_West-ward Ho!_ shares with _Hypatia_ the merit of being a successful historical romance. It is free from many of the faults of _Hypatia_, it is more mature, more carefully written. It is not laden with the difficulties of _Hypatia_; it is only in part an historical romance at all; the English scenery is placed in a country which Kingsley knew perfectly and from boyhood; and the only controversy involved was the interminable debate about Jesuit mendacity and Romanist priestcraft. So that, if _Westward Ho!_ does not present us with the weaknesses and the dilemmas of _Hypatia_, on the other hand it is not so brilliant or so rich with interest. But it has real and lasting qualities. The Devon coast scenery which Kingsley knew and loved, the West Indian and tropical scenery, which he loved but did not know, are both painted with wonderful force of imaginative colour. When one recalls all that Kingsley has done in the landscape of romance,--Alexandria and the desert of the Nile, West Indian jungles and rivers, Bideford Bay, his own heaths in _Yeast_, the fever-dens of London in _Alton Locke_,--one is almost inclined to rank him in this single gift of description as first of all the novelists since Scott. Compared with the brilliancy and variety of Kingsley's pictures of country, Bulwer's and Disraeli's are conventional; even those of Dickens are but local; Thackeray and Trollope have no interest in landscape at all; George Eliot's keen interest is not so spontaneous as Kingsley's, and Charlotte Bronte's wonderful gift is strictly limited to the narrow field of her own experience. But Kingsley, as a landscape painter, can image to us other continents and many zones, and he carries us to distant climates with astonishing force of reality.