ake up modern
journalism.

Henry Kingsley, younger brother of Charles, was himself a prolific and
vigorous novelist; and though a recent attempt to put him above his
brother cannot possibly be allowed by sound criticism, he had perhaps a
more various command of fiction, certainly a truer humour, and if a
less passionate, perhaps a more thoroughly healthy literary temperament.
But his life was not long, and he was unfortunately compelled during
most of it to write for a living. Born in 1830, he was educated at
King's College, London, and Worcester College, Oxford, on leaving which
latter he went to Australia and lived there for five years. Returning in
1859, he wrote the admirable Australian story of _Geoffrey Hamlyn_,
which, with _Ravenshoe_ two years later, contains most of his work that
can be called really first rate. He returned to Australia for his
subject in _The Hillyars and the Burtons_, and wrote several other
novels before his death in 1876, having been during part of the time a
newspaper editor, a newspaper correspondent, and a journalist generally.
The absence of composition, which Flaubert deplored in English novels
generally, shows at its height in Henry Kingsley, whose _Ravenshoe_, for
instance, has scarcely any plot at all, and certainly owes nothing to
what it has; while he was a rapid and careless writer. But he had, in a
somewhat less elaborate form, all his brother's talents for description
of scene and action, and his characters, if more in the way of ordinary
life, are also truer to that life. Also he is particularly to be
commended for having, without the slightest strait-lacedness, and indeed
with a good deal of positive Bohemianism, exhibited the nineteenth
century English notion of what constitutes a gentleman perhaps better
than any one else. "There are some things a fellow _can't_ do"--the
chance utterance of his not ungenerous scamp Lord Welter--is a memorable
sentence, whereon a great sermon might be preached.

A little older than Henry Kingsley (he died in the same year), much more
popular for a time, and the exerter of an influence which has not ceased
yet, and has been on the whole distinctly undervalued, was George Henry
Lawrence, who was educated at Rugby and Balliol, was called to the Bar,
but was generally known in his own time as Major Lawrence from a militia
commission which he held. He also fought in, or at least was present
during, the war of independence of the southern states