A vague impression that Kingsley was somehow a potential defender of the faith—that he had seen through the doubts and difficulties which perplex other minds—counts for something in his popularity. It is quite needless to dispel this pleasant vision, if anybody holds it; but I shall venture to take it for granted that it would be useless to look to him for any very profound statement of the grounds of belief. Doubtless he was what is called a sincere believer; but one cannot forget that all hagiologists are apt unconsciously to heighten the halo of religious unction which surrounded their heroes when alive. Kingsley did not carry so much of the pulpit frame of mind into ordinary life as innocent readers might fancy. Nobody would have been better pleased to follow jolly Bishop Corbet into his cellar and pitch away cassock and bands with 'There goes the parson,' and 'There goes the bishop.' He had not the dignified calm which stamps the caste of bores and philosophers; and, indeed, the impetuosity of temperament which disqualified him for such tasks is but too perceptible in his artistic work. Its most obvious fault is a want of repose and harmony. He can never be quiet for a moment. Every sentence must be emphatic and intense. He seizes the first aspect of a subject; dashes out a picture—sometimes of perfectly admirable vigour—in half-a-dozen lines; but cannot dwell upon a particular strain of thought or tone down the brilliant hues of fragmentary passages by the diffused atmosphere of calm reflection. He could hardly sit quiet for a moment, as one of his admirers tells us; and his strong-minded heroes, who ought to be self-sustained and tranquil, are always in as great a fever as himself. The result of this tendency is too plainly written upon his life as upon his books. He was always, in a sanitary sense, living upon his capital, and taking more out of his strength than his powers justified. He knocked himself up completely by writing 'Yeast' before he was thirty, and every subsequent work seems to have involved an effort which told heavily upon his constitution. The natural consequence of such a process is to be seen in the fact already noticed that his literary productiveness rapidly declined; and that in his later works we have the emphasis which has become habitual, without the force which saved it from affectation. It must, however, be said to his credit that he had the merit—a lamentably rare one—of abandoning the attempt to rival his own earlier performances when the vein no longer flowed spontaneously.