IV 



I 



CONCERNING KINGSLEYS IN GENERAL, 

 AND GEORGE HENRY KINGSLEY IN 

 PARTICULAR 



Families are like nations in a way. They have 

 their periods characterised by an outbreak of 

 intellectual brilliancy, and those periods in between 

 wherein they merely get on with their normal 

 intellectual power. With some nations the intel- 

 lectually brilliant generations follow each other more 

 closely than those of other nations. France, for 

 example, is a quicker flowerer than Germany : it 

 depends on the nature of the stock, and I merely 

 mention it in order to point out what happened in 

 the old English family of the Kingsleys in its last 

 generation but one. It flowered, had in its way its 

 Elizabethan period. 



As a family I think one may safely say — being 

 a member of it oneself — that it has not been given 

 to exhausting itself with rapidly successive outbreaks 

 of intellectual brilliancy. It has gone on frequently 



B 



