ere was a pride in our very prejudice, which made it
seem hopelessly fixed and stultified. There is a trail of it through
all but the greatest writings of that time, Tennyson was not without
it, Charles Kingsley, Froude. . . . To the novel it became actually a
stock-in-trade, and as such it was used by Henry Kingsley in his novel
of "Ravenshoe." He was a younger brother of Charles, and his life was
as restless and adventurous as a novel. He was, besides being an
author, an explorer to the Australian goldfields--from which he came
back rich in observation of men and manners, but without having made a
pecuniary fortune--the editor of a paper, the _Edinburgh Daily Review_,
and a correspondent in the Franco-Prussian War. He was a prolific and
too hasty writer, but his novel of "Ravenshoe," whose scene is
principally laid on the northern strip of Somerset coast, bordering the
Bristol Channel, and which was his own favourite among his works, is
considered by many critics to reach a high level, and to stand
comparison with the work of his more famous brother. In the _Academy_
of 1901 the following tribute to the book appeared under the initials
C.K.B.: "I first read 'Ravenshoe' at that period when absolute romance
and absolute fact have to live together; and very turbulent partners
they make. The appeal of the book was instant and permanent. Even
now, after a dozen years I cannot read the story unmoved. . . . Each
point holds me of old, by sheer force of its human presentation, its
resourceful dialogue, its unwearied vitality."

I first read "Ravenshoe" in this year of 1917, and to me the world
seems to have travelled so far since its publication in 1862, that its
aims, its ideals, and its point of view, are hardly credible. Through
it all runs that facile spirit of optimism which seems to me to have
distinguished much of the thought of the mid-Victorian era, that air of
"All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds," that insular
pride of which I have been speaking, but which to us now appears the
narrowest and worst form of parochialism, a certainty that English
beef, English beer, English morals, and English standards, were the
ultimate excellence towards which a world of misguided foreigners might
ultimately aspire, that self-satisfaction, different from pride, that
glorying in prejudice, and wilful blindness to all features of national
life which do not bear out the theory of an earthly paradise. "Tel