heads and brave hearts, and thank God, as for His choicest gifts, for men who will work themselves and govern and teach us to work”; for men like those worthies “whom,” in the words of Kingsley’s hearty dedication of his book to Bishop Selwyn and Rajah Sir James Brooke, “Elizabeth, without distinction of rank or age, gathered round her in the ever-glorious wars of her great reign.”¹

It was, then, to the spacious days of Good Queen Bess that Kingsley turned, and he found there a canvas broad enough to suit his purpose—which was to depict the types of character, and the sort of training, by which England rose to the command of the seas, “and a model to all Europe of material propserity and national unit—a powerful, a wealthy, a free and a happy people.” And he takes as his type a youth of his own native and much-loved Devon, the son of a country gentleman, lusty in frame and sinew, combative in spirit, yet withal sweet in temper, practised in the art of war and the craft of the sea, and altogether such an one as men follow to the death, and women reverence and worship, a veritable “Happy Warrior.” At Amyas Leigh’s side stand his gentle but no less chivalrous brother Francis, and a mother who is the very apotheosis of saintly affection and holy resignation; while round him move Drake and Hawkins, Raleigh and Grenville, and many other famous men of Devon. “Burghers of Bideford, plotting Jesuits, Romanist country families, mariners who have sailed round the world with Drake, mariners who have seen Columbus and Cabot and Vasco da Gama, country parsons, gentlemen adventurers, Spanish dons, South American Indians and victims of the Inquisition crowd the story with variety of character and incident.” Mark the broadening interest of the tale—from the home of the Leighs at Bideford through North Devon and through South, to London and to the Irish wars, thence to the Spanish main and the great continent of South America—scene of some of the most thrilling adventures in the book—thence back to Devon and particularly to Plymouth, where Amyas gets his ship and commands her in the great Armada struggle which once and for ever crushed the ambitions of Spain and rudely dispelled the dream of papal vengeance. In all this change of scene and incident there is no flagging, and dull indeed must be the reader who finds the story dreary.

Contrasted with Hypatia, Westward Ho! has not only the advantages—perhaps doubtful—belonging to Kingsley’s maturer age, but those accruing to the comparative modernity of the period it deals with. But, though there are not in it the hopeless inaccuracies and anachronisms which your pedant can discovery by the score in the old-world story, Kingsley was too prone to read his own prejudices into the men and events of the sixteenth century—who could not contradict him as those of Alton Locke and Yeast could—for us to accept the story as pure history. “Kingsley has faith enough in his teaching to give a genuine glow to these hybrid beings begotten half of fancy, half of the external world. But we feel too plainly that the work will not stand the test of close examination, either by the historian or the literary critic.”

An early reviewer in Blackwood, indeed, somewhat savagely declared that Kingsley’s pictures of English society, thought and feeling, were utterly at variance with historical records and with the voluminous evidence afforded by the authors of the works of the period. The whole novel is accordingly “a huge anachronism—the characters, except in name, belong to the age of Cromwell rather than Elizabeth.” Now, though Kings-ley belonged to the Froude type of historian—he refers1 to the light thrown by Froude upon “the buccaneering of our Western men,” and Froude’s English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century is a first cousin to Westward Ho!—this is going too far. Kingsley’s forte may not have been minute accuracy, but there is every reason to believe that he has not misinterpreted the spirit of the age which he has chosen for his theme—an age in which puritanism and adventure went hand in hand. In another matter a gratifying and interesting compliment was paid him by Captain Alston of H.M.S. St. George, who, after some raillery on Kingsley’s having made the (hemp) cable of the Rose rattle through the hawse- holes—raillery which he afterwards qualifies—says, “You would have made a first-rate sailor.”

Unfortunately, little has been recovered of Kingsley’s correspondence during the months just succeeding the publication of Westward Ho! But in the later letter to Mr. Cole already referred to he says that he