Charles Kingsley was a great publicist; a
popular preacher; a popular novelist; and (in two cases at least) a very
good novelist. His _Water Babies_ is really a breezy and roaring freak;
like a holiday at the seaside--a holiday where one talks natural history
without taking it seriously. Some of the songs in this and other of his
works are very real songs: notably, "When all the World is Young, Lad,"
which comes very near to being the only true defence of marriage in the
controversies of the nineteenth century. But when all this is allowed,
no one will seriously rank Kingsley, in the really literary sense, on
the level of Carlyle or Ruskin, Tennyson or Browning, Dickens or
Thackeray: and if such a place cannot be given to him, it can be given
even less to his lusty and pleasant friend, Tom Hughes, whose
personality floats towards the frankness of the _Boy's Own Paper_; or to
his deep, suggestive metaphysical friend Maurice, who floats rather
towards _The Hibbert Journal_. The moral and social influence of these
things is not to be forgotten: but they leave the domain of letters. The
voice of Carlyle is not heard again in letters till the coming of
Kipling and Henley.
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