patriotic glories. But he was also on the side of the poor: as
"Parson Lot" he attempted to be a Christian Socialist.

Now, the Socialists are the people who want to take everything; the
Christians are the persons who do not want to give more than they
find convenient. Kingsley himself was ready to give, and did give,
his time, his labour, his health, and probably his money, to the
poor. But he was by no means minded that they should swallow up the
old England with church and castle, manor-house and tower, wealth,
beauty, learning, refinement. The man who wrote "Alton Locke," the
story of the starved tailor-poet, was the man who nearly wept when
he heard a fox bark, and reflected that the days of fox-hunting were
numbered. He had a poet's politics, Colonel Newcome's politics. He
was for England, for the poor, for the rich, for the storied houses
of the chivalrous past, for the cottage, for the hall; and was dead
against the ideas of Manchester, and of Mr. John Bright. "My
father," he says in a letter, "would have put his hand to a spade or
an axe with any man, and so could I pretty well, too, when I was in
my prime; and my eldest son is now working with his own hands at
farming, previous to emigrating to South America, where he will do
the drudgery of his own cattle-pens and sheepfolds; and if I were
twenty-four and unmarried I would go out there too, and work like an
Englishman, and live by the sweat of my brow."

This was the right side of his love of the Vikings; it was thus THEY
lived, when not at war--thus that every gentleman who has youth and
health should work, winning new worlds for his class, in place of
this miserable, over-crowded, brawling England. This, I think, was,
or should have been, the real lesson and message of Kingsley for the
generations to come. Like Scott the scion of an old knightly line,