[24] Some will have it that this was really Charlotte's: but not
with much probability.

Charles Kingsley is one of the most precious documents for the cynics
who say that while, if you please the public in only one way, you may
possibly meet with only tolerable ingratitude; if you attempt to please
it in more ways than one, you are certain to be suspected, and still
more certain to have the defects of your weakest work transferred to
your best. He was a novelist, a poet, an essayist, a preacher, a
historian, and a critic. His history, though less positively inaccurate
than the "dead set" against him of certain notorious persons chose to
represent it, was uncritical: and his criticism, sometimes acute and
luminous, was decidedly unhistorical. But he was a preacher of
remarkable merit, a charming and original essayist, a poet of no wide
range but of true poetical quality, and a novelist of great variety and
of almost the first class. He let his weakest qualities go in with his
strongest in his novels, and had also the still more unfortunate
tendency to "trail coats" of the most inconceivably different colours
for others to tread upon. Liberals, Radicals, and Tories; Roman
Catholics, High Churchmen, Low Churchmen, and No-Churchmen;
sentimentalists and cynics; people who do not like literary and
historical allusion, and people who are meticulous about literary and
historical accuracy--all these and many others, if they cannot disregard
flings at their own particular tastes, fancies, and notions, are sure to
lose patience with him now and then. Accordingly, he has met with some
exacerbated decriers, and with very few thorough-going defenders.

Yet _almost_ thoroughing-going defence is, as far as the novels (our
only direct business) are concerned, far from difficult; and the present