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 writer, though there are perhaps not a dozen consecutive pages of Kingsley's novels to which, at some point or other, he is not prepared to append the note, "This is Bosh," is prepared also to exalt him miles above writers whose margins he would be quite content to leave without a single annotation of this--or any other--kind.

In particular the variety of the books, and their vividness, are both extraordinary.

And perhaps the greatest notes of the novel generally, as well as those in which the novel of this period can most successfully challenge comparison with those of any other, are, or should be, vividness and variety.

His books in the kind are seven; and the absence of _replicas_ among them is one of their extraordinary features.

_Yeast_, the first (1848), and _Alton Locke_, the second (next year), are novels of the unrest of thought which caused and accompanied the revolutionary movement of the period throughout Europe.