heroes in "Westward Ho!" in a perfectly simple, straightforward way.
He was always thinking of our own times and referring to them. That
is why even the rather ruffianly Hereward is so great an enemy of
saints and monks. That is why, in "Hypatia" (which opens so well),
we have those prodigiously dull, stupid, pedantic, and conceited
reflections of Raphael Ben Ezra. That is why, in all Kingsley's
novels, he is perpetually exciting himself in defence of marriage
and the family life, as if any monkish ideas about the blessedness
of bachelorhood were ever likely to drive the great Anglo-Saxon race
into convents and monasteries. That is the very last thing we have
to be afraid of; but Kingsley was afraid of it, and was eternally
attacking everything Popish and monkish.

Boys and young people, then, can read "Westward Ho!" and "Hypatia,"
and "Hereward the Wake," with far more pleasure than their elders.
They hurry on with the adventures, and do not stop to ask what the
moralisings mean. They forgive the humour of Kingsley because it is
well meant. They get, in short, the real good of this really great
and noble and manly and blundering genius. 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