at _The Heroes_ still
remains, after forty years, the child's introduction to Greek mythology,
and is still the best book of its class. When we compare it with another
attempt by a romancer of genius, and set it beside the sticky dulness of
_The Tanglewood Tales_, it looks like a group of real Tanagra figurines
placed beside a painted plaster cast. Kingsley's _Heroes_, in spite of
the inevitable sermon addressed in the preface to all good boys and
girls, has the real simplicity of Greek art, and the demi-gods tell their
myths in noble and pure English. _The Water Babies_ is an immortal bit
of fun, which will be read in the next century with _Gulliver_ and _The
Ring and the Rose_, long after we have all forgotten the nonsensical
whims about science and the conventional pulpit moralising which Kingsley
scattered broadcast into everything he said or wrote.

We have as yet said nothing about that which was Kingsley's most
characteristic and effective work--his political fictions. These were
the pieces by which his fame was first achieved, and no doubt they are
the works which gave him his chief influence on his generation. But, for
that very reason, they suffered most of all his writings as works of art.
_Yeast_ is a book very difficult to classify. It is not exactly a novel,
it is more than a _Dialogue_, it is too romantic for a sermon, it is too
imaginative for a pamphlet, it is too full of action for a political and
social treatise. Incongruous as it is, it is interesting and effective,
and contains some of Kingsley's best work. It has some of his most
striking verses, some of his finest pictures of scenery, many of his most
eloquent thoughts, all his solid ideas, the passion of his youth, and the
first glow of his enthusiasm. It was written before he was thirty,
before he thought himself to be a philosopher, before he professed to be
entrusted with a direct message from God. Its title--_Yeast_--suggests
that it is a ferment thrown into the compound mass of current political,
social, and religious ideas, to make them work and issue in some new
combination. Kingsley himself was a kind of ferment. His mind was
itself destined to cause a violent chemical reaction in the torpid fluids
into which it was projected. His early and most amorphous work of
_Yeast_ did this with singular vigour, in a fresh and reckless way, with
rare literary and poetic skill.

If I spoke my whole mind, I should count _Yeast_ as Kingsle