They take pleasure in
his love of strong men, gallant fights, desperate encounters with
human foes, with raging seas, with pestilence, or in haunted
forests. For in all that is good of his talent--in his courage, his
frank speech, his love of sport, his clear eyes, his devotion to
field and wood, river, moor, sea, and storms--Kingsley is a boy. He
has the brave, rather hasty, and not over well-informed enthusiasm
of sixteen, for persons and for causes. He saw an opponent (it
might be Father Newman): his heart lusted for a fight; he called
his opponent names, he threw his cap into the ring, he took his coat
off, he fought, he got a terrible scientific drubbing. It was like
a sixth-form boy matching himself against the champion. And then he
bore no malice. He took his defeat bravely. Nay, are we not left
with a confused feeling that he was not far in the wrong, though he
had so much the worse of the fight?
Such was Kingsley: a man with a boy's heart; a hater of cruelty and
injustice, and also with a brave, indomitable belief that his own
country and his own cause were generally in the right, whatever the
quarrel. He loved England like a mistress, and hated her enemies,
Spain and the Pope, though even in them he saw the good. He is for
ever scolding the Spanish for their cruelties to the Indians, but he
defends our doings to the Irish, which (at that time) were neither
more nor less oppressive than the Spanish performances in America.
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