Often one has read it
since, and it is an example of those large, rich, well-fed romances,
at which you can cut and come again, as it were, laying it down, and
taking it up on occasion, with the certainty of being excited,
amused--and preached at.
Lately I have re-read "Westward Ho!" and some of Kingsley's other
books, "Hypatia," "Hereward the Wake," and the poems, over again.
The old pleasure in them is not gone indeed, but it is modified.
One must be a boy to think Kingsley a humourist. At the age of
twelve or ten you take the comic passages which he conscientiously
provides, without being vexed or offended; you take them merely in
the way of business. Better things are coming: struggles with the
Inquisition, storms at sea, duels, the Armada, wanderings in the
Lotus land of the tropical west; and for the sake of all this a boy
puts up good-naturedly with Kingsley's humour. Perhaps he even
grins over Amyas "burying alternately his face in the pasty and the
pasty in his face," or he tries to feel diverted by the Elizabethan
waggeries of Frank. But there is no fun in them--they are
mechanical; they are worse than the humours of Scott's Sir Percy
Shafto, which are not fine.
The same sense of everything not being quite so excellent as one
remembered it haunts one in "Hereward the Wake, the Last of the
English." Kingsley calls him "the Last of the English," but he is
really the first of the literary Vikings.
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