bore no malice. He took his defeat bravely. Nay, are we not left
with a confused feeling that he was not far in the wrong, though he
had so much the worse of the fight?

Such was Kingsley: a man with a boy's heart; a hater of cruelty and
injustice, and also with a brave, indomitable belief that his own
country and his own cause were generally in the right, whatever the
quarrel. He loved England like a mistress, and hated her enemies,
Spain and the Pope, though even in them he saw the good. He is for
ever scolding the Spanish for their cruelties to the Indians, but he
defends our doings to the Irish, which (at that time) were neither
more nor less oppressive than the Spanish performances in America.
"Go it, our side!" you always hear this good Kingsley crying; and
one's heart goes out to him for it, in an age when everybody often
proves his own country to be in the wrong.

Simple, brave, resolute, manly, a little given to "robustiousness,"
Kingsley transfigured all these qualities by possessing the soul and
the heart of a poet. He was not a very great poet, indeed, but a
true poet--one of the very small band who are cut off, by a gulf
that can never be passed, from mere writers of verse, however
clever, educated, melodious, ingenious, amiable, and refined. He
had the real spark of fire, the true note; though the spark might
seldom break into flame, and the note was not always clear. Never
let us confuse true poets with writers of verse, still less with
writers of "poetic prose." Kingsley wrote a great deal of that-
perhaps too much: his descriptions of scenes are not always as good
as in Hereward's ride round the Fens, or when the tall, Spanish
galleon staggers from the revenge of man to the vengeance of God, to
her doom through the mist, to her rest in the sea. Perhaps only a