In any estimate of _Hypatia_ as a romance, it is right to consider the curious tangle of difficulties which Kingsley crowded into his task. It was to be a realistic historical novel dated in an age of which the public knew nothing, set in a country of which the author had no experience, but which many of us know under wholly altered conditions. It was to carry on controversies as to the older and the later types of Christianity, as to Polytheism, Judaism, and Monotheism; it was to confute Romanism, Scepticism, and German metaphysics; it was to denounce celibacy and monasticism, to glorify muscular Christianity, to give glowing pictures of Greek sensuousness and Roman rascality, and finally to secure the apotheosis of Scandinavian heroism. And in spite of these incongruous and incompatible aims, the story still remains a vivid and fascinating tale. That makes it a real _tour de force_. It is true that it has many of the faults of Bulwer, a certain staginess, melodramatic soliloquies, careless incongruities, crude sensationalism--but withal, it has some of the merits of Bulwer at his best, in _The Last Days of Pompeii_, _Riensi_, _The Last of the Barons_,--the play of human passion and adventure, intensity of reproduction however inaccurate in detail; it has "go," intelligibility, memorability. The characters interest us, the scenes amuse us, the pictures are not forgotten. The stately beauty of Hypatia, the seductive fascination of Pelagia, the childlike nature of Philammon, the subtle cynicism of Raphael Aben-Ezra, the mighty audacity of the Goths, the fanaticism of Cyril, and the strange clash of three elements of civilisation,--Graeco-Roman, Christian, Teutonic--give us definite impressions, leave a permanent imprint on our thoughts. There are extravagances, theatricalities, impossibilities enough. The Gothic princes comport themselves like British seamen ashore in Suez or Bombay; Raphael talks like young Lancelot Smith in _Yeast_; Hypatia is a Greek Argemone; and Bishop Synesius is merely an African fifth-century Charles Kingsley, what Sydney Smith called a "squarson," or compound of squire and parson. Still, after all--bating grandiloquences and incongruities and "errors excepted," _Hypatia_ lives, moves, and speaks to us; and, in the matter of vitality and interest, is amongst the very few successes in historical romance in the whole Victorian literature.