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 A. W. KINGLAKE
 
 GEORGE BELL & SONS 
 
 LONDON: YORK STREET, COVENT GARDEN 
 CAMBRIDGE : DEIGHTON, BELL AND CO. 
 NEW YORK : THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
 
 
 - 
 
 A.W. KINGLAKE 
 
 A BIOGRAPHICAL AND 
 LITERARY STUDY 
 
 BY 
 
 REV. W. TUCKWELL 
 
 AUTHOR OF " TONGUES rN TREES," "WINCHESTER FIFTY 
 YEARS AGO," "REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD," ETC. 
 
 OCfAipOCi $ tTTlXoiTTOl {AXpTVpiS (T0(pUT0t,T0i 
 
 LONDON 
 
 GEORGE BELL AND SONS 
 
 1902
 
 ' CHISWICK PRESS : CHARLES WHI TTINGHAM AND CO. 
 TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON.
 
 PREFACE 
 
 It is just eleven years since Kinglake passed 
 away, and his life has not yet been separately 
 memorialized. A few years more, and the per- 
 sonal side of him would be irrecoverable, though 
 by personality, no less than by authorship, he 
 made his contemporary mark. When a tomb has 
 been closed for centuries, the effaced lineaments 
 of its tenant can be re-coloured only by the 
 idealizing hand of genius, as Scott drew Claver- 
 house, and Carlyle drew Cromwell. But, to the 
 biographer of the lately dead, men have a right 
 to say, as Saul said to the Witch of Endor, 
 " Call up Samuel ! " In your study of a life so 
 recent as Kinglake's, give us, if you choose, some 
 critical synopsis of his monumental writings, 
 some salvage from his ephemeral and scattered 
 papers ; trace so much of his youthful training 
 as shaped the development of his character ; 
 depict, with wise restraint, his political and 
 public life : but also, and above all, re-clothe 
 him " in his habit as he lived," as friends and
 
 VI PREFACE 
 
 associates knew him ; recover his traits of voice 
 and manner, his conversational wit or wisdom, 
 epigram or paradox, his explosions of sarcasm 
 and his eccentricities of reserve, his words of 
 winningness and acts of kindness : and, since 
 one half of his life was social, introduce us to 
 the companions who shared his lighter hour 
 and evoked his finer fancies ; take us to the 
 Athenaeum " Corner," or to Holland House, and 
 flash on us at least a glimpse of the brilliant 
 men and women who formed the setting to his 
 sparkle; "die in amicitiam coeant et fcedera 
 jungant" 
 
 This I have endeavoured to do, with such 
 aid as I could command from his few remaining 
 contemporaries. His letters to his family were 
 destroyed by his own desire ; on those written 
 to Madame Novikoff no such embargo was laid, 
 nor does she believe that it was intended. I 
 have used these sparingly, and all extracts from 
 them have been subjected to her censorship. 
 If the result is not Attic in salt, it is at any rate 
 Roman in brevity. I send it forth with John 
 Bunyan's homely aspiration : 
 
 And may its buyer have no cause to say, 
 His money is but lost or thrown away.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. 
 
 I. Early Years .... 
 
 II. "Eothen" 
 
 III. Literary and Parliamentary Life 
 
 IV. "The Invasion of the Crimea" 
 V. Madame Novikoff 
 
 VI. Later Days, and Death 
 
 Index 
 
 page 
 i 
 
 20 
 
 33 
 
 56 
 
 90 
 
 in 
 
 149
 
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 Kinglake in the late Fifties . Frontispiece 
 
 Eliot Warburton to face p. 14 
 
 Lord Raglan .....,, 40 
 
 Madame Novikoff ....,, 92 
 
 Kinglake in the Early Seventies . ,. 128
 
 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 EARLY YEARS 
 
 The fourth decade of the deceased century 
 dawned on a procession of Oriental pilgrims, 
 variously qualified or disqualified to hold the 
 gorgeous East in fee, who, with bakshish in 
 their purses, a theory in their brains, an un- 
 filled diary-book in their portmanteaus, sought 
 out the Holy Land, the Sinai peninsula, the 
 valley of the Nile, sometimes even Armenia 
 and the Monte Santo, and returned home to 
 emit their illustrated and mapped octavos. We 
 have the type delineated admiringly in Miss 
 Yonge's " Heartsease," l bitterly in Miss Skene's 
 " Use and Abuse," facetiously in the Clarence 
 Bulbul of "Our Street." "Hang it! has not 
 
 *~. 
 
 When " Heartsease " first appeared, Percy Fothering- 
 ham was believed to be a portrait ; but the accomplished 
 authoress in a letter written not long before her death told 
 me that the character was wholly imaginary. 
 
 B
 
 2 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 everybody written an Eastern book ? I should 
 like to meet anybody in society now who has 
 not been up to the Second Cataract. My Lord 
 Castleroyal has done one — an honest one ; my 
 Lord Youngent another — an amusing one ; my 
 Lord Woolsey another — a pious one ; there is 
 the ' Cutlet and the Cabob ' — a sentimental 
 one ; Timbuctoothen — a humorous one." Lord 
 Carlisle's honesty, Lord Nugent's fun, Lord 
 Lindsay's piety, failed to float their books. 
 Miss Martineau, clear, frank, unemotional ; 
 Curzon, fuddling the Levantine monks with 
 rosoglio that he might fleece them of their 
 treasured hereditary manuscripts, even Eliot 
 Warburton's power, colouring, play of fancy, 
 have yielded to the mobility of Time. Two 
 alone out of the gallant company maintain their 
 vogue to-day : Stanley's " Sinai and Palestine," 
 as a Fifth Gospel, an inspired Scripture Ga- 
 zetteer ; and " Eothen," as a literary gem of 
 purest ray serene. 
 
 In 1898 a reprint of the first edition was 
 given to the public, prefaced by a brief eulo- 
 gium of the book and a slight notice of the 
 author. It brought to the writer of the " In- 
 troduction " not only kind and indulgent 
 criticism, but valuable corrections, fresh facts,
 
 EARLY YEARS 3 
 
 clues to further knowledge. These last have 
 been carefully followed out. The unwary state- 
 ment that Kinglake never spoke after his first 
 failure in the House has been atoned by a 
 careful study of all his speeches in and out of 
 Parliament. His reviews in the "Quarterly" 
 and elsewhere have been noted ; impressions 
 of his manner and appearance at different 
 periods of his life have been recovered from 
 coasval acquaintances ; his friend Hayward's 
 Letters, the numerous allusions in Lord Hough- 
 ton's Life, Mrs. Crosse's lively chapters in 
 " Red Letter Days of my Life," Lady Gregory's 
 interesting recollections of the Athenaeum Club 
 in Blackwood of December, 1895, the some- 
 what slender notice in the " Dictionary of 
 National Biography," have all been carefully 
 digested. From these, and, as will be seen, 
 from other sources, the present Memoir has 
 been compiled ; an endeavour — sera tamen — to 
 lay before the countless readers and admirers 
 of his books a fairly adequate appreciation, 
 hitherto unattempted, of their author. 
 
 I have to acknowledge the great kindness 
 of Canon William Warburton, who examined 
 his brother Eliot's diaries on my behalf, ob- 
 tained information from Dean Boyle and Sir
 
 4 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 M. Grant Duff, cleared up for me not a few 
 obscure allusions in the " Eothen " pages. My 
 highly valued friend, Mrs. Hamilton Kinglake, 
 of Taunton, his sister-in-law, last surviving rela- 
 tive of his own generation, has helped me with 
 facts which no one else could have recalled. To 
 Mr. Estcott, his old acquaintance and Somer- 
 setshire neighbour, I am indebted for recollec- 
 tions manifold and interesting ; but above all I 
 tender thanks to Madame NovikofT, his intimate 
 associate and correspondent during the last 
 twenty years of his life, who has supplemented 
 her brilliant sketch of him in " La Nouvelle 
 Revue" of 1896 by oral and written informa- 
 tion lavish in quantity and of paramount bio- 
 graphical value. Kinglake's external life, his 
 literary and political career, his speeches, and 
 the more fugitive productions of his pen, were 
 recoverable from public sources ; but his per- 
 sonal and private side, as it showed itself to 
 the few close intimates who still survive, must 
 have remained to myself and others meagre, 
 superficial, disappointing, without Madame 
 Novikoff's unreserved and sympathetic con- 
 fidence. 
 
 Alexander William Kinglake was descended
 
 EARLY YEARS 5 
 
 from an old Scottish stock, the Kinlochs, who 
 migrated to England with King James, and 
 whose name was Anglicized into Kinglake. 
 Later on we find them settled on a consider- 
 able estate of their own at Saltmoor, near 
 Borobridge, whence towards the close of the 
 eighteenth century two brothers, moving 
 southward, made their home in Taunton — 
 Robert as a physician, William as a solicitor 
 and banker. Both were of high repute, both 
 begat famous sons. From Robert sprang the 
 eminent Parliamentary lawyer, Serjeant John 
 Kinglake, at one time a contemporary with 
 Cockburn and Crowder on the Western Circuit, 
 and William Chapman Kinglake, who while at 
 Trinity, Cambridge, won the Latin verse prize, 
 " Salix Babylonica," the English verse prizes on 
 " Byzantium" and the " Taking of Jerusalem," 
 in 1 830 and 1832. Of William's sons the eldest 
 was Alexander William, author of " Eothen," 
 the youngest Hamilton, for many years one of 
 the most distinguished physicians in the West 
 of England. "Eothen," as he came to be 
 called, was born at Taunton on the 5th August, 
 1809, at a house called "The Lawn." His 
 father, a sturdy Whig, died at the age of ninety 
 through injuries received in the hustings crowd 
 
 ^/
 
 6 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 of a contested election. His mother belonged 
 to an old Somersetshire family, the Woodfordes 
 of Castle Cary. She, too, lived to a great age ; 
 a slight, neat figure in dainty dress, full of 
 antique charm and grace. As a girl she had 
 known Lady Hester Stanhope, who lived with 
 her grandmother, Lady Chatham, at Burton 
 Pynsent, her own father, Dr. Thomas Wood- 
 forde, being Lady Chatham's medical attendant. 1 
 The future prophetess of the Lebanon was then 
 a wild girl, scouring the countryside on bare- 
 backed horses ; she showed great kindness to 
 Mary Woodforde, afterwards Kinglake's mother. 
 It was as his mother's son that she received 
 him long afterwards at Djoun. To his mother 
 Kinglake was passionately attached ; owed to 
 her, as he tells us in " Eothen," his home in the 
 
 1 Pedigrees are perplexing unless tabulated; so here is 
 Kinglake's genealogical tree. 
 
 klnglakes of saltmoor. woodfordes of 
 
 Castle Cary. 
 
 Robert. William.=fMary Woodforde. 
 
 Serjeant Rev. W. C. A. W. King- Dr. Hamilton 
 John King- Kinglake. lake. Kinglake. 
 
 lake. (" Eothen.")
 
 EARLY YEARS 7 
 
 saddle and his love for Homer. A tradition is 
 preserved in the family that on the day of her 
 funeral, at a churchyard five miles away, he was 
 missed from the household group reassembled 
 in the mourning home ; he was found to have 
 ordered his horse, and galloped back in the 
 darkness to his mother's grave. Forty years 
 later he writes to Alexander Knox : " The death 
 of a mother has an almost magical power of re- 
 calling the home of one's childhood, and the 
 almost separate world that rests upon affection." 
 Of his two sisters, one was well read and agree- 
 ably talkative, noted by Thackeray as the 
 cleverest woman he had ever met ; the other, 
 Mrs. Acton, was a delightful old esprit fort, as 
 I knew her in the sixties, "pagan, I regret to 
 say," but not a little resembling her brother in 
 the point and manner of her wit. The family 
 moved in his infancy to an old-fashioned hand- 
 some "Wilton House," adjoining closely to the 
 town, but standing amid spacious park-like 
 grounds, and inhabited in after years by King- 
 lake's younger brother Hamilton, who suc- 
 ceeded his uncle in the medical profession, and 
 passed away, amid deep and universal regret, 
 in 1898. Here during the thirties Sydney 
 Smith was a frequent and a welcome visitor ;
 
 8 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 it was in answer to old Mrs. Kinglake that he 
 uttered his audacious mot on being asked if he 
 would object, as a neighbouring clergyman had 
 done, to bury a Dissenter : " Not bury Dis- 
 senters ? I should like to be burying them all 
 day ! " 
 
 Taunton was an innutrient foster-mother, 
 arida uutrix, for such young lions as the 
 Kinglake brood. Two hundred years before 
 it had been a prosperous and famous place, its 
 woollen and kersey trades, with the population 
 they supported, ranking it as eighth in order 
 among English towns. Its inhabitants were 
 then a gallant race, republican in politics, 
 Puritan in creed. Twice besieged by Goring 
 and Lumford, it had twice repelled the Royalists 
 with loss. It was the centre of Monmouth's 
 rebellion and of Jeffrey's vengeance ; the suburb 
 of Tangier, hard by its ancient castle, still re- 
 calls the time when Colonel Kirke and his 
 regiment of " Lambs " were quartered in the 
 town. But long before the advent of the 
 Kinglakes its glory had departed ; its manu- 
 factures had died out, its society become 
 Philistine and bourgeois — "little men who walk 
 in narrow ways" — while from pre-eminence in 
 electoral venality among English boroughs it
 
 EARLY YEARS 
 
 was saved only by the near proximity of Bridge- 
 water. A noted statesman who, at a later period, 
 represented it in Parliament, used to say that 
 by only one family besides Dr. Hamilton 
 Kinglake's could he be received with any 
 sense of social or intellectual equality. 
 
 Not much, however, of Kinglake's time was 
 given to his native town : he was early sent to 
 the Grammar School at Ottery St. Mary's, the 
 " Clavering" of " Pendennis," whose Dr. Wap- 
 shot was George Coleridge, brother of the poet. 
 He was wont in after life to speak of this time 
 with bitterness ; a delicate child, he was starved 
 on insufficient diet ; and an eloquent passage 
 in " Eothen " depicts his intellectual fall from the 
 varied interests and expanding enthusiasm of 
 liberal home teaching to the regulation gerund- 
 grinding and Procrustean discipline of school. 
 " The dismal change is ordained, and then — 
 thin meagre Latin with small shreds and patches 
 of Greek, is thrown like a pauper's pall over 
 all your early lore ; instead of sweet knowledge, 
 vile, monkish, doggerel grammars and graduses, 
 dictionaries and lexicons, and horrible odds 
 and ends of dead languages are given you for 
 your portion, and down you fall, from Roman 
 story to a three-inch scrap of ' Scriptores
 
 IO A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 Romani,' — from Greek poetry, down, down to 
 the cold rations of ' Poetae Graeci,' cut up by 
 commentators, and served out by school- 
 masters ! " 
 
 At Eton — under Keate, as all readers of 
 " Eothen " know — he was contemporary with 
 Gladstone, Sir F. Hanmer, Lords Canning 
 and Dalhousie, Selwyn, Shadwell. He wrote 
 in the " Etonian," created and edited by Mack- 
 worth Praed ; and is mentioned in Praed's poem 
 on Surly Hall as 
 
 " Kinglake, dear to poetry, 
 And dear to all his friends." 
 
 Dr. Gatty remembers his " determined pale 
 face " ; thinks that he made his mark on the 
 river rather than in the playing fields, being a 
 good oar and swimmer. His great friend at 
 school was Savile, the " Methley " of his travels, 
 who became successively Lord Pollington and 
 Earl of Mexborough. The Homeric lore which 
 Methley exhibited in the Troad, is curiously 
 illustrated by an Eton story, that in a pugilistic 
 encounter with Hoseason, afterwards an Indian 
 Cavalry officer, while the latter sate between 
 the rounds upon his second's knee, Savile 
 strutted about the ring, spouting Homer. 
 
 Kinglake entered at Trinity, Cambridge, in
 
 EARLY YEARS I I 
 
 1828, among an exceptionally brilliant set — 
 Tennyson, Arthur Hallam, John Sterling, 
 Trench, Speckling, Spring Rice, Charles Buller, 
 Maurice, Monckton Milnes, J. M. Kemble, 
 Brookfield, Thompson. With none of them 
 does he seem in his undergraduate days to have 
 been intimate. Probably then, as afterwards, 
 he shrank from camaraderie, shared Byron's 
 distaste for " enthusymusy " ; naturally cynical 
 and self-contained, was repelled by the spiritual 
 fervour, incessant logical collision, aggressive 
 tilting at abuses of those young " Apostles," 
 already 
 
 " Yearning for the large excitement that the coming years 
 
 would yield, 
 Eager-hearted as a boy when first he leaves his father's 
 
 field," 
 
 waxing ever daily, as Sterling exhorted, " in 
 religion and radicalism." He saw life differ- 
 ently ; more practically, if more selfishly ; to 
 one rhapsodizing about the " plain living and 
 high thinking " of Wordsworth's sonnet, he 
 answered : " You know that you prefer dining 
 with people who have good glass and china 
 and plenty of servants." For Tennyson's 
 poetry he even then felt admiration ; quotes, 
 nay, misquotes, in " Eothen," from the little
 
 12 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 known " Timbuctoo " ; 1 and from " Locksley 
 Hall"; and supplied long afterwards an incident 
 adopted by Tennyson in " Enoch Arden," 
 
 " Once likewise in the ringing of his ears 
 Though faintly, merrily — far and far away — 
 He heard the pealing of his parish bells," 2 
 
 1 " Eothen," p. 33. Reading " Timbuctoo " to-day one is 
 amazed it should have gained the prize. Two short pas- 
 sages adumbrate the coming Tennyson, the rest is mystic 
 nonsense. " What do you think of Tennyson's prize poem ? " 
 writes Charles Wordsworth to his brother Christopher. "Had 
 it been sent up at Oxford, the author would have had a 
 better chance of spending a few months at a lunatic asylum 
 than of obtaining the Prize." A current Cambridge story 
 at the time explained the selection. There were three 
 examiners, the Vice-Chancellor, a man of arbitrary temper, 
 with whom his juniors hesitated to disagree; a classical 
 professor unversed in English Literature ; a mathematical 
 professor indifferent to all literature. The letter g was to 
 signify approval, the letter b to brand it with rejection. Tenny- 
 son's manuscript came from the Vice-Chancellor scored all 
 over with g's. The classical professor failed to see its 
 merit, but bowed to the Vice-Chancellor, and added his 
 g. The mathematical professor could not admire, but since 
 both his colleagues ordained it, good it must be, and his g 
 made the award unanimous. The three met soon after, and 
 the Vice-Chancellor, in his blatant way, attacked the other 
 two for admiring a trashy poem. " Why," they remon- 
 strated, "you covered it withe's yourself." " G's," said he, 
 " they were ^'s for queries ; I could not understand a line of 
 it." 
 
 2 " Enoch Arden," p. 34.
 
 EARLY YEARS I 3 
 
 from his own experience in the desert, when on a 
 Sunday, amid overpowering heat and stillness, 
 he heard the Marlen bells of Taunton peal for 
 morning church. 1 
 
 In whatever set he may have lived he made 
 his mark at Cambridge. Lord Houghton re- 
 membered him as an orator at the Union ; and 
 speaking to Cambridge undergraduates fifty 
 years later, after enumerating the giants of his 
 student days, Macaulay, Praed, Buller, Sterling, 
 Merivale, he goes on to say : " there, too, were 
 Kemble and Kinglake, the historian of our 
 earliest civilization and of our latest war ; 
 Kemble as interesting an individual as ever 
 was portrayed by the dramatic genius of his 
 own race ; Kinglake, as bold a man-at-arms in 
 literature as ever confronted public opinion." 
 We know, too, that not many years after leaving 
 Cambridge he received, and refused, a solicita- 
 tion to stand as Liberal representative of the 
 University in Parliament. He was, in fact, as 
 far as any of his contemporaries from acqui- 
 escing in social conventionalisms and shams. 
 To the end of his life he chafed at such re- 
 straint : " when pressed to stay in country 
 houses," he writes in 1872, "I have had the 
 
 1 "Eothen," p. 169. Reprint by Bell and .Sons, 1898.
 
 14 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 frankness to say that I have not discipline 
 enough." Repeatedly he speaks with loathing 
 of the "stale civilization," the "utter respect- 
 ability " of European life ; 1 longed with all his 
 soul for the excitement and stir of soldiership, 
 from which his shortsightedness debarred him ; 2 
 rushed off again and again into foreign travel ; 
 set out immediately on leaving Cambridge, in 
 1834, for his first Eastern tour, " to fortify him- 
 self for the business of life." Methley joined 
 him at Hamburg, and they travelled by Berlin, 
 Dresden, Prague, Vienna, to Semlin, where his 
 book begins. Lord Pollington's health broke 
 down, and he remained to winter at Corfu, 
 while Kinglake pursued his way alone, return- 
 ing to England in October, 1835. 3 On his 
 return he read for the Chancery Bar along 
 with his friend Eliot Warburton, under Bryan 
 
 1 "Eothen,"p. 17. 
 
 2 His deferential regard for army rank was like that of 
 Johnson for bishops. Great was his indignation when 
 the " grotesque Salvation Army," as he called it, adopted 
 military nomenclature. " I would let those ragamuffins call 
 themselves saints, angels, prophets, cherubim, Olympian 
 gods and goddesses if they like ; but their pretension in 
 taking the rank of officers in the army is to me beyond 
 measure repulsive." 
 
 3 "Eothen," p. 190 in first edition. It was struck out in 
 the fourth edition.
 
 ELIOT WARBURTON. 
 
 From a water-colour drawing in the possessii n of Canon Warburton. 
 
 P. .).
 
 EARLY YEARS I 5 
 
 Procter, a Commissioner of Lunacy, better 
 known by his poet-name, Barry Cornwall ; his 
 acquaintance with both husband and wife ripen- 
 ing into lifelong friendship. Mrs. Procter is 
 the " Lady of Bitterness," cited in the " Eothen " 
 Preface. As Anne Skepper, before her marriage, 
 she was much admired by Carlyle ; "a brisk 
 witty prettyish clear eyed sharp tongued young 
 lady " ; and was the intimate, among many, 
 especially of Thackeray and Browning. In 
 epigrammatic power she resembled Kinglake; 
 but while his acrid sayings were emitted with 
 gentlest aspect and with softest speech ; while, 
 like Byron's Lambro : 
 
 " he was the mildest mannered man 
 That ever scuttled ship or cut a throat, 
 With such true breeding of a gentleman, 
 You never could divine his real thought," 
 
 her sarcasms rang out with a resonant clearness 
 that enforced and aggravated their severity. 
 That two persons so strongly resembling each 
 other in capacity for rival exhibition, or for 
 mutual exasperation, should have maintained 
 so firm a friendship, often surprised their ac- 
 quaintance ; she explained it by saying that she 
 and Kinglake sharpened one another like two 
 knives ; that, in the words of Petruchio,
 
 1 6 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 " Where two raging fires meet together, 
 
 They do consume the thing that feeds their fury." 
 
 Crabb Robinson, stung by her in a tender 
 place, his boastful iterative monologues on 
 Weimar and on Goethe, said that of all men 
 Procter ought to escape purgatory after death, 
 having tasted its fulness here through living so 
 many years with Mrs. Procter; " the husbands 
 of the talkative have great reward hereafter," 
 said Rudyard Kipling's Lama. And I have 
 been told by those who knew the pair that there 
 was truth as well as irritation in the taunt. " A 
 graceful Preface to ' Eothen/ " wrote to me a 
 now famous lady who as a girl had known Mrs. 
 Procter well, " made friendly company yester- 
 day to a lonely meal, and brought back memories 
 of Mr. Kinglake's kind spoiling of a raw young 
 woman, and of the wit, the egregious vanity, the 
 coarseness, the kindness, of that hard old world- 
 ling our Lady of Bitterness." In the presence of 
 one man, Tennyson, she laid aside her shrewish- 
 ness : " talking with Alfred Tennyson lifts me 
 out of the earth earthy ; a visit to Farringford 
 is like a retreat to the religious." A celebrity 
 in London for fifty years, she died, witty and 
 vigorous to the last, in 1888. " You and I and 
 Mr. Kinglake," she says to Lord Houghton,
 
 EARLY YEARS 1 7 
 
 " are all that are left of the goodly band that 
 used to come to St. John's Wood ; Eliot War- 
 burton, Motley, Adelaide, Count de Verg, 
 Chorley, Sir Edwin Landseer, my husband." 
 " I never could write a book," she tells him in 
 another letter, " and one strong reason for not 
 doing so was the idea of some few seeing how 
 poor it was. Venables was one of the few ; I 
 need not say that you were one, and Kinglake." 
 
 Kinglake was called to the Chancery Bar, 
 and practised apparently with no great success. 
 He believed that his reputation as a writer 
 stood in his way. When, in 1845, poor Hood's 
 friends were helping him by gratuitous articles 
 in his magazine, " Hood's Own," Kinglake 
 wrote to Monckton Milnes refusing to contribute. 
 He will send ^"10 to buy an article from some 
 competent writer, but will not himself write. 
 " It would be seriously injurious to me if the 
 author of ' Eothen ' were affichtd as contribut- 
 ing to a magazine. My frailty in publishing a 
 book has, I fear, already hurt me in my pro- 
 fession, and a small sin of this kind would 
 bring on me still deeper disgrace with the 
 solicitors." 
 
 Twice at least in these early years he 
 travelled. " Mr. Kinglake," writes Mrs. Procter 
 
 c
 
 1 8 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 in 1843, "is in Switzerland, reading Rousseau." 
 And in the following year we hear of him in 
 Algeria, accompanying St. Arnaud in his cam- 
 paign against the Arabs. The mingled interest 
 and horror inspired in him by this extra- 
 ordinary man finds expression in his " Invasion 
 of the Crimea" (ii. 157). A few, a very few 
 survivors, still remember his appearance and 
 manners in the forties. The eminent husband 
 of a lady, now passed away, who in her lifetime 
 gave Sunday dinners at which Kinglake was 
 always present, speaks of him as sensitive, quiet 
 in the presence of noisy people, of Brookfield and 
 the overpowering Bernal Osborne ; liking their 
 company, but never saying anything worthy of 
 remembrance. A popular old statesman, still 
 active in the House of Commons, recalls meet- 
 ing him at Palmerston, Lord Harrington's seat, 
 where was assembled a party in honour of 
 Madame Guiccioli and her second husband, 
 the Marquis de Boissy, and tells me that he 
 attached himself to ladies, not to gentlemen, 
 nor ever joined in general tattle. Like many 
 other famous men, he passed through a period of 
 shyness, which yielded to women's tactfulness 
 only. From the first they appreciated him ; 
 "if you were as gentle as your friend King-
 
 EARLY YEARS 1 9 
 
 lake," writes Mrs. Norton reproachfully to 
 Hayward in the sulks. Another coaeval of 
 those days calls him handsome— an epithet I 
 should hardly apply to him later — slight, not 
 tall, sharp featured, with dark hair well tended, 
 always modishly dressed after the fashion 
 of the thirties, the fashion of Bulwer's ex- 
 quisites, or of H. K. Browne's "Nicholas 
 Nickleby " illustrations ; leaving on all who 
 saw him an impression of great personal dis- 
 tinction, yet with an air of youthful abandon 
 which never quite left him : " He was pale, 
 small, and delicate in appearance," says Mrs. 
 Simpson, Nassau Senior's daughter, who knew 
 him to the end of his life ; while Mrs. Andrew 
 Crosse, his friend in the Crimean decade, cites 
 his finely chiselled features and intellectual 
 brow, " a complexion bloodless with the pallor 
 not of ill-health, but of an old Greek bust."
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 "EOTHEN' : 
 
 " Eothen " appeared in 1844. Twice, Kinglake 
 tells us, he had essayed the story of his travels, 
 twice abandoned it under a sense of strong dis- 
 inclination to write. A third attempt was in- 
 duced by an entreaty from his friend Eliot 
 Warburton, himself projecting an Eastern tour ; 
 and to Warburton in a characteristic preface 
 the narrative is addressed. The book, when 
 finished, went the round of the London market 
 without finding a publisher. It was offered to 
 John Murray, who cited his refusal of it as the 
 great blunder of his professional life, consoling 
 himself with the thought that his father had 
 equally lacked foresight thirty years before in 
 declining the " Rejected Addresses " ; he se- 
 cured the copyright later on. It was published 
 in the end by a personal friend, Ollivier, of 
 Pall Mall, Kinglake paying £50 to cover risk 
 of loss; even worse terms than were obtained by
 
 " EOTHEN 21 
 
 Warburton two years afterwards from Colburn, 
 who owned in the fifties to having cleared 
 ,£6,000 by " The Crescent and the Cross." The 
 volume was an octavo of 4 1 8 pages ; the curious 
 folding-plate which forms the frontispiece was 
 drawn and coloured by the author, and was 
 compared by the critics to a tea-tray. In front 
 is Moostapha the Tatar ; the two foremost 
 figures in the rear stand for accomplished 
 Mysseri, whom Kinglakewas delighted to recog- 
 nize long afterwards as a flourishing hotel keeper 
 in Constantinople, and Steel, the Yorkshire ser- 
 vant, in his striped pantry jacket, " looking out 
 for gentlemen's seats." Behind are " Methley," 
 Lord Pollington, in a broad-brimmed hat, and 
 the booted leg of Kinglake, who modestly hid 
 his figure by a tree, but exposed his foot, of which 
 he was very proud. Of the other characters, 
 " Our Lady of Bitterness " was Mrs. Procter, 
 " Carrigaholt" was Henry Stuart Burton of 
 Carrigaholt, County Clare. Here and there 
 are allusions, obvious at the time, now needing 
 a scholiast, which have not in any of the re- 
 prints been explained. In their ride through 
 the Balkans they talked of old Eton days. 
 " We bullied Keate, and scoffed at Larrey 
 Miller and Okes ; we rode along loudly laugh-
 
 2 2 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 ing, and talked to the grave Servian forest as 
 though it were the Brocas clump." 1 Keate 
 requires no interpreter ; Okes was an Eton 
 tutor, afterwards Provost of King's. Larrey 
 or Laurie Miller was an old tailor in Keate's 
 Lane who used to sit on his open shop-board, 
 facing the street, a mark for the compliments 
 of passing boys ; as frolicsome youngsters in 
 the days of Addison and Steele, as High School 
 lads in the days of Walter Scott, were accus- 
 tomed to " smoke the cobler." The Brocas 
 was a meadow sacred to badger-baiting and 
 cat-hunts. The badgers were kept by a certain 
 Jemmy Flowers, who charged sixpence for each 
 " draw " ; Puss was turned out of a bag and 
 chased by dogs, her chance being to reach and 
 climb a group of trees near the river, known as 
 the "Brocas Clump." Of the quotations, "a 
 Yorkshireman hippodamoio " (p. 35) is, I am 
 told, an obiter dictum of Sir Francis Doyle. 
 " Striving to attain," etc. (p. $$), is taken not 
 quite correctly from Tennyson's " Timbuctoo." 
 Our crew were "a solemn company" (p. 57) is 
 probably a reminiscence of " we were a gallant 
 company" in" The Siegeof Corinth." For" 'the 
 own armchair' of our Lyrist's ' Sweet Lady 
 1 "Eothen," p. 18. Reprint by Bell and Sons, 1898.
 
 " EOTHEN 2% 
 
 Anne' ' (p. 161) see the poem, " My own arm- 
 chair" in Barry Cornwall's "English Lyrics." 
 " Proud Marie of Anjou " (p. 96) and "single- 
 sin " (p. 121), are unintelligible; a friend 
 
 once asked Kinglake to explain the former, but 
 received for answer, " Oh ! that is a private 
 thing." It may, however, have been a pet name 
 for little Marie de Viry, Procter's niece, and 
 the chere amie of his verse, whom Eothen must 
 have met often at his friend's house. The 
 St. Simonians of p. 83 were the disciples of 
 Comte de St. Simon, a Parisian reformer in the 
 latter part of the eighteenth century, who en- 
 deavoured to establish a social republic based 
 on capacity and labour. Pere Enfantin was his 
 disciple. The "mystic mother" was a female 
 Messiah, expected to become the parent of a 
 new Saviour. " Sir Robert once said a good 
 thing" (p. 93), refers possibly to Sir Robert 
 Peel, not famous for epigram, whose one good 
 thing is said to have been bestowed upon 
 a friend before Croker's portrait in the Aca- 
 demy. " Wonderful likeness," said the friend, " it 
 gives the very quiver of the mouth." " Yes," 
 said Sir Robert, " and the arrow coming out 
 of it." Or it may mean Sir Robert Inglis, 
 Peel's successor at Oxford, more noted for
 
 24 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 his genial kindness and for the perpetual 
 bouquet in his buttonhole at a date when such 
 ornaments were not worn, than for capacity 
 to conceive and say good things. In some 
 mischievous lines describing the Oxford elec- 
 tion where Inglis supplanted Peel, Macaulay 
 wrote : 
 
 "And then said all the Doctors sitting in the Divinity 
 
 School, 
 'Not this man, but Sir Robert' — now Sir Robert was a 
 
 fool." 
 
 But in the fifth and later editions Kinglake 
 altered it to "Sir John." 
 
 By a curious oversight in the first two edi- 
 tions (p. 41) Jove was made to gaze on Troy 
 from Samothrace ; it was rightly altered to 
 Neptune in the third ; and " eagle eye of Jove " 
 in the following sentence was replaced by 
 " dread Commoter of our globe." The phrase 
 "a natural Chiffney-bit " (p. 109), I have found 
 unintelligible to-day through lapse of time even 
 to professional equestrians and stable-keepers. 
 Samuel Chiffney, a famous rider and trainer, 
 was born in 1753, and won the Derby on 
 Skyscraper in 1789. He managed the Prince 
 of Wales's stud, was the subject of discreditable 
 insinuations, and was called before the Jockey
 
 "eothen" 25 
 
 Club. Nothing was proved against him, but 
 in consequence of the fracas the Prince severed 
 his connection with the Club and sold his 
 horses. Chiffney invented a bit named after 
 him ; a curb with two snaffles, which gave a 
 stronger bearing on the sides of a horse's 
 mouth. His rule in racing was to keep a slack 
 rein and to ride a waiting race, not calling on 
 his horse till near the end. His son Samuel, 
 who followed him, observed the same plan ; 
 from its frequent success the term " Chiffney 
 rush" became proverbial. In his ride through 
 the desert (p. 169) Kinglake speaks of his 
 " native bells — the innocent bells of Marlen, 
 that never before sent forth their music beyond 
 the Blaygon hills." Marlen bells is the local 
 name for the fine peal of St. Mary Magdalen, 
 Taunton. The Blaygon, more commonly called 
 the Blagdon Hills, run parallel with the Quan- 
 tocks, and between them lies the fertile Vale of 
 Taunton Deane. " Damascus," he says, on 
 p. 245, "was safer than Oxford"; and adds a 
 note on Mr. Everett's degree which requires 
 correction. It is true that an attempt was made 
 to non-placet Mr. Everett's honorary degree 
 in the Oxford Theatre in 1843 on the ground 
 of his being a Unitarian; not true that it sue-
 
 26 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 ceeded. It was a conspiracy by the young 
 lions of the Newmania, who had organized a 
 formidable opposition to the degree, and would 
 have created a painful scene even if defeated. 
 But the Proctor of that year, J elf, happened to 
 be the most-hated official of the century ; and 
 the furious groans of undergraduate displeasure 
 at his presence, continuing unabated for three- 
 quarters of an hour, compelled Wynter, the 
 Vice-Chancellor, to break up the Assembly, 
 without recitation of the prizes, but not without 
 conferring the degrees in dumb show : uncon- 
 scious Mr. Everett smilingly took his place in 
 red grown among: the Doctors, the Vice-Chan- 
 cellor asserting afterwards, what was true in the 
 letter though not in the spirit, that he did not 
 hear the non-placets. So while Everett was 
 obnoxious to the Puseyites, Jelf was obnoxious 
 to the undergraduates ; the cannonade of the 
 angry youngsters drowned the odium of the 
 theological malcontents ; in the words of Bom- 
 bastes : 
 
 "Another lion gave another roar, 
 
 And the first lion thought the last a bore." 
 
 The popularity of " Eothen " is a paradox : 
 it fascinates by violating all the rules which
 
 . 1 
 
 >) 
 
 EOTHEN 2 7 
 
 convention assigns to viatic narrative. It 
 traverses the most affecting regions of the 
 world, and describes no one of them : the 
 Troad — and we get only his childish raptures 
 over Pope's " Homer's Iliad"; Stamboul — and 
 he recounts the murderous services rendered 
 by the Golden Horn to the Assassin whose 
 serail, palace, council chamber, it washes ; 
 Cairo — but the Plague shuts out all other 
 thoughts; Jerusalem — but Pilgrims have vul- 
 garized the Holy Sepulchre into a Bartholomew 
 Fair. He gives us everywhere, not history, 
 antiquities, geography, description, statistics, 
 but only Kinglake, only his own sensations, 
 thoughts, experiences. We are told not what 
 the desert looks like, but what journeying in 
 the desert feels like. From morn till eve you 
 sit aloft upon your voyaging camel ; the risen 
 sun, still lenient on your left, mounts vertical 
 and dominant ; you shroud head and face in 
 silk, your skin glows, shoulders ache, Arabs 
 moan, and still moves on the sighing camel 
 with his disjointed awkward dual swing, till the 
 sun once more descending touches you on the 
 right, your veil is thrown aside, your tent is 
 pitched, books, maps, cloaks, toilet luxuries, 
 litter your spread-out rugs, you feast on scorch-
 
 28 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 ing toast and " fragrant " ! tea, sleep sound and 
 long ; then again the tent is drawn, the comforts 
 packed, civilization retires from the spot she 
 had for a single night annexed, and the Genius 
 of the Desert stalks in. 
 
 Herein, in these subjective chatty confid- 
 ences, is part of the spell he lays upon us : 
 while we read we are in the East : other 
 books, as Warburton says, tell us about the 
 East, this is the East itself. And yet in 
 his company we are always Englishmen in 
 the East : behind Servian, Egyptian, Syrian, 
 desert realities, is a background of English 
 scenery, faint and unobtrusive yet persistent 
 and horizoning. In the Danubian forest we 
 talk of past school-days. The Balkan plain 
 suggests an English park, its trees planted as 
 if to shut out " some infernal fellow creature in 
 the shape of a new-made squire"; Jordan re- 
 calls the Thames ; the Galilean Lake, Winder- 
 mere ; the Via Dolorosa, Bond Street ; the 
 fresh toast of the desert bivouac, an Eton 
 breakfast ; the hungry questing jackals are 
 the place-hunters of Bridgewater and Taunton ; 
 the Damascus gardens, a neglected English 
 
 1 He is very fond of this word ; it occurs eleven times.
 
 " EOTHEN 29 
 
 manor from which the " family " has been long 
 abroad ; in the fierce, dry desert air are heard 
 the " Marlen " bells of home, calling to morning 
 prayer the prim congregation in far-off St. 
 Mary's parish. And a not less potent factor in 
 the charm is the magician's self who wields it, 
 shown through each passing environment of 
 the narrative ; the shy, haughty, imperious 
 Solitary, "a sort of Byron in the desert," of 
 cultured mind and eloquent speech, headstrong 
 and not always amiable, hiding sentiment with 
 cynicism, yet therefore irresistible all the more 
 when he condescends to endear himself by his 
 confidence. He meets the Plague and its ter- 
 rors like a gentleman, but shows us, through 
 the vicarious torments of the cowering Levant- 
 ine that it was courage and coolness, not in- 
 sensibility, which bore him through it. A foe 
 to marriage, compassionating Carrigaholt as 
 doomed to travel " Vetturini-wise," pitying the 
 Dead Sea goatherd for his ugly wife, revelling 
 in the meek surrender of the three young men 
 whom he sees "led to the altar" in Suez, he is 
 still the frank, susceptible, gallant bachelor, 
 observantly and critically studious of female 
 charms : of the magnificent yet formidable 
 Smyrniotes, eyes, brow, nostrils, throat, sweetly
 
 30 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 turned lips, alarming in their latent capacity 
 for fierceness, pride, passion, power : of the 
 Moslem women in Nablous, "so handsome 
 that they could not keep up their yashmaks : " 
 of Cypriote witchery in hair, shoulder-slope, 
 tempestuous fold of robe. He opines as he 
 contemplates the plain, clumsy Arab wives 
 that the fine things we feel and say of women 
 apply only to the good-looking and the grace- 
 ful : his memory wanders off ever and again to 
 the muslin sleeves and bodices and "sweet 
 chemisettes" in distant England. In hands 
 sensual and vulgar the allusions might have 
 been coarse, the dilatings unseemly ; but the 
 " taste which is the feminine of genius," the 
 self-respecting gentleman-like instinct, innocent 
 at once and playful, keeps the voluptuary out 
 of sight, teaches, as Imogen taught Iachimo, 
 "the wide difference 'twixt amorous and vil- 
 lainous." Add to all these elements of fascina- 
 tion the unbroken luxuriance of style ; the easy 
 flow of casual epigram or negligent simile ; — 
 Greek holy days not kept holy but "kept 
 stupid" ; the mule who "forgot that his rider 
 was a saint and remembered that he was a 
 tailor " ; the pilgrims " transacting their salva- 
 tion " at the Holy Sepulchre ; the frightened,
 
 "EOTHEN ' 31 
 
 wavering guard at Satalieh, not shrinking back 
 or running away, but "looking as if the pack 
 were being shuffled," each man desirous to 
 change places with his neighbour ; the white 
 man's unresisting hand "passed round like a 
 claret jug " by the hospitable Arabs ; the travel- 
 lers dripping from a Balkan storm compared 
 to "men turned back by the Humane Society 
 as being incurably drowned." Sometimes he 
 breaks into a canter, as in the first experience 
 of a Moslem city, the rapturous escape from 
 respectability and civilization ; the apostrophe 
 to the Stamboul sea ; the glimpse of the Mysian 
 Olympus ; the burial of the poor dead Greek ; 
 the Janus view of Orient and Occident from 
 the Lebanon watershed ; the pathetic terror of 
 Bedouins and camels on entering a walled city ; 
 until, once more in the saddle, and winding- 
 through the Taurus defiles, he saddens us by 
 a first discordant note, the note of sorrow that 
 the entrancing tale is at an end. 
 
 Old times return to me as I handle the 
 familiar pages. To the schoolboy six and 
 fifty years ago arrives from home a birthday 
 gift, the bright green volume, with its showy 
 paintings of the impaled robbers and the Jordan 
 passage ; its bulky Tatar, towering high above
 
 32 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 his scraggy steed, impressed in shining gold 
 upon its cover. Read, borrowed, handed 
 round, it is devoured and discussed with fifth 
 form critical presumption, the adventurous 
 audacity arresting, the literary charm not ana- 
 lyzed but felt, the vivid personality of the old 
 Etonian winged with public school freemasonry. 
 Scarcely in the acquired insight of all the inter- 
 vening years could those who enjoyed it then 
 more keenly appreciate it to-day. Transcend- 
 ent gift of genius ! to gladden equally with 
 selfsame words the reluctant inexperience of 
 boyhood and the fastidious judgment of matu- 
 rity. Delightful self-accountant reverence of 
 author-craft ! which wields full knowledge of 
 a shaddock-tainted world, yet presents no 
 licence to the prurient lad, reveals no trail to 
 the suspicious moralist.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 LITERARY AND PARLIAMENTARY LIFE 
 
 Kinglake returned from Algiers in 1844 to 
 find himself famous both in the literary and 
 social world ; for his book had gone through 
 three editions and was the universal theme. 
 Lockhart opened to him the " Quarterly." 
 "Who is Eothen?" wrote Macvey Napier, editor 
 of the " Edinburgh," to Hayward : " I know 
 he is a lawyer and highly respectable ; but I 
 should like to know a little more of his personal 
 history : he is very clever but very peculiar." 
 Thackeray, later on, expresses affectionate 
 gratitude for his presence at the " Lectures on 
 English Humourists": — "it goes to a man's 
 heart to find amongst his friends such men as 
 Kinglake and Venables, Higgins, Rawlinson, 
 Carlyle, Ashburton and Hallam, Milman, 
 Macaulay, Wilberforce, looking on kindly." 
 He dines out in all directions, himself giving 
 dinners at Long's Hotel. " Did you ever meet 
 
 D
 
 J 
 
 34 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 Kinglake at my rooms ?" writes Monckton 
 Milnes to MacCarthy : "he has had immense 
 success. I now rather wish I had written his 
 book, which I could have done — at least nearly' 1 
 We are reminded of Charles Lamb — " here 's 
 Wordsworth says he could have written Ham- 
 let, if he had had a mind!' " A delightful 
 Voltairean volume," Milnes elsewhere calls it. 
 " Eothen" was reviewed in the " Quarterly" 
 by Eliot Warburton. " Other books," he says, 
 " contain facts and statistics about the East ; 
 this book gives the East itself in vital actual 
 reality. Its style is conversational ; or the 
 soliloquy rather of a man convincing and amus- 
 ing himself as he proceeds, without reverence 
 for others' faith, or lenity towards others' pre- 
 judices. It is a real book, not a sham ; it 
 equals Anastasius, rivals 'Vathek;' its terse- 
 ness, vigour, bold imagery, recall the grand 
 style of Fuller and of South, to which the 
 author adds a spirit, freshness, delicacy, all his 
 own." Kinglake, in turn, reviewed " The 
 Crescent and the Cross " in an article called 
 " The French Lake." From a cordial notice 
 of the book he passes to a history of French 
 ambition in the Levant. It was Bonaparte's 
 fixed idea to become an Oriental conqueror — a
 
 LITERARY AND PARLIAMENTARY LIFE 35 
 
 second Alexander : Egypt in his grasp, he 
 would pass on to India. He sought alliance 
 against the English with Tippoo Saib, and 
 spent whole days stretched upon maps of Asia. 
 He was baffled, first at Aboukir, then at Acre ; 
 but the partition of Turkey at Tilsit showed 
 that he had not abandoned his design. To 
 have refrained from seizing Egypt after his 
 withdrawal was a political blunder on the part 
 of England. 
 
 By far the most charming of Kinglake's 
 articles was a paper on the " Rights of Women," 
 in the " Quarterly Review ' of December, 
 1844. Grouping together Monckton Milnes's 
 " Palm Leaves," Mrs. Poole's " Sketch of 
 Egyptian Harems," Mrs. Ellis's " Women and 
 Wives of England," he produced a playful, 
 lightly touched, yet sincerely constructed 
 sketch of woman's characteristics, seductions, 
 attainments ; the extent and secret of her fasci- 
 nation and her deeper influence ; her defects, 
 foibles, misconceptions. He was greatly vexed 
 to learn that his criticism of " Palm Leaves" 
 was considered hostile, and begged Warburton 
 to explain. His praise, he said, had been 
 looked upon as irony, his bantering taken to 
 express bitterness. Warburton added his own
 
 $6 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 conviction that the notice was tributary to 
 Milnes's fame, and Milnes accepted the explana- 
 tion. But the chief interest of this paper lies 
 in the beautiful passage which ends it. " The 
 world must go on its own way, for all that we 
 can say against it. Beauty, though it beams 
 over the organization of a doll, will have its 
 hour of empire ; the most torpid heiress will 
 easily get herself married ; but the wife whose 
 sweet nature can kindle worthy delights is she 
 that brings to her hearth a joyous, hopeful, 
 ardent spirit, and that subtle power whose 
 sources we can hardly trace, but which yet so 
 irradiates a home that all who come near are 
 filled and inspired by a deep sense of womanly 
 presence. We best learn the unsuspected 
 might of a being like this when we try the 
 weight of that sadness which hangs like lead 
 upon the room, the gallery, the stairs, where 
 once her footstep sounded, and now is heard no 
 more. It is not less the energy than the grace 
 and gentleness of this character that works the 
 enchantment. Books can instruct, and books 
 can exalt and purify ; beauty of face and beauty 
 of form will come with bright pictures and 
 statues, and for the government of a household 
 hired menials will suffice ; but fondness and
 
 LITERARY AND PARLIAMENTARY LIFE $*] 
 
 hate, daring hopes, lively fears, the lust of 
 glory and the scorn of base deeds, sweet 
 charity, faithfulness, pride, and, chief over all, 
 the impetuous will, lending might and power 
 to feeling : — these are the rib of the man, and 
 from these, deep veiled in the mystery of her 
 very loveliness, his true companion sprang. A 
 being thus ardent will often go wrong in her 
 strenuous course ; will often alarm, sometimes 
 provoke ; will now and then work mischief and 
 even perhaps grievous harm ; but she will be 
 our own Eve after all ; the sweet-speaking 
 tempter whom heaven created to be the joy and 
 the trouble of this pleasing anxious existence ; 
 to shame us away from the hiding-places of a 
 slothful neutrality, and lead us abroad in the 
 world, men militant here on earth, enduring 
 quiet, content with strife, and looking for peace 
 hereafter." l Beautiful words indeed ! how 
 came the author of a tribute so caressingly appre- 
 ciative, so eloquently sincere, to remain himself 
 outside the gates of Paradise ? how could the 
 pen which in the Crimean chapter on the Holy 
 Shrines traced so exquisitely the delicate fanci- 
 fulness of purest sexual love, perpetrate that 
 elaborate sneer over the bachelor obsequies of 
 1 "Quarterly Review," December, 1844.
 
 38 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 Carrigaholt — " the lowly grave, that is the end 
 of man's romantic hopes, has closed over all his 
 rich fancies and all his high aspirations : he is 
 utterly married." 1 
 
 " Gai, gai, mariez vous, 
 
 Mettez vous dans la misere ! 
 
 Gai, gai, mariez vous, 
 
 Mettez vous la corde au cou ! " 2 
 
 There is generally a good reason for pro- 
 longed celibacy, a reason which the bachelor 
 as generally does not betray : Kinglake re- 
 mained single, by his own account, because he 
 had observed that women always prefer other 
 men to their own husbands. Yet, although 
 unmarried, perhaps because unmarried, he 
 heartily admired many clever women ; formed 
 with them sedate but genuine friendships, the 
 I' amour sans at/es, sometimes called " Platonic " 
 by persons who have not read Plato ; found 
 in their illogical clear-sightedness, in their 
 uyxwoix, to use the master's own untranslat- 
 able phrase, a titillating stimulus which he 
 missed in men. He thought that the Church 
 should ordain priestesses as well as priests, the 
 former to be the Egerias of men, as the latter 
 are the Pontiffs of women. And Lady Gregory 
 1 " Eothen," p. 46. 2 Poitier's " Vaudeville."
 
 LITERARY AND PARLIAMENTARY LIFE 39 
 
 tells us, that when attacked by gout, he wished 
 for the solace of a lady doctor, and wrote to 
 one asking if gout were beyond her scope. 
 She answered : " Dear Sir, — Gout is not be- 
 yond my scope, but men are." 
 
 In 1854 he accompanied Lord Raglan to the 
 Crimea. " I had heard," writes John Kenyon, 
 "of Kinglake's chivalrous goings on. We 
 were saying yesterday that though he might 
 write a book, he was among the last men to go 
 that he might write a book. He is wild about 
 matters military, if so calm a man is ever wild." 
 He had hoped to go in an official position as 
 non-combatant, but this was refused by the 
 authorities. His friend, Lord Raglan, whose 
 acquaintance he had made while hunting with 
 the Duke of Beaufort's hounds, took him as 
 his private guest. Arrested for a time at 
 Malta by an attack of fever, he joined our 
 army before hostilities began, rode with Lord 
 Raglan's staff at the Alma fight, likening the 
 novel sensation to the excitement of fox-hunt- 
 ing ; and accompanied the chief in his visit of 
 tenderness to the wounded when the fight was 
 over. Throughout the campaign the two were 
 much together, as we shall notice more fully 
 later on. There are often slight but unmistak-
 
 40 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 able signs of Kinglake's presence as spectator 
 and auditor of Lord Raglan's deeds and words ; * 
 his affection and reverence for the great general 
 animate the whole ; in outward composure and 
 latent strength the two men resembled each 
 other closely. The book is, in fact, a history 
 of Lord Raglan's share in the campaign ; be- 
 gun in 1856 at the request of Lady Raglan, the 
 narrative ends when the " Caradoc " with the 
 general's body on board steams out of the bay, 
 "Farewell" flying at her masthead, the Rus- 
 sian batteries, with generous recognition, ceas- 
 ing to fire till the ship was out of sight. " Lord 
 Raglan is dead," said Kinglake as vol. viii. 
 was sent to press, "and my work is finished." 
 
 Ten years were to elapse before the open- 
 ing volumes should appear ; and meanwhile 
 he entered parliament for the borough of 
 Bridgewater, which had rejected him in 1852. 
 His colleague was Colonel Charles J. Kemyss 
 Tynte, member of a family which local in- 
 fluence and lavish expenditure had secured in 
 
 1 One characteristic anecdote he omits. Two French 
 officers were attached to our headquarters ; and the staff 
 were partly embarrassed and partly amused by Lord Rag- 
 lan's inveterate habit, due to old Peninsular associations, of 
 calling the enemy "the French" in the presence of our 
 foreign guests.
 
 LORD RAGLAN. 
 
 From a litli'.^i .ipli l.y J. II. Lynch. 
 
 P. 40.
 
 LITERARY AND PARLIAMENTARY LIFE 4 1 
 
 the representation of the town for nearly forty 
 years. Catechized as to his political creed, he 
 answered : " I call myself an advanced Liberal ; 
 but I decline to go into parliament as the 
 pledged adherent of Lord Palmerston or any 
 other Liberal." He adds, in response to a 
 further question : " I am believed to be the 
 author of ' Eothen." He broke down in his 
 maiden speech ; but recovered himself in a 
 later effort, and spoke, not unfrequently, on 
 subjects then important, now forgotten ; on 
 the outrage of the "Charles et George"; the 
 capture of the Sardinian "Cagliari" by the 
 Neapolitans on the high seas ; our attitude 
 towards the Paris Congress of 1857; while 
 in 1858 he led the revolt against Lord Pal- 
 merston's proposal to amend the Conspiracy 
 Laws in deference to Louis Napoleon ; in i860 
 vigorously denounced the annexation of Savoy 
 and Nice ; and in 1864 moved the amendment 
 to Mr. Disraeli's motion in the debate on the 
 Address, which was carried by 313 to 295. 
 His feeble voice and unimpressive manner 
 prevented him from becoming a power in the 
 House ; but his speeches when read are full, 
 fluent, and graceful ; the late Sir Robert Peel's 
 remarkable harangue against the French
 
 42 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 Emperor in the course of an earlier debate was 
 taken, as he is said to have owned, mainly 
 from a speech by Kinglake, delivered so indis- 
 tinctly that the reporters failed to catch it, but 
 audible to Sir Robert who sate close beside 
 him. 
 
 With his constituents he was more at ease 
 and more effective. His seat for Bridge- 
 water was challenged at a general election by 
 Henry Padwick, a hanger-on to Disraeli and a 
 well-known bookmaker on the turf, who, with 
 an Irish Colonel Westbrook, tried to cajole the 
 electors and their wives by extravagant com- 
 pliments to the town, its neighbourhood, its 
 denizens ; a place celebrated, as Captain Costi- 
 gan said of Chatteris, " for its antiquitee, its 
 hospitalitee, the beautee of its women, the 
 manly fidelitee, generositee, and jovialitee of 
 its men." Kinglake met them on their own 
 ground. In his flowery speeches the romance 
 of Sinai and Palestine faded before the glories 
 of the little Somersetshire town. What was 
 the Jordan by comparison with the Parrett ? 
 Could Libanus or Anti-Libanus vie with the 
 Mendip and the Quantock Hills ? The view 
 surveyed by Monmouth from St. Mary's Tower 
 on the Eve of Sedgemoor transcended all the
 
 LITERARY AND PARLIAMENTARY LIFE 43 
 
 panoramas which the Holy Land or Asia Minor 
 could present! But his more serious orations 
 were worthy of his higher fame. In the panic 
 of 1858, when the address of the French 
 colonels to the Emperor, beseeching to be led 
 against England, had created serious alarm on 
 this side the Channel, he went down to Bridge- 
 water to enlighten the West of England. 
 " Why," he asked, " do we fear invasion ? The 
 population of France is peaceful, the 'turnip- 
 soup Jacques Bonhomme ' is peaceful, the 
 soldiers of the line are peaceful. Why are we 
 anxious ? Because there sits in his chamber at 
 the Tuileries a solitary moody man. He is 
 deeply interested in the science and the art of 
 war ; he told me once that he was contemplat- 
 ing a history of all the great battles ever fought. 
 He holds absolute control over vast resources 
 both in men and money ; he has shown that he 
 can attack successfully at a few weeks' notice 
 the greatest European military power : gout 
 or indigestion may at any moment convert him 
 into an enemy of ourselves. Until France re- 
 turns to parliamentary government this danger 
 is imminent and continual. Our safety lies in 
 our fleet, and in that alone. If for twenty-four 
 hours only the Channel were denuded of our
 
 44 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 ships in time of war with France, they would 
 hurl upon our shores a force we could not meet. 
 Such denudation must be made impossible ; 
 our fleet so augmented and strengthened as to 
 provide impregnably at all times for home de- 
 fence no less than for foreign necessities. Our 
 danger, I repeat, lies in no hostility on the part 
 of the French army, in no ferocity on the part 
 of the French people, in no present unfriendli- 
 ness on the part of the French Emperor : it 
 arises from the fact that a revolutionary govern- 
 ment exists in France, which has armed one 
 man, under the name of Emperor — Dictator 
 rather, I should say — with a power so colossal, 
 that until such power is moderated, as all power 
 ought to be, no neighbour can be entirely safe." 
 This speech was reproduced in "The Times." 
 Montalembertread it with admiration. "Who," 
 he asked Sir M. E. Grant Duff, "who is Mr. 
 Kinglake ? " " He is the author of ' Eothen.' ' 
 " And what is ' Eothen ? ' I never heard of 
 it. 
 
 He found great enjoyment in parliamentary 
 life, but was in 1868 unseated on petition for 
 bribery on the part of his agents. Blue-books 
 are not ordinarily light reading; but the Re- 
 port of the Commissioners appointed to inquire
 
 LITERARY AND PARLIAMENTARY LIFE 45 
 
 into the alleged corrupt practices at Bridge- 
 water is not only a model of terse and vigorous 
 composition, but to persons with a sense of 
 humour, inclined to view human irregularities 
 and inconsistencies in a sportive rather than 
 an indignant light, it is a sustained and divert- 
 ing comedy. Of the constituency, both before 
 and after the Reform Bill, three-fourths, the 
 Commissioners artlessly inform us, sought and 
 received bribes ; of the remainder, all but a few 
 individuals negotiated and gave the bribes. So 
 in every election, both sides bribed avowedly ; 
 if a luckless Purity Candidate appeared, he 
 was promptly informed that "Mr. Most" 
 would win the seat : highest bribes decided 
 each election, further bribes averted petitions. 
 When once a desperate riot took place and the 
 ringleaders were tried at Quarter Sessions, 
 the jury were bribed to acquit, in the teeth of 
 the Chairman's summing up. At last, in 1868, 
 the defeated candidate petitioned ; blue-book 
 literature was enriched by a remarkable report, 
 and the borough was disfranchised. Of course 
 Kinglake had only himself to thank ; if a 
 gentleman chooses to sit for a venal borough, 
 and to intrust his interests to a questionable 
 agent, he must, in the words of Mrs. Gamp,
 
 46 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 " take the consequences of sech a sitiwation." 
 The consequences to him were loss of his 
 present seat, and permanent exclusion from 
 Parliament. 
 
 He was keenly mortified by his ostracism, 
 speaking of himself ever after as " a political 
 corpse." Thenceforward he gave his whole 
 energy to literary work, to occasional reviews, 
 mainly to his " Invasion of the Crimea." In 
 the " Edinburgh " I think he never wrote, 
 cordially disliking its then editor. A fine 
 notice in " Blackwood " of Madame de La- 
 fayette's life was from his pen. Surveying the 
 Revolutionary Terror, he points out that Robes- 
 pierre's opponents were in numbers over- 
 whelmingly strong, but lacked cohesion and 
 leaders ; while the Mountain, dominated by a 
 single will, was legally armed with power to 
 kill, and went on killing. The Church played 
 into Robespierre's hands by enforcing Patience 
 and Resignation as the highest Christian 
 virtues, confusing the idea of submission to 
 Heaven with the idea of submission to a 
 scoundrel. Had Hampden been a Papist he 
 would have paid ship-money. He wrote also 
 in " The Owl," a brilliant little magazine edited 
 by his friend Laurence Oliphant ; a " Society
 
 LITERARY AND PARLIAMENTARY LIFE 47 
 
 Journal," conducted by a set of clever well-to- 
 do young bachelors living in London, addressed 
 like the " Pall Mall Gazette," in " Pendennis," 
 " to the higher circles of society, written by 
 gentlemen for gentlemen." When the expenses 
 of production were paid, the balance was spent 
 on a whitebait dinner at Greenwich, and on 
 offerings of flowers and jewellery to the lady 
 guests invited. It came to an end, leaving no 
 successor equally brilliant, high-toned, whole- 
 some ; its collected numbers figure sometimes 
 at a formidable price in sales and catalogues. 1 
 
 1 Some of us can recall the lines in which Sir G. Tre- 
 velyan commemorated "The Owl's" nocturnal flights : 
 
 " When at sunset, chill and dark, 
 Sunset thins the swarming park, 
 Bearing home his social gleaning — 
 Jests and riddles fraught with meaning, 
 Scandals, anecdotes, reports, — 
 Seeks The Owl a maze of courts 
 Which, with aspect towards the west, 
 
 Fringe the street of Sainted James, 
 Where a warm, secluded nest 
 
 As his sole domain he claims ; 
 From his wing a feather draws, 
 
 Shapes for use a dainty nib, 
 
 Pens his parody or squib ; 
 Combs his down and trims his claws, 
 And repairs where windows bright 
 Flood the sleepless Square with light."
 
 48 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 The first two volumes of his " Crimea " had 
 appeared in 1863. They were awaited with 
 eager expectation. An elaborate history of 
 the war had been written by a Baron de Bazan- 
 court, condemned as unfair and unreliable by 
 English statesmen, and severely handled in our 
 reviews. So the wish was felt everywhere for 
 some record less ephemeral, which should 
 render the tale historically, and counteract 
 Bazancourt's misstatements. " I hear," wrote 
 the Duke of Newcastle, " that Kinglake has 
 undertaken the task. He has a noble oppor- 
 tunity of producing a text-book for future 
 history, but to accomplish this it must be 
 stoically impartial." 
 
 The beauty of their style, the merciless por- 
 traiture of the Second Empire, the unparalleled 
 diorama of the Alma fight, combined to gain 
 for these first four- and -twenty chapters an 
 immediate vogue as emphatic and as widely 
 spread as that which saluted the opening of 
 Macaulay's " History." None of the later 
 volumes, though highly prized as battle nar- 
 ratives, quite came up to these. The political 
 and military conclusions drawn provoked no 
 small bitterness; his cousin, Mrs. Serjeant 
 Kinglake, used to say that she met sometimes
 
 LITERARY AND PARLIAMENTARY LIFE 49 
 
 with almost affronting coldness in society at 
 the time, under the impression that she was 
 A. W. Kinglake's wife. Russians were, per- 
 haps unfairly, dissatisfied. Todleben, who knew 
 and loved Kinglake well, pronounced the book 
 a charming romance, not a history of the war. 
 Individuals were aggrieved by its notice of 
 themselves or of their regiments ; statesmen 
 chafed under the scientific analysis of their 
 characters, or at the publication of official 
 letters which they had intended but not re- 
 quired to be looked upon as confidential, and 
 which the recipients had in all innocence com- 
 municated to the historian. Palmerstonians, 
 accepting with their chief the Man of December, 
 were furious at the exposure of his basenesses. 
 Lucas in " The Times " pronounced the work 
 perverse and mischievous; the ''Westminster 
 Review " branded it as reactionary. " The 
 Quarterly," in an article ascribed to A. H. 
 Layard, condemned its style as laboured and 
 artificial ; as palling from the sustained pomp 
 and glitter of the language ; as wearisome from 
 the constant strain after minute dissection ; de- 
 claring it further to be " in every sense of the 
 word a mischievous book." " Blackwood," less 
 unfriendly, surrendered itself to the beauty of 
 
 E
 
 50 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 the writing ; " satire so studied, so polished, so 
 remorseless, and withal so diabolically enter- 
 taining, that we know not where in modern 
 literature to seek such another philippic." 
 
 Reeve, editor of the " Edinburgh," wished 
 Lord Clarendon to attack the book ; he refused, 
 but offered help, and the resulting article was 
 due to the collaboration of the pair. It caused 
 a prolonged coolness between Reeve and King- 
 lake, who at last ended the quarrel by a char- 
 acteristic letter : " I observed yesterday that 
 my malice, founded perhaps upon a couple of 
 words, and now of three years' duration, had 
 not engendered corresponding anger in you ; 
 and if my impression was a right one, I trust 
 we may meet for the future on our old terms." 
 
 On the other hand, the " Saturday Review," 
 then at the height of its repute and influence, 
 vindicated in a powerful article Kinglake's 
 truth and fairness ; and a pamphlet by Hayward, 
 called " Mr. Kinglake and the Quarterlies," 
 amused society by its furious onslaught upon 
 the hostile periodicals, laid bare their animus, 
 and exposed their misstatements. " If you 
 rise in this tone," he began, in words of Lord 
 Ellenborough when Attorney-General, " I can 
 speak as loudly and emphatically : I shall
 
 LITERARY AND PARLIAMENTARY LIFE 5 I 
 
 prosecute the case with all the liberality of a 
 gentleman, but no tone or manner shall put me 
 down." And the dissentient voices were 
 drowned in the general chorus of admiration. 
 German eulogy was extravagant ; French Re- 
 publicanism was overjoyed; Englishmen, at 
 home and abroad, read eagerly for the first 
 time in close and vivid sequence events which, 
 when spread over thirty months of daily news- 
 papers, few had the patience to follow, none 
 the qualifications to condense. Macaulay tells 
 us that soon after the appearance of his own 
 first volumes, a Mr. Crump from America 
 offered him five hundred dollars if he would 
 introduce the name of Crump into his history. 
 An English gentleman and lady, from one of 
 our most distant colonies, wrote to Kinglake a 
 jointly signed pathetic letter, intreating him to 
 cite in his pages the name of their only son, 
 who had fallen in the Crimea. He at once 
 consented, and asked for particulars — manner, 
 time, place — of the young man's death. The 
 parents replied that they need not trouble him 
 with details ; these should be left to the his- 
 torian's kind inventiveness : whatever he might 
 please to say in embellishment of their young 
 hero's end they would gratefully accept.
 
 52 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 Unlike most authors, from Moliere down to 
 Dickens, he never read aloud to friends any 
 portion of the unpublished manuscript ; never, 
 except to closest intimates, spoke of the book, 
 or tolerated inquiry about it from others. 
 When asked as to the progress of a volume 
 he had in hand, he used to say, " That is 
 really a matter on which it is quite out of my 
 power even to inform myself" ; and I remember 
 how once at a well-selected dinner-party in the 
 country, whither he came in good spirits and 
 inclined to talk his best, a second-hand criticism 
 on his book by a conceited parson, the official and 
 incongruous element in the group, stiffened him 
 into persistent silence. All England laughed, 
 when Blackwood's " Memoirs " saw the light, 
 over his polite repulse of the kindly officious 
 publisher, who wished, after his fashion, to 
 criticise and finger and suggest. " I am almost 
 alarmed, as it were, at the notion of receiving 
 suggestions. I feel that hints from you might 
 be so valuable and so important, it might be 
 madness to ask you beforehand to abstain from 
 giving me any ; but I am anxious for you to 
 know what the dangers in the way of long delay 
 might be, the result of even a few slight and 
 possibly most useful suggestions. . . . You will
 
 LITERARY AND PARLIAMENTARY LIFE 53 
 
 perhaps (after what I have said) think it best 
 not to set my mind running in a new path, lest 
 1 should take to re-writing." Note, by the way, 
 the slovenliness of this epistle, as coming from 
 so great a master of style ; that defect char- 
 acterizes all his correspondence. He wrote for 
 the Press "with all his singing robes about 
 him " ; his letters were unrevised and brief. 
 Mrs. Simpson, in her pleasant " Memories," 
 ascribes to him the Eloquence ciu billet in a 
 supreme degree. I must confess that of more 
 than five hundred letters from his pen which I 
 have seen only six cover more than a single 
 sheet of note-paper, all are alike careless and 
 unstudied in style, though often in matter char- 
 acteristic and informing. " I am not by nature," 
 he would say, " a letter-writer, and habitually 
 think of the uncertainty as to who may be the 
 reader of anything that I write. It is my fate, 
 as a writer of history, to have before me letters 
 never intended for my eyes, and this has aggra- 
 vated my foible, and makes me a wretched 
 correspondent. I should like very much to 
 write letters gracefully and easily, but I can't, 
 because it is contrary to my nature." " I have 
 got," he writes so early as 1873, "to shrink 
 from the use of the pen ; to ask me to write
 
 54 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 letters is like asking a lame man to walk ; it is 
 not, as horse-dealers say, ' the nature of the 
 beast.' When others talk to me charmingly, 
 my answers are short, faltering, incoherent sen- 
 tences ; so it is with my writing." " You," he says 
 to another lady correspondent, "have the pleas- 
 ant faculty of easy, pleasant letter-writing, in 
 which I am wholly deficient." 
 
 In fact, the claims of his Crimean book, 
 which compelled him latterly to refuse all other 
 literary work, gave little time for correspond- 
 ence. Its successive revisions formed his daily 
 task until illness struck him down. Sacks of 
 Crimean notes, labelled through some fantastic 
 whim with female Christian names — the Helen 
 bag, the Adelaide bag, etc. — were ranged round 
 his room. His working library was very small 
 in bulk, his habit being to cut out from any 
 book the pages which would be serviceable, 
 and to fling the rest away. So, we are told, 
 the first Napoleon, binding volumes for his 
 travelling library, shore their margins to the 
 quick, and removed all prefaces, title-pages, 
 and other superfluous leaves. So, too, Edward 
 Fitzgerald used to tear out of his books all 
 that in his judgment fell below their authors' 
 highest standard, retaining for his own delecta-
 
 LITERARY AND PARLIAMENTARY LIFE 55 
 
 tion only the quintessential remnants. Vols. 
 III. and IV. appeared in 1868, V. in 1875, 
 VI. in 1880, VII. and VIII. in 1887; while a 
 Cabinet Edition of the whole in nine volumes 
 was issued continuously from 1870 to 1887. 
 Our attempt to appreciate the book shall be 
 reserved for another chapter.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 " THE INVASION OF THE CRIMEA " 
 
 Was the history of the Crimean War worth 
 writing ? Not as a magnified newspaper report, 
 — that had been already done — but as a per- 
 manent work of art from the pen of a great 
 literary expert ? Very many of us, I think, after 
 the lapse of fifty years, feel compelled to say 
 that it was not. The struggle represented no 
 great principles, begot no far-reaching conse- 
 quences. It was not inspired by the "holy 
 glee " with which in Wordsworth's sonnet 
 Liberty fights against a tyrant, but by the 
 faltering boldness, the drifting, purposeless un- 
 resolve of statesmen who did not desire it, and 
 by the irrational violence of a Press which did 
 not understand it. It was not a necessary 
 war ; its avowed object would have been at- 
 tained within a few weeks or months by blood- 
 less European concert. It was not a glorious 
 war ; crippled by an incompatible alliance and
 
 "the invasion of the Crimea 57 
 
 governed by the Evil Genius who had initiated 
 it for personal and sordid ends, it brought dis- 
 credit on baffled generals in the field, on 
 Crown, Cabinet, populace, at home. It was 
 not a fruitful war; the detailed results pur- 
 chased by its squandered life and treasure 
 lapsed in swift succession during twenty sequent 
 years, until the last sheet of the treaty which 
 secured them was contemptuously torn up by 
 Gortschakoff in 1870. But a right sense of 
 historical proportion is in no time the heritage 
 of the many, and is least of all attainable while 
 the memory of a campaign is fresh. On Eng- 
 lishmen who welcomed home their army in 
 1855, the strife from which shattered but vic- 
 torious it had returned, loomed as epoch-making 
 and colossal, as claiming therefore permanent 
 record from some eloquent artist of attested 
 descriptive power. Soon the report gained 
 ground that the destined chronicler was King- 
 lake, and all men hailed the selection ; yet the 
 sceptic who in looking back to-day decries the 
 greatness of the campaign may perhaps no less 
 hesitate to approve the fitness of its chosen 
 annalist. His fame was due to the perfection 
 of a single book ; he ranked as a potentate in 
 style. But literary perfection, whether in prose
 
 58 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 or poetry, is a fragile quality, an afflatus irre- 
 gular, independent, unamenable to orders ; the 
 official tributes of a Laureate we compliment 
 at their best with the northern farmer's verdict 
 on the pulpit performances of his parson : 
 
 "An' I niver knaw'd wot a mean'd but I thow't a 'ad 
 
 summut to saay, 
 And I thowt a said wot a owt to 'a said an' I corned 
 
 awaay." 
 
 Set to compile a biography from thirty years 
 of " Moniteurs," the author of Waverley, like 
 Lord Chesterfield's diamond pencil, produced 
 one miracle of dulness ; it might well be feared 
 that Kinglake's volatile pen, when linked with 
 forceful feeling and bound to rigid task-work, 
 might lose the charm of casual epigram, easy 
 luxuriance, playful egotism, vagrant allusion, 
 which established " Eothen " as a classic. On 
 the other hand, he had been for twenty years 
 conversant with Eastern history, geography, 
 politics; was, more than most professional sol- 
 diers, an adept in military science ; had sate in 
 the centre of the campaign as its general's guest 
 and comrade ; was intrusted, above all, by Lady 
 Raglan with the entire collection of her hus- 
 band's papers : her wish, implied though not 
 expressed, that they should be utilized for the
 
 "THE INVASION OF THE CRIMEA" 59 
 
 vindication of the great field-marshal's fame, he 
 accepted as a sacred charge ; her confidence 
 not only governed his decision to become the 
 historian of the war, but imparted a personal 
 character to the narrative. 
 
 In order, therefore, rightly to appreciate " The 
 Invasion of the Crimea," we must look upon 
 it as a great prose epic ; its argument, machinery, 
 actors, episodes, subordinate to a predominant 
 ever present hero. In its fine preamble Lord 
 Raglan sits enthroned high above generals, 
 armies, spectators, conflicts ; on the quality of 
 his mind the fate of two great hosts and the 
 fame of two great nations hang. He checks 
 St. Arnaud's wild ambition ; overrules the 
 waverings of the Allies ; against his own judg- 
 ment, but in dutiful obedience to home in- 
 struction, carries out the descent upon the Old 
 Fort coast. The successful achievement of the 
 perilous flank march is ascribed to the undi- 
 vided command which, during forty-eight hours, 
 accident had conferred upon him. From his 
 presence in council French and English come 
 away convinced and strengthened ; his calm 
 in action imparts itself to anxious generals 
 and panic-stricken aides-de-camp. Through 
 Alma fight, from the high knoll to which happy
 
 60 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 audacity had carried him he rides the whirlwind 
 and directs the storm. In the terrible crisis 
 which sees the Russians breaking over the 
 crest of Inkerman, in the ill-fated attack on 
 the Great Redan where Lacy Yea is killed, his 
 apparent freedom from anxiety infects all around 
 him and achieves redemption from disaster. 1 
 We see him in his moments of vexation and 
 discomfiture ; dissembling pain and anger under 
 the stress of the French alliance, galled by 
 Cathcart's disobedience, by the loss of the 
 Light Brigade, by Lord Panmure's insulting, 
 querulous, unfounded blame. We read his last 
 despatch, framed with wonted grace and clear- 
 ness ; then — on the same day — we see the out- 
 worn frame break down, and follow mournfully 
 two days later the afflicting details of his death. 
 As the generals and admirals of the allied forces 
 stand round the dead hero's form, as the palled 
 bier, draped in the flag of England, is carried 
 from headquarters to the port, as the " Caradoc," 
 steaming away with her honoured freight, flies 
 
 1 Greville, vii. 223, quotes from a letter written after 
 Inkerman to the Prince Consort by Colonel Steele, saying 
 " that he had no idea how great a mind Raglan really had, 
 but that he now saw it, for in the midst of distresses and 
 difficulties of every kind in which the army was involved, 
 he was perfectly serene and undisturbed."
 
 "the invasion of the crimea" 6i 
 
 out her " Farewell " signal, the narrative 
 abruptly ends. The months of the siege which 
 still remained might be left to other hands or 
 lapse untold. Troy had still to be taken when 
 Hector died ; but with his funeral dirge the 
 Iliad closed, the blind bard's task was over : 
 
 " Such honours Ilion to her hero paid, 
 
 And peaceful slept the mighty Hector's shade." 
 
 If the framework of the narrative is epic, its 
 treatment is frequently dramatic. The " Usage 
 of Europe " in the opening pages is not so 
 much a record as a personification of unwritten 
 Law : the Great Eltchi tramps the stage with a 
 majesty sometimes bordering on fustian. Dra- 
 matic is the story of the sleeping Cabinet. 
 "It was evening — a summer evening" — one 
 thinks of a world-famous passage in the " De 
 Corona" — when the Duke of Newcastle carried 
 to Richmond Lodge the fateful despatch com- 
 mitting England to the war. " Before the 
 reading of the Paper had long continued, all 
 the members of the Cabinet except a small 
 minority were overcome with sleep"; the few 
 who remained awake were in a quiet, assenting 
 frame of mind, and the despatch "received from 
 the Cabinet the kind of approval which is
 
 62 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 awarded to an unobjectionable Sermon." Not 
 less dramatic is Nolan's death ; the unearthly 
 shriek of the slain corpse erect in saddle with 
 sword arm high in air, as the dead horseman 
 rode still seated through the 13th Light 
 Dragoons; the " Minden Yell" of the 20th 
 driving down upon the Iakoutsk battalion ; the 
 sustained and scathing satire on the Notre 
 Dame Te Deum for the Boulevard massacre. 
 A simple dialogue, a commonplace necessary 
 act, is staged sometimes for effect. " Then 
 Lord Stratford apprised the Sultan that he had 
 a private communication to make to him. The 
 pale Sultan listened." . . . "Whose was the 
 mind which had freshly come to bear upon this 
 part of the fight? Sir Colin Campbell was sit- 
 ting in his saddle, the veteran was watching 
 his time." . . . "The Emperor Nicholas was 
 alone in his accustomed writing-room. He 
 took no counsel ; he rang a bell. Presently an 
 officer of his staff stood before him. To him 
 he gave his order for the occupation of the 
 Principalities." This overpasses drama — it is 
 melodrama. 
 
 To the personal element which pervades the 
 volumes great part of their charm is due. The 
 writer never obtrudes himself, but leaves his
 
 n 
 
 THE INVASION OF THE CRIMEA" 6$ 
 
 presence to be discerned by the touches which 
 attest an eye-witness. Through his observant 
 nearness we watch the Chiefs demeanour and 
 hear his words ; see him " turn scarlet with 
 shame and anger " when the brutal Zouaves 
 carry outrage into the friendly Crimean village, 
 witness his personal succour of the wounded 
 Russian after Inkerman, hear his arch accept- 
 ance of the French courtesy, so careful always 
 to yield the post of danger to the English ; his 
 "Go quietly" to the excited aide-de-camp; 1 
 his good-humoured reception of the scared and 
 breathless messenger from D'Aurelle's brigade ; 
 the " five words " spoken to Airey command- 
 ing the long delayed advance across the Alma ; 
 the <; tranquil low voice " which gave the order 
 rescuing the staff from its unforeseen encounter 
 with the Russian rear. He records Codring- 
 ton's leap on his grey Arab into the breast- 
 work of the Great Redoubt ; Lacy Yea's pas- 
 
 1 " Go quietly " might have been his motto : even on 
 horseback he seemed never to be in a hurry. Airey used to 
 come in from their rides round the outposts shuddering 
 with cold, and complaining that the Chief would never move 
 his horse out of a walk. " I daresay," said Carlyle, " Lord 
 Raglan will rise quite quietly at the last trump, and remain 
 entirely composed during the whole day, and show the most 
 perfect civility to both parties."
 
 64 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 sionate energy in forcing his clustered regiment 
 to open out; Miller's stentorian " Rally ' : in 
 reforming the Scots Greys after the Balaclava 
 charge ; Clarke losing his helmet in the same 
 charge, and creating amongst the Russians, as 
 he plunged in bareheaded amongst their ranks, 
 the belief that he was sheltered by some 
 Satanic charm. He notes on the Alma the 
 singular pause of sound maintained by both 
 armies just before the cannonade began ; the 
 first death — of an artilleryman riding before his 
 gun — a new sight to nine-tenths of those who 
 witnessed it ; * the weird scream of exploding 
 shells as they rent the air around. He crossed 
 the Alma close behind Lord Raglan, canter- 
 ing after him to the summit of a conspicuous 
 hillock in the heart of the enemy's position, 
 whence the mere sight of plumed English 
 officers scared the Russian generals, and, fol- 
 lowed soon by guns and troops, governed the 
 issue of the fight. The general's manner was 
 
 1 The first death ! out of how many he nowhere reckons : 
 he shrinks from estimates of carnage, and we thank him for 
 it. But an accomplished naturalist tells me that the vulture, 
 a bird unknown in the Crimea before hostilities began, 
 swarmed there after the Alma fight, and remained till the 
 war was over, disappearing meanwhile from the whole North 
 African littoral.
 
 "the invasion of the Crimea" 65 
 
 " the manner of a man enlivened by the pro- 
 gress of a great undertaking without being 
 robbed of his leisure. He spoke to me, I 
 remember, about his horse. He seemed like 
 a man who had a clue of his own and knew his 
 way through the battle." When the last gun 
 was fired Kinglake followed the Chief back, 
 witnessed the wild burst of cheering accorded 
 to him by the whole British army, a manifesta- 
 tion, Lord Burghersh tells us, which greatly 
 distressed his modesty — and dined alone with 
 him in his tent on the evening of the eventful 
 day. 
 
 If Lord Raglan was the Hector of the 
 Crimean Iliad, its Agamemnon was Lord Strat- 
 ford : " king of men," as Stanley called him in 
 his funeral sermon at Westminster ; king of dis- 
 trustful home Cabinets, nominally his masters, of 
 scheming European embassies, of insulting 
 Russian opponents, of presumptuous French 
 generals, of false and fleeting Pashas (Lc 
 Sultan, cest Lord Stratford, said St. Arnaud), 
 of all men, whatever their degree, who entered 
 his ambassadorial presence. Ascendency was 
 native to the man ; while yet in his teens we find 
 Etonian and Cambridge friends writing to him 
 deferentially as to a critic and superior. At 
 
 F
 
 66 A. VV. KINGLAKE 
 
 four and twenty he became Minister to a Court 
 manageable only by high-handed authority and 
 menace. He owned, and for the most part con- 
 trolled, a violent temper ; it broke bounds 
 sometimes, to our great amusement as we read 
 to-day, to the occasional discomfiture of 
 attachis or of dependents, 1 to the abject terror 
 of Turkish Sublimities who had outworn his 
 patience. But he knew when to be angry ; 
 he could pulverize by fiery outbreaks the Reis 
 Effendi and his master, Abdu-1-Mejid; but as 
 Plenipotentiary to the United States he could 
 " quench the terror of his beak, the lightning of 
 his eye," disarming by his formal courtesy and 
 winning by his obvious sincerity the suspicious 
 and irritable John Quincy Adams. When 
 
 1 " D — n your eyes ! " he said once, in a moment of 
 irritation, to his attache, Mr. Hay. "D — n your Excel- 
 lency's eyes ! " was the answer, delivered with deep respect 
 but with sufficient emphasis. Dismissed on the spot, the 
 candid attache went in great anger to pack up, but was 
 followed after a time by Lady Canning, habitual peacemaker 
 in the household, who besought him if not to apologize at 
 least to bid his Chief good-bye. After much persuasion he 
 consented. " Hardly had he entered the room when Sir 
 Stratford had him by the hand. ' My dear Hay,' this will 
 never do ; what a devil of a temper you have ! ' The two 
 were firmer friends than ever after this " (Lane Poole's 
 Life of Lord Stratford, chapter xiii.).
 
 "the invasion of the Crimea" 67 
 
 Menschikoff once insulted him, seeing that a 
 quarrel at that moment would be fatal to his 
 purpose, he pretended to be deaf, and left the 
 Russian in the belief that his rude speech 
 had not been heard. Enthroned for the sixth 
 time in Constantinople, at the dangerous epoch 
 of 1853, he could point to an unequalled dip- 
 lomatic record in the past ; to the Treaty of 
 Bucharest, to reunion of the Helvetic Con- 
 federacy shattered by Napoleon's fall, to the 
 Convention which ratified Greek independence, 
 to the rescue from Austrian malignity of the 
 Hungarian refugees. 
 
 His conduct of the negotiations preceding 
 the Crimean War is justly called the corner- 
 stone of his career : at this moment of his 
 greatness Kinglake encounters and describes 
 him : through the brilliant chapters in his 
 opening volume, as more fully later on through 
 Mr. Lane Poole's admirable biography, the 
 Great Eltchi is known to English readers. He 
 moves across the stage with a majesty some- 
 times bordering on what Iago calls bombast cir- 
 cumstance ; drums and trumpets herald his every 
 entrance ; now pacing the shady gardens of the 
 Bosphorus, now foiling, "in his grand quiet way," 
 the Czar's ferocious Christianity, or torturing
 
 68 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 his baffled ambassador by scornful concession 
 of the points which he formally demanded but 
 did not really want ; or crushing with " thin, 
 tight, merciless lips and grand overhanging 
 Canning brow" the presumptuous French com- 
 mander who had dared to enter his presence 
 with a plot for undermining England's influence 
 in the partnership of the campaign. Was he, 
 we ask as we end the fascinating description, 
 was he, what Bright and the Peace Party pro- 
 claimed him to be, the cause of the Crimean 
 War ? The Czar's personal dislike to him — a 
 caprice which has never been explained 1 — ex- 
 asperated no doubt to the mind of Nicholas 
 the repulse of Menschikoff's demands ; but 
 that the precipitation of the prince and his 
 master had put the Russian Court absolutely 
 in the wrong is universally admitted. It has 
 been urged against him that his recommenda- 
 tion of the famous Vienna Note to the Porte 
 was official merely, and allowed the watchful 
 Turks to assume his personal approbation of 
 their refusal. It may be so ; his biographer 
 
 1 The story of an old quarrel between Sir Stratford 
 Canning and the then Grand Duke Nicholas at St. Peters- 
 burg in 1825 is disproved by Canning's own statement. The 
 two met once only in their lives, at a purely formal recep- 
 tion at Paris in 1814.
 
 "THE INVASION OF THE CRIMEA " 69 
 
 does not admit so much : but it is obvious 
 that the Turks were out of hand, and that no 
 pressure from Lord Stratford could have per- 
 suaded them to accept the Note. Further, 
 the " Russian Analysis of the Note," escap- 
 ing shortly afterwards from the bag of diplo- 
 matic secrecy, revealed to our Cabinet the 
 necessity of those amendments to the Note on 
 which the Porte had insisted. And lastly, the 
 passage of the Dardanelles by our fleet, which 
 more than any overt act made war inevitable, 
 was ordered by the Government at home 
 against Lord Stratford's counsel. Between 
 panic-stricken statesmen and vacillating ambas- 
 sadors, Lord Clarendon on one side, M. de la 
 Cour on the other, the Eltchi stands like 
 Tennyson's promontory of rock, 
 
 " Tempest-buffeted, citadel-crowned." 
 
 Napoleon at St. Helena attributed much of 
 his success in the field to the fact that he was 
 not hampered by governments at home. Every 
 modern commander, down certainly to the 
 present moment, must have envied him. King- 
 lake's mordant pen depicts with felicity and 
 compression the men of Downing Street, who 
 without military experience or definite political
 
 JO A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 aim, thwarted, criticised, over-ruled, tormented, 
 their much-enduring General. We have Aber- 
 deen, deficient in mental clearness and propell- 
 ing force, by his horror of war bringing war to 
 pass ; Gladstone, of too subtle intellect and too 
 lively conscience, " a good man in the worst 
 sense of the term " ; Palmerston, above both in 
 keenness of instinct and in strength of will, 
 meaning war from the first, and biding his time 
 to insure it ; Newcastle, sanguine to the verge 
 of rashness, loyally adherent to Lord Raglan 
 while governed by his own judgment, dis- 
 trustful under stress of popular clamour ; Pan- 
 mure, ungenerous, rough-tongued, violent, 
 churlish, yet not malevolent — "a rhinoceros 
 rather than a tiger " — hurried by subservience 
 to the newspaper Press into injustice which he 
 afterwards recognized, yet did but sullenly 
 repair. We see finally that dominant Press it- 
 self, personified in the all-powerful Delane, a 
 potentate with convictions at once flexible and 
 vehement ; forceful without spite and merciless 
 without malignity ; writing no articles, but 
 evoking, shaping, revising all. The French 
 commanders were not hampered by the muzzled 
 Paris Press, which had long since ceased to 
 utter any but dictated sentiments ; they suffered
 
 "THE INVASION OF THE CRIMEA 7 1 
 
 even more disastrously from the imperious in- 
 terference of the Tuileries. Canrobert's in- 
 action, mutability, sudden alarms, flagrant 
 breaches of faith, were inexplicable until long 
 afterwards, when the fall of the Empire dis- 
 closed the secret instructions — disloyal to his 
 allies and ruinous to the campaign — by which 
 Louis Napoleon shackled his unhappy General. 
 In Canrobert's successor, Pelissier, he met his 
 match. For the first time a strong man headed 
 the French army. Short of stature, bull-necked 
 and massive in build, with grey hair, long dark 
 moustache, keen fiery eyes, his coarse rough 
 speech masking tested brain power and high 
 intellectual culture, he brought new life to the 
 benumbed French army, new hope to Lord 
 Raglan. The duel between the resolute 
 general and the enraged Emperor is narrated 
 with a touch of comedy. All that Lord Raglan 
 desired, all that the Emperor forbade, Pelissier 
 was stubbornly determined to accomplish ; the 
 siege should be pressed at once, the city taken 
 at any cost, the expedition to Kertch resumed. 
 Once only, under torment of the Emperor's 
 reproaches and the Minister at War's remon- 
 strances, his resolution and his nerve gave way ; 
 eight days of failing judgment issued in the
 
 7 2 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 Karabelnaya defeat, the severest repulse which 
 the two armies had sustained ; but the paralysis 
 passed away, he showed himself once more 
 eager to act in concert with the English general ; 
 — when the long-borne strain of disappointment 
 and anxiety sapped at last Lord Raglan's vital 
 forces, and the hard fierce Frenchman stood 
 for upwards of an hour beside his dead col- 
 league's bedside, " crying like a child." 
 
 The lieutenants of Lord Raglan in the Crimea 
 have long since passed away, but in artistic 
 epical presentment they retain their place 
 around him. Airey, his right hand from the 
 first disembarkation at Kalamita Bay, strong- 
 willed, decisive, ardent, thrusting away suspense 
 and doubt, untying every knot, is vindicated by 
 his Chief against the Duke of Newcastle's wordy 
 inculpation in the severest despatch perhaps 
 ever penned to his official superior by a soldier 
 in the field. Colin Campbell, with glowing 
 face, grey kindling eye, light, stubborn, crisping 
 hair, leads his Highland brigade up the hill 
 against the Vladimir columns, till "with the 
 sorrowful wail which bursts from the brave 
 Russian infantry when they have to suffer loss," 
 eight battalions of the enemy fall back in retreat. 
 Lord Lucan, tall, lithe, slender, his face glitter-
 
 "the invasion of the Crimea J$ 
 
 ing and panther-like in moments of strenuous 
 action, wins our hearts as he won Kinglake's, 
 in spite of the mis-aimed cleverness and pre- 
 sumptuous self-confidence which always criti- 
 cised and sometimes disobeyed the orders of his 
 Chief. General Pennefather, " the grand old 
 boy," his exulting radiant face flashing every- 
 where through the smoke, his resonant innocu- 
 ous oaths roaring cheerily down the line, sustains 
 all day the handful of our troops against the 
 tenfold masses of the enemy. Generous and 
 eloquent are the notices of Korniloff and Tod- 
 leben, the great sailor and the great engineer, 
 the soul and the brain of the Sebastopol defence. 
 The first fell in the siege, the second lived to 
 write its history, to become a valued friend of 
 Kinglake, to explore and interpret in his com- 
 pany long afterwards the scenes of struggle ; 
 his book and his personal guidance gave to the 
 historian what would otherwise have been un- 
 attainable, a clear knowledge of the conflict as 
 viewed from within the town. 
 
 The pitched battlefields of the campaign were 
 three, Alma, Balaclava, Inkerman. The Alma 
 chapter is the most graphic, for there the fight 
 was concentrated, offering to a spectator by 
 Lord Raglan's side a coup d'ceil of the entire
 
 74 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 action. The French were by bad generalship 
 virtually wiped out ; for Bosquet crossed the 
 river too far to the right, Canrobert was afraid 
 to move without artillery, Prince Napoleon and 
 St. Arnaud's reserves were jammed together in 
 the bottom of the valley. We see, as though 
 on the spot, the advance, irregular and unsup- 
 ported, of Codrington's brigade, their dash into 
 the Great Redoubt and subsequent disorderly 
 retreat ; the enemy checked by the two guns 
 from Lord Raglan's knoll and by the steadiness 
 of the Royal Fusiliers ; the repulse of the Scots 
 Fusiliers and the peril which hung over the 
 event ; then the superb advance of Guards and 
 Highlanders up the hill, thin red line against 
 massive columns, which determined finally the 
 action. 
 
 The interest of the Balaclava fight centres 
 in the two historic cavalry charges. Here 
 again, from his position on the hill above, 
 Kinglake witnessed both ; the first, clear in 
 smokeless air, the second lost in the volleying 
 clouds which filled the valley of death. He 
 saw the enormous mass of Russian cavalry, 
 3,500 sabres, flooding like an avalanche down 
 the hill with a momentum which Scarlett's tiny 
 squadron could not for a moment have resisted ;
 
 " THE INVASION OF THE CRIMEA ' ! 75 
 
 their unexplained halt, the three hundred seizing 
 the opportunity to strike, digging individually 
 into the Russian ranks, the scarlet streaks 
 visibly cleaving the dense grey columns. In- 
 wedged and surrounded, in their passionate 
 blood frenzy, with ceaseless play of whirling 
 sword, with impetus of human and equestrian 
 weight and strength, the red atoms hewed their 
 way to the Russian rear, turned, worked back, 
 emerged, reformed ; while the 4th and 5th 
 Dragoons, the Royals, the ist Inniskillings, 
 dashed upon the amazed column right, left, 
 front, till the close-locked mass headed slowly 
 up the hill, ranks loosened, horsemen turned and 
 galloped off, a beaten straggling herd. Eight 
 minutes elapsed from the time when Scarlett 
 gave the word to charge, until the moment when 
 the Russians broke : we turn from the fifty 
 describing pages, breathless as though we had 
 ridden in the melley ; if the episode has no 
 historical parallel, the narrative is no less unique. 
 Our greatest contemporary poet tried to cele- 
 brate it ; his lines are tame and unexciting 
 beside Kinglake's passionate pulsing rhapsody. 
 Its effect upon the Russian mind was lasting; 
 out of all their vast array hardly a single 
 squadron was ever after able to keep its ground
 
 76 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 against the approach of English cavalry ; while 
 but for Cathcart's obstinacy and Lucan's temper 
 it would have issued in the immediate recapture 
 of the Causeway Heights. 
 
 The Charge of the Light Brigade, on the 
 other hand, while it stirred the imagination of 
 the poet, shocked the military conscience of the 
 historian. He saw in it with agony, as Lord 
 Raglan saw, as the French spectators saw, no act 
 of heroic sacrifice, but a needless, fruitless mas- 
 sacre. " You have lost the Light Brigade," was 
 his commander's salutation to Lord Lucan. 
 " Cest magnifiqiie, metis ce nest pas lagtierre" was 
 the oft-quoted reproof of Bosquet. The " some- 
 one's blunder," the sullen perversity in miscon- 
 ception which destroyed the flower of our cavalry, 
 has faded from men's memories; the splendour of 
 the deed remains. It is well to recover salvage 
 from the irrevocable, to voice and to prolong 
 the deep human interest attaching to death 
 encountered at the call of duty; that is the 
 poet's task, and brilliantly it has been dis- 
 charged. Its other side, the paean of sorrow for 
 a self-destructive exploit, the dirge on lives 
 wantonly thrown away, the deep blame attach- 
 ing to the untractableness which sent them to 
 their doom, was the task of the historian, and
 
 " THE INVASION OF THE CRIMEA" 7J 
 
 that too has been faithfully and lastingly accom- 
 plished. 
 
 Inkerman was the most complicated of the 
 battles ; the chapters which record it are cor- 
 respondingly taxing to the reader. More than 
 once or twice they must be scanned, with close 
 study of their lucid maps, before the intricate 
 sequences are fairly and distinctively grasped ; 
 the sixth book of Thucydides, a standing 
 terror to young Greek students, is light and 
 easy reading compared with the bulky sixth 
 volume of Kinglake. The hero of the day 
 was Pennefather ; he maintained on Mount 
 Inkerman a combat of pickets reinforced from 
 time to time, while around him through nine 
 hours successive attacks of thousands were met 
 by hundreds. The disparity of numbers was 
 appalling. At daybreak 40,000 Russian troops 
 advanced against 3,000 English and were re- 
 pulsed. Three hours later 19,000 fresh troops 
 came on, passed through a gap in our lines, 
 which Cathcart's disobedience, atoned for pre- 
 sently by his death, had left unoccupied, and 
 seized the heights behind us ; they too were 
 dispossessed, but our numbers were dwindling 
 and our strength diminishing. The Home 
 Ridge, key of our position, was next invaded by
 
 j8 A. W. KTNGLAKE 
 
 6,ooo Russians ; the 7th St. Leger, linked 
 with a few Zouaves and with 200 men of our 
 77th Regiment, French and English for once 
 joyously intermingled, hurled them back. It 
 was the crisis of the fight ; Canrobert's inter- 
 position would have determined it ; but he 
 sullenly refused to move. Finally, led by two 
 or three daring young officers, 300 of our 
 wearied troops charged the Russian battery 
 which had tormented us all day ; their artillery- 
 men, already flinching under the galling fire of 
 two 18-pounders, brought up by Lord Raglan's 
 foresight early in the morning, hastily withdrew 
 their guns, and the battle was won. It was a 
 day of Homeric rushes ; Burnaby, with only 
 twenty men to support him, rescuing the 
 Grenadier Guards' colours ; the onset of the 20th 
 with their " Minden Yell"; Colonel Daubeny 
 with two dozen followers cleaving the Russian 
 trunk column at the barrier ; Waddy's dash at 
 the retreating artillery train, foiled only by the 
 presence and the readiness of Todleben. One 
 marvels in reading how the English held their 
 own ; their victory against so tremendous odds 
 is ascribed by the historian to three condi- 
 tions ; the hampering of the enemy by his 
 crowded masses ; the slaughter amongst his
 
 " THE INVASION OF THE CRIMEA " J9 
 
 officers early in the fight, which deprived their 
 men of leadership ; above all, the dense mist 
 which obscured from him the fewness of his 
 opponents. If Canrobert with his fresh troops 
 had followed in pursuit, the Russian's retreat 
 must have been turned into a rout and his 
 artillery captured ; if on the following day he 
 had assaulted the Flagstaff Bastion, Sebas- 
 topol, Todleben owned, must have fallen. He 
 would do neither ; his hesitancy and apparent 
 feebleness have already been explained ; but to 
 it, and to the sinister influence which held his 
 hand, were due the subsequent miseries of the 
 Crimean winter. 
 
 But the epic muse exacted from Kinglake, as 
 from Virgil long before, the portrayal not only 
 of generals and of battles, but of two great 
 monarchs, each in his own day conspicuously 
 and absolutely prominent — the Czar Nicholas 
 and the Emperor Napoleon : 
 
 " dicam horrida bella, 
 Dicam acies, actosque animis in funera reges." 
 
 His handling of them is characteristic. Few 
 men living then could have approached either 
 without a certain awe, their " genius " rebuked, 
 like Mark Antony's, in the presence of Caesars so
 
 80 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 imposing and so mighty; Kinglake's attitude 
 towards both is the attitude of cold analysis. 
 
 In the opening of the fifties the Czar Nicholas 
 was the most powerful man then living in the 
 world. He ruled over sixty million subjects 
 whose loyalty bordered on worship : he had in 
 arms a million soldiers, brave and highly 
 trained. In the troubles of 1848 he had stood 
 scornful and secure amid the overthrow of sur- 
 rounding thrones ; and the entire impact of his 
 vast and well-organized Empire was subject to 
 his single will ; whatever he chose to do he 
 did. Of stern and unrelenting nature, of active 
 and widely ranging capacity for business, of 
 gigantic stature and commanding presence, he 
 inspired almost universal terror ; and yet his 
 friendliness had when he pleased a glow and 
 frankness irresistible in its charm. Readers of 
 Queen Victoria's early life will recall the alarm 
 she felt at his sudden proposal to visit Windsor 
 in 1844, the fascination which his presence 
 exercised on her when he became her guest. 
 He professed to embody his standard of con- 
 duct in the English word " gentleman " ; his 
 ideal of human grandeur was the character of 
 the Duke of Wellington. It was an evil 
 destiny that betrayed this high-minded man
 
 "THE INVASION OF THE CRIMEA" 8 1 
 
 into crooked ways ; that made England sacri- 
 fice the stateliest among her ancient friends to 
 an ignoble and crime-stained adventurer ; that 
 poured out blood and treasure for no public 
 advantage and with no permanent result ; that 
 first humiliated, then slew with broken heart 
 the man who had been so great, and who is 
 still regarded by surviving Russians who knew 
 his inner life and had seen him in his gentle 
 mood with passionate reverence and affection. 
 Kinglake's description of " Prince Louis 
 Bonaparte," of his character, his accomplices, 
 his policy, his crimes, is perhaps unequalled in 
 historical literature ; I know not where else to 
 look for a vivisection so scientific and so merci- 
 less of a great potentate in the height of his 
 power. With scrutiny polite, impartial, guarded, 
 he lays bare the springs of a conscienceless 
 nature and the secrets of a crime-driven career ; 
 while for the combination of precise sim- 
 plicity with exhaustive synopsis, the masquer- 
 ading of moral indignation in the guise of 
 mocking laughter, the loathing of a gentleman 
 for a scoundrel set to the measure not of in- 
 dignation but of contempt, we must go back 
 to the refined insolence, the uj3p*s TwronStvpiw, 
 of Voltaire. He had well known Prince Napo- 
 
 Q
 
 82 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 leon in his London days, had been attracted 
 by him as a curiosity — " a balloon man who 
 had twice fallen from the skies and yet was 
 still alive " — had divined the mental power 
 veiled habitually by his blank, opaque, wooden 
 looks, had listened to his ambitious talk and 
 gathered up the utterances of his thoughtful, 
 long-pondering mind, had quarrelled with him 
 finally and lastingly over rivalry in the good 
 graces of a woman. 1 He saw in him a fourfold 
 student ; of the art of war, of the mind of the 
 first Napoleon, of the French people's char- 
 acter, of the science by which law may lend itself 
 to stratagem and become a weapon of deceit. 
 
 The intellect of this strange being was sub- 
 ject to an uncertainty of judgment, issuing 
 in ambiguity of enterprise, and giving an im- 
 
 1 La Femme was a "Miss" or "Mrs." Howard. She 
 followed Louis Napoleon to France in 1848, and lived 
 openly with him as his mistress. In the once famous 
 " Letters of an Englishman " we are told how shortly after 
 the December massacre the elite of English visitors in Paris 
 were not ashamed to dine at her house in the President's 
 company: and in i860, Mrs. Simpson, in France with her 
 father, Nassau Senior, found her, decorated with the title of 
 Madame de Beauregard, inhabiting La Celle, near Ver- 
 sailles, once the abode of Madame de Pompadour, " with 
 the national flag flying over it, to the great scandal of the 
 neighbourhood."
 
 "THE INVASION OF THE CRIMEA" $$ 
 
 pression of well-kept secrecy, due often to the 
 fact that divided by mental conflict he had no 
 secret to tell. He understood truth, but under 
 the pressure of strong motive would invariably 
 deceive. He sometimes, out of curiosity, would 
 listen to the voice of conscience, and could 
 imitate neatly on occasion the scrupulous lan- 
 guage of a man of honour ; but the considera- 
 tion that one of two courses was honest, and 
 the other not, never entered into his motives 
 for action. He was bold in forming plots, and 
 skilful in conducting them ; but in the hour ol 
 trial and under the confront of physical danger 
 he was paralyzed by constitutional timidity. 
 His great aim in life was to be conspicuous — 
 digito monstrarier — coupled with a theatric 
 mania which made scenic effects and surprises 
 essential to the eminence he craved. 
 
 Handling this key to his character, Kinglake 
 pursues him into his December treason, contrasts 
 the consummate cleverness of his schemes with 
 the faltering cowardice which shrank, like Mac- 
 beth's ambition, from " the illness should attend 
 them," and which, but for the stronger nerve of 
 those behind him, would have caused his col- 
 lapse, at Paris as at Strasburg and Boulogne, in 
 contact with the shock of action. It is difficult
 
 84 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 now to realize the commotion caused by this four- 
 teenth chapter of Kinglake's book. The Em- 
 peror was at the summit of his power, fresh from 
 Austrian conquest, viewed with alarm by Eng- 
 land, whose rulers feared his strength and were 
 distrustful of his friendship. Our Crown, our 
 government, our society, had condoned his 
 usurpation ; he had kissed the Queen's cheek, 
 bent her ministers to his will, ridden through 
 her capital a triumphant and applauded guest. 
 And now men read not only a cynical dissection 
 of his character and disclosure of his early 
 foibles, but the hideous details of his deceit 
 and treachery, the phases of cold-blooded 
 massacre and lawless deportation by which he 
 emptied France of all who hesitated to enrol 
 themselves as his accomplices or his tools. 
 Forty years have passed since the terrible in- 
 dictment was put forth ; down to its minutest 
 allegation it has been proved literally true ; the 
 arch criminal has fallen from his estate to die 
 in disgrace, disease, exile. When we talk to- 
 day with cultivated Frenchmen of that half- 
 forgotten epoch, and of the book which bared 
 its horrors, we are met by their response of 
 ardent gratitude to the man who joined to 
 passionate hatred of iniquity surpassing capacity
 
 "the invasion of the Crimea" 85 
 
 for denouncing it ; their avowal that with all its 
 frequent exposure of their military short-comings 
 and depreciation of their national character, no 
 English chronicle of the century stands higher 
 in their esteem than the history of the war in 
 the Crimea. 
 
 The close of the book is grim and tragic in 
 the main, the stir of gallant fights exchanged 
 for the dreary course of siege, intrenchment, 
 mine and countermine. We have the awful 
 winter on the heights, the November hurricane, 
 the foiled bombardments, the cruel blunder of 
 the Karabelnaya assault, the bitter natural dis- 
 content at home, the weak subservience of our 
 government to misdirected clamour, the touch- 
 ing help-fraught advent of the Lady Nurses : 
 then, just as better prospects dawn, the Chief's 
 collapse and death. From the morrow of 
 Inkerman to the end, through no fault of his, 
 the historian's chariot wheels drag. More and 
 more one sees how from the nature of the task, 
 except for the flush of contemporary interest 
 then, except by military students now, it is not 
 a work to be popularly read ; the exhausted 
 interest of its subject swamps the genius of its 
 narrator. Scattered through its more serious 
 matter are gems with the old " Eothen" sparkle,
 
 86 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 of periphrasis, aphorism, felicitous phrase and 
 pregnant epithet. Such is the fine analogy be- 
 tween the worship of holy shrines and the lover's 
 homage to the spot which his mistress's feet have 
 trod ; such France's tolerance of the Elysee 
 brethren compared to the Arab laying his 
 verminous burnous upon an ant-hill ; the apt 
 quotation from the Psalms to illustrate the on- 
 coming of the Guards ; the demeanour of horses 
 in action; the course of a flying cannon-ball; 
 the two ponderous troopers at the Horse 
 Guards ; Tom Tower and his Croats landing 
 stores for our soldiers from the " Erminia." 
 Or again, we have the light clear touches of a 
 single line ; " the decisiveness and consistency 
 of despotism " — " the fractional and volatile 
 interests in trading adventure which go by the 
 name of Shares" — " the unlabelled, undocketed 
 state of mind which shall enable a man to en- 
 counter the Unknown " — " the qualifying words 
 which correct the imprudences and derange the 
 grammatical structure of a Queen's Speech": 
 but these are islets in the sea of narrative, not, 
 as in " Eothen," woof-threads which cross the 
 warp. 
 
 To compare an idyll with an epic, it may be 
 said, is like comparing a cameo with a Grecian
 
 "THE INVASION OF THE CRIMEA " 87 
 
 temple : be it so ; but the temple falls in ruins, 
 the cameo is preserved in cabinets ; and it is 
 possible that a century hence the Crimean his- 
 tory will be forgotten, while " Eothen " is read 
 and enjoyed. The best judges at the time pro- 
 nounced that as a lasting monument of literary 
 force the work was over refined : " Kinglake," 
 said Sir George Cornewall Lewis, "tries to 
 write better than he can write " ; quoting, per- 
 haps unconsciously, the epigram of a French 
 art critic a hundred years before — // cherche 
 toujour % s a faire mieux qttil ne fait. 1 He 
 lavished on it far more pains than on " Eothen " : 
 the proof sheets were a black sea of erasures, 
 intercalations, blots ; the original chaotic manu- 
 script pages had to be disentangled by a calli- 
 graphic Taunton bookseller before they could 
 be sent to press. This fastidiousness in part 
 gained its purpose ; won temporary success ; 
 gave to his style the glitter, rapidity, point, 
 effectiveness, of a pungent editorial ; went 
 home, stormed, convinced, vindicated, damaged, 
 triumphed : but it missed by excessive polish 
 the reposeful, unlaboured, classic grace essen- 
 tial to the highest art. Over-scrupulous mani- 
 
 1 Bachaumont's criticism of Latour. Lady Dilke's 
 "French Painters," p. 165.
 
 88 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 pulation of words is liable to the ''defect of its 
 qualities " ; as with unskilful goldsmiths of 
 whom old Latin writers tell us, the file goes 
 too deep, trimming away more of the first fine 
 minting than we can afford to lose. Ruskin 
 has explained to us how the decadence of 
 Gothic architecture commenced through care 
 bestowed on window tracery for itself instead 
 of as an avenue or vehicle for the admission of 
 light. Read "words" for tracery, "thought' 
 for light, and we see how inspiration avenges 
 itself so soon as diction is made paramount ; 
 artifice, which demands and misses watchful 
 self-concealment, passes into mannerism ; we 
 have lost the incalculable charm of spontaneity. 
 Comparison of " Eothen " with the " Crimea " 
 will I think exemplify this truth. The first, to 
 use Matthew Arnold's imagery, is Attic, the 
 last has declined to the Corinthian ; it remains 
 a great, an amazingly great production ; great 
 in its pictorial force, its omnipresent survey, 
 verbal eloquence, firm grasp, marshalled de- 
 lineation of multitudinous and entangled matter; 
 but it is not unique amongst martial records as 
 " Eothen " is unique amongst books of travel : 
 it is through " Eothen " that its author has 
 soared into a classic, and bids fair to hold his
 
 " THE INVASION OF THE CRIMEA 89 
 
 place. And, apart from the merit of style, 
 great campaigns lose interest in a third, if not 
 in a second generation ; their historical conse- 
 quence effaced through lapse of years ; their 
 policy seen to have been nugatory or mis- 
 chievous ; their chronicles, swallowed greedily 
 at the birth like Saturn's progeny, returning to 
 vex their parent ; relegated finally to an honour- 
 able exile in the library upper shelves, where 
 they hold a place eyed curiously, not invaded : 
 
 " devoured 
 As fast as they are made, forgot as soon 
 As done. . . . To have done, is to hang 
 Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail, 
 In monumental mockery."
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 MADAME NOVIKOFF 
 
 The Cabinet Edition of "The Invasion of the 
 Crimea" appeared in 1877, shortly after the 
 Servian struggle for independence, which 
 aroused in England universal interest and 
 sympathy. Kinglake had heard from the lips 
 of a valued lady friend the tragic death-tale of 
 her brother Nicholas Kireeff, who fell fighting 
 as a volunteer on the side of the gallant Servian 
 against the Turk : and, much moved by the 
 recital, offered to honour the memory of the 
 dead hero in the Preface to his forthcoming 
 edition. He kept his word ; made sympathetic 
 reference to M. Kireeff in the opening of his 
 Preface ; but passed in pursuance of his original 
 design to a hostile impeachment of Russia, its 
 people, its church, its ruler. This was an error 
 of judgment and of feeling ; and the lady, read- 
 ing the manuscript, indignantly desired him to 
 burn the whole rather than commit the outrage
 
 MADAME NOVIKOFF 91 
 
 of associating her brother's name with an attack 
 on causes and personages dear to him as to 
 herself. Kinglake listened in silence, then ten- 
 dered to her a crayon rouge, begging her to efface 
 all that pained her. She did so ; and, dimin- 
 ished by three-fourths of its matter, the Preface 
 appears in Vol. I. of the Cabinet Edition. The 
 erasure was no slight sacrifice to an author of 
 Kinglake's literary sensitiveness, mutilating as 
 it did the integrity of a carefully schemed com- 
 position, and leaving visible the scar. He sets 
 forth the strongly sentimental and romantic 
 side of Russian temperament. Love of the 
 Holy Shrines begat the war of 1853, racial 
 ardour the war of 1876. The first was directed 
 by a single will, the second by national enthu- 
 siasm ; yet the mind of Nicholas was no less 
 tossed by a breathless strife of opposing desires 
 and moods than was Russia at large by the 
 struggle between Panslavism and statesman- 
 ship. Kinglake paints vividly the imposing 
 figure of the young Kireeff, his stature, beauty, 
 bravery, the white robe he wore incarnadined 
 by death-wounds, his body captured by the 
 hateful foes. He goes on to tell how myth 
 rose like an exhalation round his memory: how 
 legends of "a giant piling up hecatombs by a
 
 92 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 mighty slaughter " reverberated through man- 
 sion and cottage, town and village, cathedral 
 and church ; until thousands of volunteers 
 rushed to arms that they might go where 
 young Kireeff had gone. Alexander's hand 
 was forced, and the war began, which but for 
 England's intervention would have cleared 
 Europe of the Turk. We have the text, but 
 not the sermon ; the Preface ends abruptly 
 with an almost clumsy peroration. 
 
 The lady who inspired both the eulogy and 
 the curtailment was Madame Novikoff, more 
 widely known perhaps as O. K., with whom 
 Kinglake maintained during the last twenty 
 years of life an intimate and mutual friendship. 
 Madame Olga Novikoff, nie Kireeff, is a 
 Russian lady of aristocratic rank both by 
 parentage and marriage. In a lengthened 
 sojourn at Vienna with her brother-in-law, the 
 Russian ambassador, she learned the current 
 business of diplomacy. An eager religious 
 propagandist, she formed alliance with the 
 " Old Catholics " on the Continent, and with 
 many among the High Church English clergy ; 
 becoming, together with her brother Alexander, 
 a member of the Rfamion Nationale, a society 
 for the union of Christendom. Her interest in
 
 MADAME NOVIKOFF. 
 
 "O. K." 
 
 p. 92.
 
 MADAME NOVIKOFF 93 
 
 education has led her to devote extensive help 
 to school and church building and endowment 
 on her son's estate. God-daughter to the Czar 
 Nicholas, she is a devoted Imperialist, nor less 
 in sympathy, as were all her family, with 
 Russian patriotism : after the death of her 
 brother in Servia on July T 6 ¥ , 1876, she be- 
 came a still more ardent Slavophile. The 
 three articles of her creed are, she says, those 
 of her country, Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Na- 
 tionalism. Her political aspirations have been 
 guided, and guided right, by her tact and good- 
 ness of heart. Her life's aim has been to 
 bring about a cordial understanding between 
 Enoland and her native land ; there is little 
 doubt that her influence with leading Liberal 
 politicians, and her vigorous allocutions in the 
 Press, had much to do with the enthusiasm 
 manifested by England for the liberation of 
 the Danubian States. Readers of the Princess 
 Lieven's letters to Earl Grey will recall the 
 part played by that able ambassadress in keep- 
 ing this country neutral through the crisis of 
 1828-9; to her Madame Novikoff has been 
 likened, and probably with truth, by the 
 Turkish Press both English and Continental. 
 She was accused in 1876 of playing on the
 
 94 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 religious side of Mr. Gladstone's character to 
 secure his interest in the Danubians as mem- 
 bers of the Greek Church, while with un- 
 ecclesiastical people she was said to be equally 
 skilful on the political side, converting at the 
 same time Anglophobe Russia by her letters 
 in the " Moscow Gazette." Mr. Gladstone's 
 leanings to Montenegro were attributed angrily 
 in the English "Standard" to Madame Novi- 
 koff : " A serious statesman should know better 
 than to catch contagion from the petulant en- 
 thusiasm of a Russian Apostle." The con- 
 tagion was in any case caught, and to some 
 purpose ; letter after letter had been sent by 
 the lady to the great statesman, then in tempo- 
 rary retirement, without reply, until the last 
 of these, " a bitter cry of a sister for a sacrificed 
 brother," brought a feeling answer from Mrs. 
 Gladstone, saying that her husband was deeply 
 moved by the appeal, and was writing on the 
 subject. In a few days appeared his famous 
 pamphlet, " Bulgarian Horrors and the Ques- 
 tion of the East." 
 
 Carlyle advised that Madame Novikoff's 
 scattered papers should be worked into a 
 volume ; they appeared under the title " Is 
 Russia Wrong ? " with a preface by Froude,
 
 MADAME NOVIKOFF 95 
 
 the moderate and ultra-prudent tone of which 
 infuriated Hayward and Kinglake, as not 
 being sufficiently appreciative. Hayward de- 
 clared some woman had biassed him ; Kinglake 
 was of opinion that by studying the Mat of 
 Oueen Elizabeth Froude had " gone and 
 turned himself into an old maid." 
 
 Froude's Preface to her next work, " Russia 
 and England, a Protest and an Appeal," by O. K., 
 1880, was worded in a very different tone and 
 satisfied all her friends. The book was also re- 
 viewed with highest praise by Gladstone in " The 
 Nineteenth Century." Learning that an assault 
 upon it was contemplated in " The Quarterly," 
 Kinglake offered to supply the editor, Dr. Smith, 
 with materials which might be so used as to 
 neutralize a personal attack upon O. K. Smith 
 entreated him to compose the whole article 
 himself. " I could promise you," he writes, "that 
 the authorship should be kept a profound 
 secret;" but this Kinglake seems to have 
 thought undesirable. The article appeared in 
 April, 18S0, under the title of " The Slavonic 
 Menace to Europe." It opens with a panegyric 
 on the authoress : " She has mastered our 
 language with conspicuous success ; she ex- 
 postulates as easily as she reproaches, and she
 
 o6 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 exhibits as much facility in barbing shafts of 
 satire as in framing specious excuses for daring 
 acts of diplomacy." It insists on the high 
 esteem felt for her by both the Russian and 
 Austrian governments, telling with much 
 humour an anecdote of Count Beust, the Prime 
 Minister of Austria during her residence in 
 Vienna. The Count, after meeting her at a 
 dinner party at the Turkish Embassy, com- 
 posed a set of verses in her honour, and gave 
 them to her, but she forgot to mention them to 
 her brother-in-law. The Prime Minister, en- 
 countering the latter, asked his opinion of the 
 verses ; and the ambassador was greatly amazed 
 at knowing nothing of the matter. 1 From 
 amenities towards the authoress, the article 
 passes abruptly to hostile criticism of the 
 book ; declares it to be proscribed in Russia 
 as mischievous, and to have precipitated a 
 general war by keeping up English interest in 
 
 1 Here is one of the stanzas : 
 
 " L'Autriche — dit-on — et la Russie 
 Se brouillent pour la Turquie. 
 Des aujourd'hui il n'en est plus question. 
 En invitant une femme charmante, 
 Le Turc — et je Fen complimente — 
 Est devenu pour nous un trait d'union."
 
 MADAME NOVIKOFF 97 
 
 Servian rebellion. It sneers in doubtful taste 
 at the lady's learning : 
 
 " sit non doctissima conjux, 
 Sit nox cum somno, sit sine lite dies ; " 
 
 denounces the Slavs as incapable of being 
 welded into a nation, urging that their inde- 
 pendence must destroy Austria- Hungary, a 
 consummation desired by Madame Novikoff, 
 with her feline contempt for " poor dear 
 Austria," but which all must unite to prevent 
 if they would avert a European war. 
 
 How could one clear harp, men asked them- 
 selves as they read, have produced so diverse 
 tones ? The riddle is solved when we learn that 
 the first part only was from Kinglake's pen : 
 having vindicated his friend's ability and good 
 faith, her right to speak and to be heard atten- 
 tively, he left the survey of her views, with which 
 he probably disagreed, to the originally assigned 
 reviewer. The article, Madame Novikoff tells 
 us in the " Nouvelle Revue," was received avec 
 7cnc stupefaction unanimc. It formed the general 
 talk for many days, was attributed to Lord 
 Salisbury, was supposed to have been inspired 
 by Prince Gortschakoff. The name standing 
 against it in Messrs. Murray's books, as they 
 
 H
 
 98 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 kindly inform me, is that of a writer still 
 alive, and better known now than then, but 
 they never heard that Kinglake had a hand in 
 it ; the editor would seem to have kept his 
 secret even from the publishers. Kinglake 
 sent the article in proof to the lady ; hoped that 
 the facts he had imparted and the interpola- 
 tions he had inserted would please her; he 
 could have made the attack on Russia more 
 pointed had he written it ; she would think the 
 leniency shows a fault on the right side ; he did 
 not know the writer of this latter part. He 
 begged her to acquaint her friends in Moscow 
 what an important and majestic organ is " The 
 Quarterly," how weighty therefore its lauda- 
 tion of herself. She recalls his bringing her 
 soon afterwards an article on her, written, he 
 said, in an adoring tone by Laveleye in the 
 " Revue des Deux Mondes," and directing her 
 to a paper in "Fraser," by Miss Pauline Irby, 
 a passionate lover of the " Slav ragamuffins," 
 and a worshipper of Madame Novikoff. He 
 quotes with delight Chenery's approbation of 
 her " Life of Skobeleff " ; he spoke of you 
 " with a gleam of kindliness in his eyes which 
 really and truly I had never observed before." 
 "The Times" quotes her as the "eloquent
 
 MADAME NOVIKOFF 99 
 
 authoress of ' Russia and England ' " ; " fancy 
 that from your enemy ! you are getting even 
 ' The Times ' into your net." A later article on 
 O. K. contains some praise, but more abuse. 
 Hay ward is angry with it ; Kinglake thinks it 
 more friendly than could have been expected 
 " to you, a friend of me, their old open enemy : 
 the sugar-plums were meant for you, the sprink- 
 lings of soot for me." 
 
 Besides "Russia and England" Madame 
 Novikoff is the author of " Friends or Foes ? 
 — is Russia wrong ? ' and of a " Life of 
 Skobeleff," the hero of Plevna and of Geok 
 Tepe. From her natural endowments and her 
 long familiarity with Courts, she has acquired 
 a capacity for combining, controlling, enter- 
 taining social "circles" which recalls les salons 
 a" autrefois, the drawing-rooms of an Ancelot, a 
 Le Brun, a Recamier. Residing in several 
 European capitals, she surrounds herself in 
 each with persons intellectually eminent ; in 
 England, where she has long spent her winters, 
 Gladstone, Carlyle and Froude, Charles Vil- 
 liers, Bernal Osborne, Sir Robert Morier, Lord 
 Houghton, and many more of the same high 
 type, formed her court and owned her influence. 
 
 Kinglake first met her at Lady Holland's in
 
 IOO A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 1870, and mutual liking ripened rapidly into 
 close friendship. During her residences in 
 England few days passed in which he did not 
 present himself at herdrawing-room in Claridge's 
 Hotel : when absent in Russia or on the 
 Continent, she received from him weekly let- 
 ters, though he used to complain that writing 
 to a lady through the poste restantc was like 
 trying to kiss a nun through a double grating. 
 These letters, all faithfully preserved, I have 
 been privileged to see ; they remind me, in 
 their mixture of personal with narrative charm, 
 of Swift's " Letters to Stella " ; except that 
 Swift's are often coarse and sometimes prurient, 
 while Kinglake's chivalrous admiration for his 
 friend, though veiled occasionally by graceful 
 banter, is always respectful and refined. They 
 even imitate occasionally the " little language " 
 of the great satirist ; if Swift was Presto, King- 
 lake is " Poor dear me" ; if Stella was M. D., 
 Madame Novikoff is " My dear Miss." This 
 last endearment was due to an incident at a 
 London dinner table. A story told by Hay- 
 ward, seasoned as usual with gros sel, amused 
 the more sophisticated English ladies present, 
 but covered her with blushes. Kinglake per- 
 ceived it, and said to her afterwards, " I thought
 
 MADAME NOVIKOFF IOI 
 
 you were a hardened married woman ; I am 
 glad that you are not ; I shall henceforth call 
 you Miss." Sometimes he rushes into verse. 
 In answer to some pretended rebuff received 
 from her at Ryde he writes : 
 
 " There was a young lady of Ryde, so awfully puffed up by 
 pride, 
 She felt grander by far than the Son of the Czar, 
 And when he said, ' Dear, come and walk on the pier, 
 
 Oh please come and walk by my side ; ' 
 The answer he got, was ' Much better not,' from that awful 
 young lady of Ryde." 
 
 Oftenest, the letters are serious in their ad- 
 miring compliments ; they speak of her superb 
 organization of health and life and strength and 
 joyousness, the delightful sunshine of her pres- 
 ence, her decision and strength of will, her great 
 qualities and great opportunities : " away from 
 you the world seems a blank." He is glad that 
 his Great Eltchi has been made known to her ; 
 the old statesman will be impressed, he feels 
 sure, by her " intense life, graciousness and 
 grace, intellect carefully masked, musical faculty 
 in talk, with that heavenly power of coming to 
 an end." He sends playfully affectionate mes- 
 sages from other members of the Gerontaion, as 
 he calls it, the group of aged admirers who
 
 102 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 formed her inner court ; echoing their laments 
 over the universality of her patronage. " Hay- 
 ward can pardon your having an ambassador or 
 two at your feet, but to find the way to your 
 heart obstructed by a crowd of astronomers, 
 Russ-expansionists, metaphysicians, theologians, 
 translators, historians, poets ; — this is more than 
 he can endure. The crowd reduces him, as 
 Ampere said to Mme. Recamier, to the quali- 
 fied blessing of being only chez vous, from the 
 delight of being avec vous. He hails and noti- 
 fies additions to the list of her admirers ; quotes 
 enthusiastic praise of her from Stansfeld and 
 Charles Villiers, warm appreciation from Morier, 
 Sir Robert Peel, Violet Fane. He rallies 
 her on her victims, jests at Froude's lover- 
 like galanterie — " Poor St. Anthony ! how he 
 hovered round the flame " ; — at the devotion of 
 that gay Lothario, Tyndall, whose approaching 
 marriage will, he thinks, clip his wings for 
 flirtation. " It seems that at the Royal Institu- 
 tion, or whatever the place is called, young 
 women look up to the Lecturers as priests of 
 Science, and go to them after the lecture in 
 what churchmen would call the vestry, and ex- 
 press charming little doubts about electricity, 
 and pretty gentle disquietudes about the solar
 
 MADAME NOVIKOFF IO3 
 
 system : and then the Professors have to 
 give explanations ; — and then, somehow, at 
 the end of a few weeks, they find they have 
 provided themselves with chaperons for life." 
 So he pursues the list of devotees ; her son 
 will tell her that Caesar summarized his con- 
 quests in this country by saying Veni, Vidi, 
 Vici ; but to her it is given to say, Veni, 
 Videbar^ Vici. 
 
 On two subjects, theology and politics, 
 Madame Novikoff was, as we have seen, pas- 
 sionately in earnest. Himself at once an ama- 
 teur casuist and a consistent Nothingarian, 
 whose dictum was that "Important if true" 
 should be written over the doors of churches, 
 he followed her religious arguments much as 
 Lord Steyne listened to the contests between 
 Father Mole and the Reverend Mr. Trail. 
 He expresses his surprise in all seriousness 
 that the Pharisees, a thoughtful and cultured 
 set of men, who alone among the Jews be- 
 lieved in a future state, should have been the 
 very men to whom our Saviour was habitu- 
 ally antagonistic. He refers more lightly and 
 frequently to " those charming talks of ours 
 about our Churches " ; he thinks they both know 
 how to cffleurer the surface of theology without
 
 104 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 getting drowned in it. Of existing Churches 
 he preferred the English, as " the most harmless 
 going"; disliked the Latin Church, especially 
 when intriguing in the East, as persecuting and 
 as schismatic, and therefore as no Church at all. 
 Roman Catholics, he said, have a special horror 
 of being called "schismatic," and that is, of 
 course, a good reason for so calling them. He 
 would not permit the use of the word " ortho- 
 dox," because, like a parson in the pulpit, it is 
 always begging the question. He refused his- 
 torical reverence to the Athanasian Creed, and 
 was delighted when Stanley's review in " The 
 Times" of Mr. Ffoulkes' learned book showed 
 it to have been written by order of Charles the 
 Great in 800 a.d. as what Thorold Rogers used 
 to call "an election squib." In the "Filioque" 
 controversy, once dear to Liddon and to Glad- 
 stone, now, I suppose, obsolete for the English 
 mind, but which relates to the chief dividing 
 tenet of East from West, he showed an interest 
 humorous rather than reverent ; took pains to 
 acquaint himself with the views held on it by 
 Dollinger and the old Catholics ; noted with 
 amusement the perplexity of London ladies as 
 to the meaning of the word when quoted in the 
 much-read "Quarterly" article, declaring their
 
 MADAME NOVIKOFF IO5 
 
 belief to be that it was a clergyman's baby born 
 out of wedlock. 
 
 Madame Novikoff's political influence, which 
 he recognized to the full, he treated in the 
 same mocking spirit. She is at Berlin, re- 
 ceived p by Bismarck; he hopes that though 
 the great man may not eradicate her Slavo- 
 phile heresies, he may manifest the weakness 
 of embroiling nations on mere ethnological 
 grounds. "Are even nearer relationships so 
 delightful ? would you walk across the street 
 for a third or fourth cousin ? then why for a 
 millionth cousin?" Madame Novikoff kindly 
 sends to me an " Imaginary Conversation " be- 
 tween herself and Gortschakoff, constructed by 
 Kinglake during her stay in St. Petersburg in 
 1879. 
 
 "G. Well — you really have done good service 
 to your country and your Czar by dividing and 
 confusing these absurd English, and getting us 
 
 out of the scrape we were in in that Balkan 
 
 Peninsula. 
 
 11 Miss O. Well, certainly I did my best; but 
 I fear I have ruined the political reputation of 
 my English partizans, for in order to make them 
 'beloved of the Slave,' I of course had to make 
 them, poor souls ! go against their own country ;
 
 106 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 and their country, stupid as it is, has now I fear 
 found them out. 
 
 " G. Tant pis pour etix ! Entre notes, if I had 
 been Gladstone, I should have preferred the 
 
 love of my own country to the love of these 
 
 Slaves of yours. But, tell me, how did you get 
 hold of Gladstone ? 
 
 " Miss O. Rien de plus simple ! Four or five 
 years ago I asked what was his weak point, 
 and was told that he had two, ' Effervescence/ 
 and ' Theology.' With that knowledge I found 
 it all child's play to manage him. I just sent 
 him to Munich, and there boiled him up in a 
 weak decoction of ' Filioque,' then kept him 
 ready for use, and impatiently awaited the 
 moment when our plans for getting up the 
 ' Bulgarian atrocities ' should be mature. I say 
 ' impatiently,' for, Heavens, how slow you all 
 were ! at least so it strikes a woman. The 
 arrangement of the ' atrocities ' was begun by 
 our people in 1871, and yet till 1876, though I 
 had Gladstone ready in 1875, nothing really 
 was done ! I assure you, Prince, it is a trying 
 thing to a woman to be kept waiting for pro- 
 mised atrocities such an unconscionable time. 
 
 " G. That brother-in-law of yours was partly 
 the cause of our slowness. He was always
 
 MADAME NOVIKOFF IOJ 
 
 wanting to have the orders for fire and blood 
 in neat formal despatches, signed by me, and 
 copied by clerks. However, I hope you are 
 satisfied now with the butcheries and the flames, 
 and the ? 
 
 11 Miss O. Pour le moment ! " 
 
 She is absent during the sudden dissolution 
 of Parliament in 1 874. " London woke yesterday 
 morning and found that your friend Gladstone 
 had made a corip-d'itat. He has dissolved Par- 
 liament at a moment when no human being 
 expected it, and my impression is that he has 
 made a good hit, and that the renovated Par- 
 liament will give him a great majority." The 
 impression was wildly wrong ; and he found a 
 cause for the Conservative majority in Glad- 
 stone's tame foreign policy, and especially in 
 the pusillanimity his government showed when 
 insulted by Gortschakoff. He always does 
 justice to her influence with Gladstone ; his 
 great majority at the polls in 1880 is her victory 
 and her triumph ; but his Turkophobia is no 
 less her creation: "England is stricken with 
 incapacity because you have stirred up the 
 seethinsf caldron that boils under Gladstone's 
 skull, putting in diabolical charms and poisons 
 of theology to overturn the structure of English
 
 108 A. W. KING LAKE 
 
 polity :" she will be able, he thinks, to tell her 
 government that Gladstone is doing his best to 
 break up the British Empire. 
 
 He quotes with approbation the newspaper 
 comparison of her to the Princess Lieven. 
 She disparages the famous ambassadress ; he 
 sets her right. Let her read the "Corres- 
 pondence," by his friend Mr. Guy Le Strange, 
 and she will see how large a part the Princess 
 played in keeping England quiet during the 
 war of 1828-29. She did not convert her 
 austere admirer, Lord Grey, to approval of the 
 Russian designs, nor overcome the uneasiness 
 with which the Duke of Wellington regarded 
 her intrigues ; but the Foreign Minister, Lord 
 Aberdeen, was apparently a fool in her hands ; 
 and, whoever had the merit, the neutrality of 
 England continued. That was, he repeats 
 more than once, a most critical time for Russia ; 
 it was an object almost of life and death to the 
 Czar to keep England dawdling in a state of 
 actual though not avowed neutrality. It is, he 
 argued, a matter of fact, that precisely this 
 result was attained, and " I shall be slow to be- 
 lieve that Madame de Lieven did not deserve 
 a great share of the glory (as you would think 
 it) of making England act weakly under such
 
 MADAME NOVIKOFF IO9 
 
 circumstances ; more especially since we know 
 that the Duke did not like the great lady, and 
 may be supposed to have distinctly traced his 
 painful embarrassment to her power." So the 
 letters go, interspersed with news, with cri- 
 ticisms of notable persons, with comments en- 
 lightening or cynical on passing political events : 
 with personal matters only now and then ; as 
 when he notes the loss of his two sisters ; 
 dwells with unwonted feeling on the death of 
 his eldest nephew by consumption ; condoles 
 with her on her husband's illness ; gives 
 council, wise or playful, as to the education of 
 her son. " I am glad to hear that he is good 
 at Greek, Latin, and Mathematics, for that 
 shows his cleverness ; glad also to hear that he 
 is occasionally naughty, for that shows his force. 
 I advise you to claim and exercise as much 
 control as possible, because I am certain that a 
 woman — especially so gifted a one as you — 
 knows more, or rather feels more, about the 
 right way of bringing up a boy than any mere 
 man." 
 
 Unbrokenly the correspondence continues: 
 the intimacy added charm, interest, fragrance 
 to his life, brought out in him all that was 
 genial, playful, humorous. He fights the ad-
 
 HO A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 monitions of coming weakness ; goes to Sid- 
 mouth with a sore throat, but takes his papers 
 and his books. It is, he says, a deserted little 
 sea-coast place. " Mrs. Grundy has a small 
 house there, but she does not know me by sight. 
 If Madame Novikoff were to come, the as- 
 tonished little town, dazzled first by her, would 
 find itself invaded by theologians, bishops, 
 ambassadors of deceased emperors, and an ex- 
 Prime- Minister." But as time goes on he 
 speaks more often of his suffering throat ; of 
 gout, increasing deafness, only half a voice : 
 his last letter is written in July, 1890, to condole 
 with his friend upon her husband's death. In 
 October his nurse takes the pen ; Madame 
 Novikoff comes back hurriedly from Scotland 
 to find him in his last illness. " It is very 
 nice," he told his nurse, " to see dear Madame 
 Novikoff again, but I am going down hill fast, 
 and cannot hope to be well enough to see much 
 of her." This is in November, 1890; on New 
 Year's Eve came the inexorable ''Terminator 
 of delights and Separator of friends."
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 LATER DAYS, AND DEATH 
 
 For twenty years Kinglake lived in Hyde 
 Park Place, in bright cheerful rooms looking in 
 one direction across the Park, but on another 
 side into a churchyard. The churchyard, Lady 
 Gregory tells us, gave him pause on first seeing 
 the rooms. " I should not like to live here, I 
 should be afraid of ghosts." " Oh no, sir, there 
 is always a policeman round the corner." 1 
 " Pleaceman X." has not, perhaps, before been 
 revered as the Shade-compelling son of Maia : 
 
 " Tu pias laetis animas reponis 
 Sedibus, virgaque levem coerces 
 Aurea turbam." 
 
 Here he worked through the morning ; the 
 afternoon took him to the " Travellers," where 
 his friends, Sir Henry Bunbury and Mr. 
 Chenery, usually expected him ; then at eight 
 
 ■ a 
 
 Blackwood's Magazine," December, 1895, P- 802.
 
 112 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 o'clock, if not, as Shylock says, bid forth, he 
 went to dine at the Athenaeum. His dinner 
 seat was in the left-hand corner of the coffee- 
 room, where, in the thirties, Theodore Hook 
 had been wont to sit, gathering near him so 
 many listeners to his talk, that at Hook's death 
 in 1 84 1 the receipts for the club dinners fell off 
 to a large amount. Here, in the " Corner," as 
 they called it, round Kinglake would be Hay- 
 ward, Drummond Wolff, Massey, Oliphant, 
 Edward Twisleton, Strzelecki, Storks, Venables, 
 Wyke, Bunbury, Gregory, American Ticknor, 
 and a few more ; Sir W. Stirling Maxwell, 
 when in Scotland, sending hampers of pheasants 
 to the company. " Hurried to the Athenaeum 
 for dinner," says Ticknor in 1857, "and there 
 found Kinglake and Sir Henry Rawlinson, to 
 whom were soon added Hayward and Stirling. 
 We pushed our tables together and had a jolly 
 dinner. . . . To the Athenaeum ; and having 
 dined pleasantly with Merivale, Kinglake, and 
 Stirling, I hurried off to the House." In later 
 years, when his voice grew low and his hearing 
 difficult, he preferred that the diners should 
 resolve themselves into little groups, assigning 
 to himself a tete-a-tete, with whom at his ease 
 he could unfold himself.
 
 LATER DAYS, AND DEATH I I 3 
 
 No man ever fought more gallantly the en- 
 croachments of old age — on sut §tre jenne jusque 
 dans ses vieux jours . At seventy-four years old, 
 staying with a friend at Brighton, he insisted on 
 riding over to Rottingdean, where Sir Frederick 
 Pollock was staying. " I mastered," he said, in 
 answer to remonstrances, " I mastered the pecu- 
 liarities of the Brighton screw before you were 
 born, and have never forgotten them." Vaulting 
 into his saddle he rode off, returning with a 
 schoolboy's delight at the brisk trot he had found 
 practicable when once clear of the King's Road. 
 Long after his hearing had failed, his sight 
 become grievously weakened, and his limbs not 
 always trustworthy, he would never allow a 
 cab to be summoned for him after dinner, 
 always walking to his lodgings. But he had to 
 give up by and by his daily canter in Rotten 
 Row, and more reluctantly still his continental 
 travel. Foreign railways were closed to him 
 by the Salle d 1 Attente ; he could not stand in- 
 carceration in the waiting-rooms. 
 
 The last time he crossed the Channel was at 
 the close of the Franco-Prussian war, on a visit to 
 his old friend M. Thiers, then President. It was 
 a dinner to deputies of the Extreme Left, and 
 Kinglake was the only Englishman ; " so," he 
 
 T
 
 I 14 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 said, " among the servants there was a sort of 
 reasoning process as to my identity, ending in 
 the conclusion, ' il doit etre Sir Dilke! ' Soon 
 the inference was treated as a fact ; and in due 
 sequence came newspaper paragraphs declar- 
 ing that the British Ambassador had gravely 
 remonstrated with the President for inviting- 
 Sir Charles Dilke to his table. Then followed 
 articles defending the course taken by the 
 President, and so for some time the ball was 
 kept up. The remonstrance of the Ambassador 
 was a myth, Lord Lyons was a friend of Sir 
 Charles ; but the latter was suspect at the time 
 both in England and France ; in England for 
 his speeches and motion on the Civil List ; in 
 France, because, with Frederic Harrison, he 
 had helped to get some of the French Com- 
 munists away from France ; and the French 
 Government was watching him with spies. In 
 Sir Charles's motion Kinglake took much 
 interest, refusing to join in the cry against it 
 as disloyal. Sir Charles, he said, spoke no 
 word against the Queen ; and only brought the 
 matter before the House because challenged to 
 repeat in Parliament the statements he had 
 made in the country. As a matter of policy he 
 thought it mistaken ; " Move in such a matter
 
 LATER DAYS, AND DEATH I I 5 
 
 openly, and party discipline compels your de- 
 feat ; bring pressure to bear on a Cabinet, 
 some of its members are on your side, and you 
 may gain your point." Sir Charles's speech 
 was calmly argumentative, and to many minds 
 convincing ; it provoked a passionate reply 
 from Gladstone ; and when Mr. Auberon 
 Herbert following declared himself a Repub- 
 lican, a tumult arose such as in those pre- 
 Milesian days had rarely been witnessed in the 
 House. But the wisdom of Kinglake's counsel 
 is sustained by the fact that many years after- 
 wards, as a result of more private discussion, 
 Mr. Gladstone pronounced his conversion to 
 the two bases of the motion, publicity, and the 
 giving of the State allowance to the head of 
 the family rather than, person by person, to 
 the children and grandchildren of the Sove- 
 reign. Action pointing in this direction was 
 taken in 1889 and 1901 on the advice of Tory 
 ministers. 
 
 Amongst Frenchmen of the highest class, 
 intellectually and socially, he had many valued 
 friends, keeping his name on the " Cosmo- 
 politan " long after he had ceased to visit it, 
 since " one never knows when the distinguished 
 foreigner may come upon one, and of such the
 
 I 1 6 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 Cosmo is the London Paradise." But he used 
 to say that in the other world a good French- 
 man becomes an Englishman, a bad English- 
 man becomes a Frenchman. He saw in the 
 typical Gaul a compound of the tiger and the 
 monkey ; noted their want of individuality, 
 their tendency to go in flocks, their suscepti- 
 bility to panic and to ferocity, to " the terror 
 that makes a man kill people, and the terror 
 that makes him lie down and beg." We re- 
 member, too, his dissection of St. Arnaud, as 
 before all things a type of his nation ; " he im- 
 personated with singular exactness the idea 
 which our forefathers had in their minds when 
 they spoke of what they called 'a Frenchman ;' 
 for although (by cowing the rich and by filling 
 the poor with envy), the great French Revolu- 
 tion had thrown a lasting gloom ov. the national 
 character, it left this one man untouched. He 
 was bold, gay, reckless, vain ; but beneath the 
 mere glitter of the surface there was a great 
 capacity for administrative business, and a 
 more than common willingness to take away 
 human life." 
 
 "I relish," Kinglake said in 1871, "the 
 spectacle of Bismarck teaching the A B C of 
 Liberal politics to the hapless French. His
 
 LATER DAYS, AND DEATH I I 7 
 
 last mot, they tell me, is this. Speaking of the 
 extent to which the French Emperor had 
 destroyed his own reputation and put an end 
 to the worship of the old Napoleon, he said : 
 ' He has killed himself and buried his uncle.' '* 
 Again, in 1874, noting the contre coup upon 
 France resulting from the Bismarck and Arnim 
 despatches, he said : " What puzzles the poor 
 dear French is to see that truth and intrepid 
 frankness consist with sound policy and con- 
 summate wisdom. How funny it would be, if 
 the French some day, as a novelty, or what 
 they would call a capi'ice, were to try the effect 
 of truth ; " though not naturally honest," as 
 Autolycus says, "were to become so by chance." 
 He thought M. Gallifet dans sa logiquc in 
 liking the Germans and hating Bismarck ; for 
 the Germans, in having their own way, would 
 break up into as many fragments as the best 
 Frenchman could desire, and Bismarck is the 
 real suppressor of France. Throughout the 
 Franco- Prussian war he sided strongly with 
 the Prussians, refusing to dine in houses where 
 the prevailing sympathy with France would 
 make him unwelcome as its declared oppo- 
 nent ; but he felt "as a nightmare" the attack 
 on prostrate Paris, " as a blow "' the capitula-
 
 I 1 8 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 tion of Metz ; denouncing Gambetta and his 
 colleagues as meeting their disasters only with 
 slanderous shrieks, " possessed by the spirit of 
 that awful Popish woman." Bismarck as a 
 statesman he consistently admired, and de- 
 plored his dismissal. I see, he said, all the 
 peril implied by Bismarck's exit, and the advent 
 of his ambitious young Emperor. It is a 
 transition from the known to the unknown, from 
 wisdom, perhaps, to folly. 
 
 His Crimean volumes continued to appear ; 
 in 1875, 1880, finally in 1887 ; while the Cabinet 
 Edition was published in 1887-8. This last 
 contained three new Prefaces ; in Vol. I. as we 
 have seen, the memorial of Nicholas Kireeff; 
 in Vol. II. the latter half of the original Preface 
 to Vol. I., cancelled thence at Madame Novi- 
 koff's request, though now carefully modified 
 so as to avoid anything which might irritate 
 Russia at a moment when troubles seemed to be 
 clearing away. In his Preface to Vol. VII. he 
 had three objects, to set right the position of 
 Sir E. Hamley, who had been neglected in the 
 despatches ; to demolish his friend Lord Bury, 
 who had "questioned my omniscience" in the 
 "Edinburgh Review" ; and to exonerate England 
 at large from absurd self-congratulations about
 
 LATER DAYS, AND DEATH 119 
 
 the " little Egypt affair," the blame of such ex- 
 aggeration resting with those whom he called 
 State Showmen. 
 
 Silent to acquaintances about the progress 
 of his work, he was communicative to his few 
 intimates, though never reading aloud extracts 
 or allowing them to be seen. In 1872 he would 
 speak pathetically of his " Crimean muddle," 
 perplexed, as he well might be, by the intricacies 
 of Inkerman. Asked if he will not introduce a 
 Te Deum on the fall of Louis Napoleon, he 
 answered that to write without the stimulus of 
 combat would be a task beyond his energy; 
 " when I took the trouble to compose that four- 
 teenth chapter, the wretched Emperor and his 
 gang were at the height of their power in Europe 
 and the world; but now!" He was insatiate 
 as to fresh facts : utilized his acquaintance with 
 Todleben, whom he had first met on his visit to 
 England in 1864; sought out Prince Ourusoff 
 at a later time, and inserted particulars gleaned 
 from him in Vol. IX., Chapter V. 
 
 In 1875 he told Madame Novikoff that his 
 task was done so far as Inkerman was con- 
 cerned, and was proud to think that he had 
 rescued from oblivion the heroism of the Rus- 
 sian troops in what he calls the " Third Period "
 
 120 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 of the great fight, ignored as it was by all 
 Russian historians of the war. He made fruit- 
 less inquiries after a paper said to have been 
 left behind him by Skobeleff, explaining that 
 " India is a cherry to be eaten by Russia, but 
 in two bites " ; it was contrary to the general's 
 recorded utterances and probably apocryphal. 
 Russophobe as regarded Turkey, he sneered at 
 England's sentimental support of nationalities 
 as "Platonic": a capital epithet he called it, 
 and envied the Frenchman who applied it to 
 us, declaring that it had turned all the women 
 against us. He was moved by receiving Korni- 
 loff's portrait with a kind message from the 
 dead hero's family, seeing in the features a 
 confirmation of the ideal which he had formed 
 in his own mind and had tried to convey to 
 others. Readers of his book will recall the fine 
 tribute to Korniloff's powers, and the descrip- 
 tion of his death, in Chapters VI. and XIII. of 
 Vol. IV. (Cabinet Edition). 
 
 Many of his comments on current events are 
 preserved in the notes or in the memories of his 
 friends. Sometimes these were characteristically 
 cynical. He ridiculed the newspaper parade of 
 national sympathy with the Prince of Wales's 
 illness : " We are represented as all members of
 
 LATER DAYS, AND DEATH 121 
 
 the royal family, and all in family hysterics." 
 Dizzy's orientalization of Queen Victoria into 
 an Empress angered him, as it angered many 
 more. The last Empress Regnant, he said, 
 was Catherine II. and it seems to be thought 
 that by advising the Queen to take that great 
 monarch's title, we shall exercise a wholesome 
 influence on the morals of our women. He 
 would quote Byron's 
 
 " Russia's mighty Empress 
 Behaved no better than a common sempstress ; " 
 
 " there was an old-fashioned sacredness, which, 
 however foolish intrinsically, was still useful, in 
 our title of ' The Queen ' ; nor do we see the 
 policy of adding a Supreme de Volaille to the 
 bread and wine of our Sacrament." 
 
 He chuckled over the indignation of the haute 
 volee, when on the visit to England of President 
 Grant's daughter in 1872, Americans in London 
 sent out cards of invitation headed " To meet 
 Miss Grant," as at a profane imitation of a prac- 
 tice hitherto confined to royalties ; laughing not 
 at the legitimate American mimicry of Euro- 
 pean consequence, but at the silly formalists 
 in Society who fumed over the imagined pre- 
 sumption. Consulted by an invalid as to the
 
 122 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 charm of Ostend for a seaside residence, he 
 limited it to persons of gregarious habits ; "the 
 people are all driven down to the beach like a 
 flock of sheep in the morning, and in the even- 
 ing they are all driven back to their folds." He 
 reported a feeble drama written by his ancient 
 idol, Lord Stratford de Redcliffe ; "it is a pain- 
 ful thing to see a man of his quality and of his 
 age unduly detained in the world ; when the 
 Emperor Nicholas died, the Eltchi lost his 
 raison d'etre." He disparaged the wild fit of 
 morality undergone by the " Pall Mall Gazette " 
 during the scandalous " Maiden Tribute" reve- 
 lation, pronouncing its protegees to be " clever 
 little devils." He was greatly startled by 
 GortschakofT's famous circular, annulling the 
 Black Sea clause in the Treaty of Paris, and 
 much relieved by Bismarck's dexterous inter- 
 position, which saved the susceptibility of 
 Europe, and especially of England, by yielding 
 as a favour to the demand of Russia what no 
 one was in a position to refuse ; but he main- 
 tained, and Lord Stratford agreed with him, that 
 Gortschakoff's precipitate act was governed by 
 circumstances never revealed to mankind. He 
 learned, too, that it caused the Chancellor to be 
 de'considere'm high Russian circles ; he was called
 
 LATER DAYS, AND DEATH 1 23 
 
 " un Narcisse qui se mire dans son encrier" 
 Kinglake used to say that in conceding the 
 right of the Sultan to exclude any war-flag from 
 the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, Russia was 
 treating Turkey as a bag-fox, to be gently 
 hunted occasionally, but not mangled or killed ; 
 and he felt keenly the ridicule resting on the 
 allies, who were compelled to surrender the 
 neutralization purchased at the cost of so much 
 blood and treasure. He watched with much 
 amusement the restoration of Turkish self-con- 
 fidence. " Turkey believes that he is no longer 
 a sick man, and is turning all his doctors out of 
 the house, to the immense astonishment of the 
 English doctor, so conscious of his own rectitude 
 that he cannot understand being sent off with 
 the quacks. You know in our beautiful Liturgy 
 we have a prayer for the Turks ; it looks as if 
 our supplications had become successful." His 
 interest in Turkey never flagged. " I am in a 
 great fright," he said in 1877, "about my dear 
 Turks, because Russia gives virtual command of 
 the army before Plevna to Todleben, a really 
 great homme de guerre." 
 
 Russophobia was at that time so strong in 
 London that Madame Novikoff hesitated to 
 visit England, and he himself feared that she
 
 124 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 might find it uncomfortable. Her alarm, how- 
 ever, was ridiculed by Hay ward, "most faith- 
 ful of the Russianisers, ready to do battle for 
 Russia at any moment, declaring her to be 
 quite virtuous, with no fault but that of being 
 incomprise." But he groaned over the humilia- 
 tion of England under Russia's bold stroke, 
 noting frequently a decay of English character 
 which he ascribed to chronic causes. The 
 Englishman taken separately, he said, seems 
 much the same as he used to be ; but there 
 is a softening of the aggregate brain which 
 affects Englishmen when acting together. He 
 hailed the great Liberal victory of 1880, and 
 watched with interest, as one behind the scenes, 
 the negotiations which led to Lord Hartington's 
 withdrawal and Mr. Gladstone's resumption of 
 power; for in these his friend Hayward was an 
 active go-between, removing by his tact and 
 frankness "hitches " which might otherwise have 
 been disastrous. He thought W. E. Forster's 
 attack on Mr. Gladstone's Irish policy in 1882 
 ill-managed for his own position, his famous 
 speech not sufficiently " clenching." Had he 
 separated from his chief on broader grounds, 
 refusing complicity with a Minister who con- 
 sented to parley with the imprisoned Irishmen,
 
 LATER DAYS, AND DEATH I 25 
 
 he would, Kinglake thought, have occupied a 
 highly commanding position. At present his 
 difference from his colleagues was one only of 
 degree. 
 
 He was once beguiled, amongst friends very 
 intimate, into telling a dream. He dreamed 
 that he was attending an anatomical lecture — 
 which, as a fact, he had never done — and that 
 his own body, from which he found himself en- 
 tirely separated, was the dissected subject on 
 which the lecturer discoursed. The body lay 
 on a table beside the lecturer, but he himself, 
 his entity, was at the other end of the room, 
 on the furthest or highest of a set of benches 
 raised one above the other as at a theatre. He 
 imagined himself in a vague way to be dis- 
 agreeing with the lecturer ; but the strongest im- 
 pression on his mind was annoyance at being so 
 badly placed, so far from the professor and from 
 his own body that he could not see or hear with- 
 out an effort. The dream, he pointed out, showed 
 this curious fact, that without any conscious 
 design or effort of the will a man may conceive 
 himself to be in perfect possession of his identity, 
 whilst separated from his own body by a dis- 
 tance of several feet. "The highest concept," 
 said Jowett, "which man forms of himself is as
 
 126 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 detached from the body." ("Life," ii. 241.) 
 The lecture-room which he imagined was one 
 of the lower school-rooms at Eton, with which 
 he had been familiar in early days. 
 
 After Hayward's death in 1884, his own 
 habits began to change. He still dined at the 
 Athenaeum "corner," but increasing deafness 
 began to make society irksome, and, his solitary 
 meal ended, he spent his evenings reading in 
 the Library. By-and-by that too became im- 
 possible. His voice grew weak, throat and 
 tongue were threatened with disease. In 1888 
 he went to Brighton with a nurse, returned to 
 rooms on Richmond Hill, then to Bayswater 
 Terrace. An operation was performed and he 
 seemed to recover, but relapsed. Old friends 
 tended him : Madame Novikoff, Mr. Froude 
 and Mr. Lecky, Madame de Quaire and Mrs. 
 Brookfield, Lord Mexborough his ancient 
 fellow-traveller, Mrs. Craven, Sir William and 
 Lady Gregory, with a few more, cheered him 
 by their visits so long as he was able to bear 
 them ; and his brother and sister, Dr. and Mrs. 
 Hamilton Kinglake, were with him at the end. 
 Patient to the last, kind and gentle to all about 
 him, he passed away quietly on New Year's 
 Day, 1 89 1 :
 
 LATER DAYS, AND DEATH I 27 
 
 " being merry-hearted, 
 Shook hands with flesh and blood, and so departed." 
 
 His remains were cremated at Woking, after 
 a special service at Christchurch, Lancaster 
 Gate, attended by Dr. and Mrs. Kinglake with 
 their son Captain Kinglake, the Duke of Bed- 
 ford, Mr, and Mrs. Lecky, Mrs. W. H. Brook- 
 field and her son Charles. 
 
 No good portrait of him has been published. 
 That prefixed to Blackwood's "Eothen" of 
 1896 was furnished by Dr. Kinglake, who. how- 
 ever, looked upon it as unsatisfactory. The " Not 
 an M.P." of " Vanity Fair," 1872, is a grotesque 
 caricature. The photograph here reproduced 
 (p. 128), by far the best likeness extant, he 
 gave to Madame Novikoff in 1870, receiving 
 hers in return, but pronouncing the transaction 
 "an exchange between the personified months 
 of May and November." The face gives ex- 
 pression to the shy aloofness which, amongst 
 strangers, was characteristic of him through 
 life. He had even a horror of hearing his 
 name pealed out by servants, and came early 
 to parties that the proclamation might be 
 achieved before as few auditors as possible. 
 Visiting the newly married husband of his
 
 128 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 friend Adelaide Kemble, and being the first 
 guest to arrive, he encountered in Mr. Sartoris 
 a host as contentedly undemonstrative as him- 
 self. Bows passed, a seat by the fire was in- 
 dicated, he sat down, and the pair contemplated 
 one another for ten minutes in absolute silence, 
 till the lady of the house came in, like the 
 prince in " The Sleeping Beauty," though not 
 by the same process, to break the charm. He 
 gave up calling at a house where he was warmly 
 appreciated, because father, mother, daughter, 
 bombarded him with questions. " I never came 
 away without feeling sure that I had in some 
 way perjured myself." 
 
 On his shyness waited swiftly ensuing bore- 
 dom ; if his neighbour at table were garrulous or 
 banale, his face at once betrayed conversational 
 prostration ; a lady who often watched him used 
 to say that his pulse ought to be felt after the first 
 course ; and that if it showed languor he should 
 be moved to the side of some other partner. 
 " He had great charm," writes to me another old 
 friend, " in a quiet winning way, but was ' dark ' 
 with rough and noisy people." So it came to 
 pass that his manner was threefold ; icy and 
 repellent with those who set. his nerves on edge ; 
 good-humoured, receptive, intermittently re-
 
 KINGLAKE IN THE EARLY SKY I ATI KS. 
 
 p. 128.
 
 LATER DAYS, AND DEATH I2Q. 
 
 sponsive in general and congenial company ; 
 while, at ease with friends trusted and beloved, 
 the lines of the face became gracious, indulgent, 
 affectionate, the sonrire des yeux often inex- 
 pressibly winning and tender. " Kinglake," 
 says Eliot Warburton in his unpublished diary, 
 "talked to us to-day about his travels ; pessi- 
 mistic and cynical to the rest of the world, he is 
 always gentle and kind to us." To this dear 
 friend he was ever faithful, wearing to the day 
 of his death an octagonal gold ring engraved 
 "Eliot. Jan: 1852." He would never play the 
 raconteur in general company, for he had a 
 great horror of repeating himself, and, latterly, 
 of being looked upon as a bore by younger 
 men ; but he loved to pour out reminiscences 
 of the past to an audience of one or two at 
 most : " Let an old man gather his recollections 
 and glance at them under the right angle, and 
 his life is full of pantomime transformation 
 scenes." The chief characteristic of his wit was 
 its unexpectedness ; sometimes acrid, sometimes 
 humorous, his sayings came forth, like Topham 
 Beauclerk's in Dr. Johnson's day, like Talley- 
 rand's in our own, poignant without effort. His 
 calm, gentle voice, contrasted with his startling 
 caustic utterance, reminded people of Prosper 
 
 K
 
 130 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 Merimee : terse epigram, felicitous apropos, 
 whimsical presentment of the topic under dis- 
 cussion, emitted in a low tone, and without the 
 slightest change of muscle : 
 
 " All the charm of all the Muses 
 Often flowering in a lonely word." x 
 
 Questions he would suavely and often wittily 
 parry or repel : to an unhistorical lady asking 
 if he remembered Madame Du Barry, he said, 
 " my memory is very imperfect as to the par- 
 ticulars of my life during the reign of Lous XV. 
 and the Regency ; but I know a lady who has 
 a teapot which belonged, she says, to Madame 
 Du Barry." Madame Novikoff, however, re- 
 cords his discomfiture at the query of a certain 
 Lady E , who, when all London was ring- 
 ing with his first Crimean volumes, asked him 
 if he were not an admirer of Louis Napoleon. 
 " Le pauvre Kinglake, d6contenanc£, repondit tout 
 das intimidS comme un enfant qu'on met dans le 
 coin : Oui — non — pas pre'cise'ment. " 
 
 He had no knowledge of or liking for music. 
 Present once by some mischance at a matine'e 
 
 1 I inserted this quotation before reading the "Etching- 
 ham Letters." Sir Richard would wish me to erase it as 
 hackneyed ; but it applies to Kinglake's talk as accurately 
 as to Virgil's writing, and I refuse to be defrauded of it.
 
 LATER DAYS, AND DEATH I 3 I 
 
 musicale, he was asked by the hostess what 
 kind of music he preferred. His preference, 
 he owned, was for the drum. One thinks of 
 the " Bourgeois Gentilhomme," " la trompette 
 marine est ten instrument qui me plait, et qui est 
 harmonieux" ; we are reminded, too, of Dean 
 Stanley, who, absolutely tone-deaf, and hurry- 
 ing away whenever music was performed, once 
 from an adjoining room in his father's house 
 heard Jenny Lind sing " I know that my Re- 
 deemer liveth." He went to her shyly, and told 
 her that she had given him an idea of what 
 people mean by music. Once before, he said in 
 all seriousness, the same feeling had come over 
 him, when before the palace at Vienna he 
 had heard a tattoo rendered by four hundred 
 drummers. 
 
 Kinglake used to regret the disuse of duel- 
 ling, as having impaired the higher tone of good 
 breeding current in his younger days, and even 
 blamed the Duke of Wellington for proscribing 
 it in the army. He had himself on one occa- 
 sion sent a cartel, and stood waitingforhisadver- 
 sary, like Sir Richard Strachan at Walcheren, 
 eight days on the French coast ; but the adver- 
 sary never came. Hayward once referred to
 
 132 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 him, as a counsellor, and if necessary a second, 
 
 a quarrel with Lord R . Lord R 's 
 
 friend called on him, a Norfolk squire, " broad- 
 faced and breathing port wine," after the fashion 
 of uncle Phillips in " Pride and Prejudice," who 
 began in a boisterous voice, " I am one of those, 
 
 Mr. Kinglake, who believe R to be a 
 
 gentleman." In his iciest tones and stoniest 
 manner Kinglake answered : " That, Sir, I am 
 quite willing to assume." The effect, he used 
 to say, as he told and acted the scene, was 
 magical ; " I had frozen him sober, and we 
 settled everything without a fight." Of all 
 his friends Hay ward was probably the closest; 
 an association of discrepancies in character, 
 manner, temperament, not complementary, but 
 opposed and hostile ; irreconcilable, one would 
 say, but for the knowledge that in love and 
 friendship paradox reigns supreme. Hay ward 
 was arrogant, overbearing, loud, insistent, full 
 of strange oaths and often unpardonably coarse ; 
 "our dominant friend," Kinglake called him; 
 " odious " is the epithet I have heard commonly 
 bestowed upon him by less affectionate acquaint- 
 ances. Kinglake was reserved, shy, reticent, 
 with the high breeding, grand manner, quiet 
 urbanity, grata protervitas, of a waning epoch ;
 
 LATER DAYS, AND DEATH 1 33 
 
 restraint, concentration, tact of omission, dic- 
 tating alike his silence and his speech ; his well- 
 weighed words " crystallizing into epigrams as 
 they touched the air." 1 When Hayward's last 
 illness came upon him in 1884, Kinglake nursed 
 him tenderly ; spending the morning in his 
 friend's lodgings at 8, St. James's Street, the 
 house which Byron occupied in his early London 
 days ; and bringing on the latest bulletin to the 
 club. The patient rambled towards the end ; 
 " we ought to be getting ready to catch the 
 train that we may go to my sister's at Lyme." 
 Kinglake quieted his sick friend by an assurance 
 that the servants, whom he would not wish to 
 hurry, were packing. " On no account hurry 
 the servants, but still let us be off." The last 
 thought which he articulated while dying was, 
 " I don't exactly know what it is, but I feel it 
 is something grand." " Hay ward is dead," King- 
 lake wrote to a common friend; "the devotion 
 shown to him by all sorts and conditions of 
 men, and, what is better, of women, was un- 
 bounded. Gladstone found time to be with 
 him, and to engage him in a conversation of 
 
 1 This delightful phrase is Lady Gregory's. One would 
 wish, like Lord Houghton, though suppressing his pre- 
 sumptuous rider, to have been its author.
 
 134 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 singular interest, of which he has made a me- 
 morandum." 
 
 Another of Kinglake's life-long familiars was 
 Charles Skirrow, Taxing Master in Chancery, 
 with his accomplished wife, from whose memor- 
 able fish dinners at Greenwich he was seldom 
 absent, adapting himself no less readily to their 
 theatrical friends — the Bancrofts, Burnand, 
 Toole, Irving — than to the literary set with 
 which he was more habitually at home. He was 
 religiously loyal to his friends, speaking of them 
 with generous admiration, eagerly defending 
 them when attacked. He lauded Butler John- 
 stone as the most gifted of the young men in 
 the House of Commons ; would not allow 
 Bernal Osborne to be called untrue ; " he offends 
 people if you like, but he is never false or 
 hollow." A clever sobriquet fathered on him, 
 burlesquing the monosyllabic names of a well- 
 known diarist and official, he repelled indig- 
 nantly. " He is my friend, and had I been 
 guilty of the jeu, I should have broken two of 
 my commandments ; that which forbids my 
 joking at a friend's expense, and that which 
 forbids my fashioning a play upon words." He 
 entreated Madame Novikoff to visit and cheer 
 Charles Lever, dying at Trieste ; deeply la-
 
 LATER DAYS, AND DEATH 1 35 
 
 mented Sir H. Bulwer's death : " I used to 
 think his a beautiful intellect, and he was won- 
 derfully simpatico to me." But he was shy of 
 condoling with bereaved mourners, believing 
 words used on such occasions to be utterly 
 untrue. He loved to include husband and wife 
 in the same meed of admiration, as in the case 
 of Dean Stanley and Lady Augusta, or of Sir 
 Robert and Lady Emily Peel. Peel, he said, has 
 the radiant quality not easy to describe ; Lady 
 Emily is always beauteous, bright, attractive. 
 Lord Stanhope he praised as a historian, pay- 
 ing him the equivocal compliment that his 
 books were much better than his conversation. 
 So, too, he qualified his admiration of Lady 
 Ashburton, dwelling on her beauty, silver voice, 
 ready enthusiasm apt to disperse itself by flying 
 at too many objects. 
 
 He was wont to speak admiringly of Lord 
 Acton, relating how, a Roman Catholic, yet re- 
 specting enlightenment and devoted to books, 
 he once set up and edited a "Quarterly Review," 
 with a notion of reconciling the Light and the 
 Dark as well as he could ; but the " Prince of 
 Darkness, the Pope," interposed, and ordered 
 him to stop the " Review." He was compelled 
 to obey ; not, he told people, on any religious
 
 136 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 ground, but because relations and others would 
 have made his life a bore to him if he had been 
 contumacious against the Holy Father. 
 
 Kinglake was strongly attracted by W. E. 
 Forster, a " rough diamond," spoken of at one 
 time as a possible Prime Minister. Beginning 
 life, he said, as a Quaker, with narrow opinions, 
 his vigour of character and brain-power shook 
 them off. Powerful, robust, and perfectly 
 honest, yet his honesty inflicted on him a 
 doubleness of view which caused him to be 
 described as engaging his two hands in two 
 different pursuits. His estimate of Sir R. 
 Morier would have gladdened Jowett's heart; 
 he loved him as a private friend ; eulogized his 
 public qualities ; rejoiced over his appointment 
 as Ambassador at St. Petersburg, seeing in him 
 a diplomatist with not only a keen intellect and 
 large views, but vibrating with the warmth, 
 animation, friendliness, that are charmingly un- 
 diplomatic. Of Carlyle, his life-long, though 
 not always congenial intimate, he used to speak 
 as having great graphic power, but being 
 essentially a humourist ; a man who, with 
 those he could trust, never pretended to be in 
 earnest, but used to roar with glorious laughter 
 over the fun of his own jeremiads ; " so far from
 
 LATER DAYS, AND DEATH 1 37 
 
 being a prophet he is a bad Scotch joker, and 
 knows himself to be a wind-bag." He blamed 
 Froude's revelations of Carlyle in " The 
 Reminiscences," as injurious and offensive. 
 Froude himself he often likened to Carlyle ; 
 the thoughts of both, he said, ran in the same 
 direction, but of the two, Froude was by far 
 the more intellectual man. 
 
 Staunch friend to the few, polite, though 
 never effusive, to the many, he also nourished 
 strong antipathies. The appearance in Madame 
 Novikoffs rooms of a certain Scotch bishop 
 invariably drove him out of them, " Peter Paul, 
 Bishop of Claridge's," he called him. To Von 
 Beust (the Austrian Chancellor), who spoke 
 English in a rapid half-intelligible falsetto, he 
 gave the name of Mirliton (penny trumpet). 
 His allusions to Mirliton and to the Bishop 
 frequently mystified Madame Novikoffs guests. 
 For he loved to talk in cypher. Canon War- 
 burton, kindly searching on my behalf his 
 brother Eliot's journals, tells me that he and 
 Kinglake, meeting almost daily, lived in a 
 cryptic world of jokes, confidences, colloquial- 
 isms, inexplicable to all but their two selves. 
 
 He cordially disliked "The Times" news- 
 paper, alleging instances of the unfairness with
 
 I38 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 which its columns had been used to spite and 
 injure persons who had offended it, chuckling 
 over Hayward's compact anathema, — " ' The 
 Times,' which as usual of late supplied its lack 
 of argument and proof by assumption, mis- 
 representation, and personality." He thought 
 that its attacks upon himself had helped his 
 popularity. " One of the main causes," he said 
 in 1875, "of the interest which people here 
 were good enough to take in my book was the 
 fight between 'The Times' and me. In 1863 
 it raged, in 1867 it was renewed with great 
 violence, and now I suppose the flame kindles 
 once more, though probably with diminished 
 strength. In 1863 the storm of opinion gener- 
 ally waxed fierce against me, but now, as I 
 hear, 'The Times' is alone, journals of all 
 politics being loud in my praise. But I never 
 look at any comment on my volumes till long 
 afterwards, and I never in my life wrote to a 
 newspaper." Once, when Chenery, the editor, 
 came to join the table at the Athenaeum 
 where he and Mr. Cartwright were dining, 
 Kinglake rose, and removed to another part of 
 the room. " The Times" had inserted a state- 
 ment that Madame Novikoff was ordered to 
 leave England, and he thus publicly resented
 
 LATER DAYS, AND DEATH 1 39 
 
 it. " So unlike me," he said, relating the story, 
 " but somehow a savagery as of youth came 
 over me in my ancient days ; it was like being 
 twenty years old again." It came out, however, 
 that " our indiscreet friend Froude " had written 
 something which justified the paragraph, and 
 Kinglake sent his amende to Chenery, with 
 whom ordinarily he was on most friendly 
 terms. 
 
 He disliked Irishmen "in the lump," saying 
 that human nature is the same everywhere 
 except in Ireland. Parnell he personally ad- 
 mired, though hating Home Rule ; and stig- 
 matized as gross hypocrisy the desertion of him 
 by Liberals after the divorce trial. He was 
 wont to speak irreverently of Lord Beaconsfield, 
 whom he had known well at Lady Blessington's 
 in early days. He would have found himself in 
 accord with Huxley, who used to thank God, 
 his friend Mr. Fiske tells us, that he had never 
 bowed the knee either to Louis Napoleon or 
 Benjamin Disraeli. He poured scorn on the 
 Treaty of Berlin. Russia, he said, defeating the 
 Turks in war, has defeated Beaconsfield in diplo- 
 macy. If Englishmen understood such things 
 they would see that the Congress was a comedy ; 
 anyone who will satisfy himself as to what
 
 HO A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 Russia was really anxious to obtain, and then 
 look at the Salisbury-Schouvaloff treaty, will 
 see that, thanks to Beaconsfield's imbecility, 
 Schouvaloff obtained one of the most signal 
 diplomatic triumphs that was ever won. 1 A 
 
 1 Of course Kinglake was not alone in this opinion. It 
 was voiced in a delightful jeu d'esprit, now forgotten, which 
 it is worth while to reproduce : 
 
 "The Berlin Congress. 
 "The following Latin poem, from the pen of the well- 
 known German poet, Gustave Schwetschke, was distributed 
 by Prince Bismarck's special request amongst the Pleni- 
 potentiaries immediately after the last sitting on Saturday : 
 
 " ' Gaudeamus Congressibile. 
 " ' Gaudeamus igitur 
 
 Socii congressus, 
 Post dolores bellicosos, 
 Post labores gloriosos, 
 
 Nobis fit decessus. 
 
 " ' Ubi sunt, qui ante nos 
 
 Quondam consedere, 
 Viennenses, Parisienses 
 Tot per annos, tot per menses ? 
 
 Frustra decidere. 
 
 " ' Mundus heu ! vult decipi, 
 
 Sed non decipiatur, 
 Non plus ultra inter gentes 
 Litigantes et frementes 
 
 Manus conferatur.
 
 LATER DAYS, AND DEATH 141 
 
 sound entente between Russia and England he 
 thought both possible and desirable ; but con- 
 
 " ' Vivat Pax ! et comitent 
 
 Dii nunc congressum, 
 Ceu Deus ex machina 
 Ipsa venit Cypria 
 
 Roborans successum. 
 
 " ' Pereat discordia ! 
 
 Vincat semper litem 
 Proxenetae probitas, 1 
 Fides, spes, et charitas, 
 
 Gaudeamus item ! 
 
 "G. S.'" 
 
 " The Other Version. 
 
 (From the " Pall Mall Gazette.") 
 
 " A correspondent informs us that the version given in 
 'The Standard' of yesterday of the congratulatory ode 
 ('Gaudeamus igitur,' etc.) addressed to the Congress by 
 'the well-known German poet Gustave Schwetschke,' and 
 ' distributed by Prince Bismarck's request among the Pleni- 
 potentiaries,' is incorrect. The true version, we are assured, 
 is as follows : 
 
 " ' Rideamus igitur, 
 
 Socii Congressus ; 
 Post dolores bellicosos, 
 Post labores bumptiosos, 
 
 Fit mirandus messus. 
 
 1 " Der ehrlich Makler."
 
 142 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 ceived it to be rendered difficult by the want of 
 steadiness and capacity which, for international 
 
 " Ubi sunt qui apud nos 
 
 Causas litigare, 
 Moldo-Wallachae frementes, 
 Graeculi esurientes? 
 
 Heu ! absquatulare. 
 
 " ' Ubi sunt provincial 
 
 Quas est laus pacasse ? 
 Totae, totse, sunt partitas : 
 Has tulerunt Muscovite, 
 
 Illas Count Andrassy. 
 
 " ' Et quid est quod Angliae 
 
 Dedit hie Congressus ? 
 Jus pro aliis pugnandi, 
 Mortuum vivificandi — 
 
 Splendidi successus ! 
 
 " ' Vult Joannes decipi 
 
 Et bamboosulatur. 
 Io Beacche ! Quae majestas ! 
 Ostreae reportans testas 
 
 Domum gloriatur ! ' " 
 
 "This version, which from internal evidence will be seen 
 to be the true one, may be roughly Englished thus : 
 
 . " ' Let us have our hearty laugh, 
 Greatest of Congresses ! 
 After days and weeks pugnacious, 
 After labours ostentatious, 
 See how big the mess is !
 
 LATER DAYS, AND DEATH 143 
 
 purposes, were the real faults of Lord Beacons- 
 field and Lord Salisbury. He repeated with 
 much amusement the current anecdote of Lord 
 Beaconsfield's conquest of Mrs. Gladstone. 
 Meeting her in society, he was said to have 
 inquired with tenderness after Mr. Gladstone's 
 health, and then after receiving the loving 
 
 " ' Where are those who at our bar 
 
 Their demands have stated : 
 Robbed Roumanians rampaging, 
 Greeklings with earth-hunger raging ? 
 
 Where ? Absquatulated ! 
 
 " ' Where the lands we've pacified, 
 
 With their rebel masses ? 
 All are gone ; yes, all up-gobbled : 
 These the Muscovite has nobbled, 
 
 Those are Count Andrassy's. 
 
 " 'And what does England carry off 
 
 To add to her possessions ? 
 The right to wage another's strife, 
 The right to raise the dead to life — 
 
 Glorious concessions ! 
 
 " ' Well, let John Bull bamboozled be 
 
 If he 's so fond of sells ! 
 Io Beacche ! Hark the cheering ! 
 See him home in triumph bearing 
 
 Both ' the oyster shells ! ' " 
 
 1 Peace and Honour.
 
 144 A - w - KINGLAKE 
 
 wife's report of her William, to have rejoined 
 in his most dulcet tones, " Ah ! take care of 
 him, for he is very very precious." He always 
 attributed Dizzy's popularity to the feeling of 
 Englishmen that he had " shown them sport," 
 an instinct, he thought, supreme in all depart- 
 ments of the English mind. 
 
 Towards his old schoolfellow Gladstone he 
 never felt quite cordially, believing, rightly or 
 wrongly, that the great statesman nourished 
 enmity towards himself. He called him, as 
 has been said, "a good man in the worst 
 sense of the term, conscientious with a diseased 
 conscience." He watched with much amuse- 
 ment, as illustrating the moral twist in Glad- 
 stone's temperament, the " Colliery explosion," 
 as it was called, when Sir R. Collier, the 
 Attorney-General, was appointed to a Puisne 
 Judgeship, which he held only for a day or 
 two, in order to qualify him for a seat on a 
 new Court of Appeal ; together with a very 
 similar trick, by which Ewelme Rectory, ten- 
 able only by an Oxonian, was given to a Cam- 
 bridge man. The responsibility was divided 
 between Gladstone and Lord Hatherley the 
 Chancellor, with the mutual idea apparently 
 that each of the two became thereby individually
 
 LATER DAYS, AND DEATH 1 45 
 
 innocent. But Sir F. Pollock, in his amusing 
 " Reminiscences," recalls the amicable halving 
 of a wicked word between the Abbess of An- 
 douillet and the Novice Margarita in " Tristram 
 Shandy." It answered in neither case. " ' They 
 do not understand us,' cried Margarita. ' But 
 the Devil does,' said the Abbess of Andouillet." 
 The Collier scandal narrowly escaped by two 
 votes in the Lords, twenty-seven in the Com- 
 mons, a Parliamentary vote of censure, and 
 gave unquestionably a downward push to the 
 Gladstone Administration. Mr. Gladstone, on 
 the other hand, cordially admired Kinglake's 
 speeches, saying that few of those he had heard 
 in Parliament could bear so well as his the 
 test of publication. 
 
 To the great Prime Minister's absolute fear- 
 lessness he did full justice, as one of the finest 
 features in his character ; and loved to quote 
 an epigram by Lord Houghton, to whom Glad- 
 stone had complained in a moment of weariness 
 that he led the life of a dog. " Yes," said 
 Houghton, "but of a St. Bernard dog, ever 
 busied in saving life." He loved to contrast 
 the twofold biographical paradox in the careers 
 of the two famous rivals, Gladstone and Dis- 
 raeli ; the dreaming Tory mystic, incarnation 
 
 L
 
 I46 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 of Oxford exclusiveness and Puseyite reserve, 
 passing into the Radical iconoclast ; the Jew 
 clerk in a city lawyer's office, " bad specimen of 
 an inferior dandy," coming to rule the proudest 
 aristocracy and lead the most fastidious assembly 
 in the world. 
 
 He was not above broad farce when the 
 fancy seized him. At the time when a certain 
 kind of nonsense verse was popular, he, with 
 Sir Noel Paton and others, added not a few 
 facetious sonnets to Edward Lear's book, which 
 lay on Madame Novikoff's table. His author- 
 ship is betrayed by the introduction of familiar 
 Somersetshire names, Taunton, Wellington, 
 Curry Rivel, Creech, Trull, Wilton : 
 
 " There was a young lady of Wilton, 
 Who read all the poems of Milton : 
 
 And, when she had done, 
 
 She said, ' What bad fun ! ' 
 
 This prosaic young lady of Wilton." 
 
 There were many more, but this will perhaps 
 suffice ; ex ungue leonem. They were addressed 
 to the " Fair Lady of Claridge's," Madame 
 Novikoff's hotel when in London, and were 
 signed " Peter Paul, Bishop of Claridge's." 
 
 " There is a fair lady at Claridge's, 
 Whose smile is more charming to me,
 
 LATER DAYS, AND DEATH 1 47 
 
 Than the rapture of ninety-nine marriages 
 Could possibly, possibly, be ; " 
 
 is the final dedicatory stanza. It is the gracious 
 fooling of a philosopher who understood his 
 company. " There are folks," says Mr. Coun- 
 sellor Pleydell, " before whom a man should 
 take care how he plays the fool, because they 
 have either too much malice or too little wit." 
 Kinglake knew his associates, and was not 
 ashamed desipere in loco, to frolic in their 
 presence. 
 
 One point there was on which he never 
 touched himself or suffered others to interrogate 
 him, his conception of and attitude towards 
 the Unseen. He wore his religion as Sir 
 William Gull wore the fur of his coat, inside. 
 Outwardly he died as he had lived, a Stoic ; 
 that on the most personal and sacred of all 
 topics he should consult the Silences was in 
 keeping with his idiosyncrasy. Another famous 
 man, questioned as to his religious creed, made 
 answer that he believed what all wise men 
 believe. " And what do all wise men be- 
 lieve ? " " That all wise men keep to them- 
 selves ? " 
 
 ~ u
 
 INDEX 
 
 Abdu-l-Medjid, 66. 
 Aberdeen, Lord, 70. 
 Acton, Lord, 135. 
 Acton, Mrs., 7. 
 Adams, J. Quincy, 66. 
 Airey, General, 63, 72. 
 Alma, 39, 48, 59, 64, 73. 
 Ampere, M., 102. 
 Anastasius, 34 
 Ancelot, Mme., 99. 
 Arnold, Matthew, 88. 
 Ashburton, Lady, 135. 
 Ashburton, Lord, 33. 
 Athanasian Creed, 104. 
 
 Bachaumont, M., 87. 
 Balaclava, 74-77. 
 Bazancourt, Baron de, 48. 
 Beaconsfield. See Disraeli. 
 Beauclerk, T., 129. 
 Beaufort, Duke of, 39. 
 Bedford, Duke of, 127. 
 Berlin Congress, 139, etc. 
 Beust, Count, 96, 137. 
 Bismarck, 105, 116-118, 140, 
 141. 
 
 Blackwood, 46, 49, 52, 127. 
 Blaygon Hills, 25. 
 Boissy, Marquis de, 18. 
 Bosquet, General, 74, 76. 
 Boyle, Dean, 3. 
 Bridgewater, 40, 43, 45. 
 Bright, John, 68. 
 Brocas Clump, 22. 
 Brookfield, Mrs., 11, 18, 126, 
 
 127. 
 Browning, R., 15. 
 Buller, Charles, n. 
 Bulwer-Lytton, 19. 
 Bulwer, Sir H., 135. 
 Bunbury, Sir H., in, 112. 
 Burghersh, Lord, 65. 
 Burnaby, Captain, 78. 
 Burton. See Carrigaholt. 
 Bury, Lord, 118. 
 Byron, n, 15, 22, 29. 
 
 Cabinet, Sleeping, 61. 
 Cagliari, 41. 
 
 Campbell, Colin, 62, 72. 
 Cambridge, 10, 13. 
 Canning, Lady, 66.
 
 i5o 
 
 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 Canning, Sir S. See Stratford. 
 
 Canrobert, 71, 78, 79. 
 
 " Caradoc," 60. 
 
 Carlisle, Lord, 2. 
 
 Carlyle, 15, 33, 63, 136-137. 
 
 Carrigaholt, 21, 38. 
 
 Cart wright, Mr., 138. 
 
 Cathcart, General, 60, 76, 77. 
 
 Catherine II., 121. 
 
 Charles et George, 41. 
 
 Chatham, Lady, 6. 
 
 Chenery, Mr., 98, in, 138- 
 
 J 39- 
 Chesterfield, Lord, 58. 
 Chiffney, 24, 25. 
 Chorley, Mr., 17. 
 Clarendon, Lord, 50, 69. 
 Claridge's Hotel, 100, 137, 146. 
 Clarke, Major, 64. 
 Codrington, General, 63, 74. 
 Coleridge, G, 9. 
 Collier, Sir R., 144. 
 " Corner," the, 112, 126. 
 Cornwall, Barry. See Procter. 
 " Cosmo," the, 115. 
 Cour, M. de la, 69. 
 Crosse, Mrs., 3, 19. 
 Crimea, 39, 48, 54, 57, etc. 
 Crump, 51. 
 Curzon, 2. 
 
 Daubeny, Col., 78. 
 J )'Aurelle, 63. 
 Delane, 70. 
 
 Dilke, Sir Charles, 114. 
 
 Dilke, Lady, 87. 
 
 Disraeli, B., 41, 42, 121, 139, 
 
 140. 
 Dollinger, Dr., 104. 
 Doyle, Sir F., 22. 
 Dream, 125. 
 Du Barry, Mme., 130. 
 Duff, Sir M. E. Grant, 4, 44. 
 
 Ellenborough, Lord, 50. 
 
 Ellis, Mrs., 35. 
 
 Eothen, 2, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, n, 
 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 20-32, 
 38, 41, 58, 85-88, 127. 
 
 Estcott, Mr., 4. 
 
 Etchingham Letters, 130. 
 
 Eton, 10, 21, 28. 
 
 Everett, Mr., 25-26. 
 
 Fane, Violet, 102. 
 Ffoulkes, Rev. E. S., 104. 
 "Filioque," 104. 
 Fiske, Mr., 139. 
 Fitzgerald, E., 54. 
 Flowers, Jemmy, 22. 
 Forster, W. E., 124, 136. 
 Froude, J. A., 95, 99, 102, 
 126, 137. 
 
 Gallifet, M., 117. 
 Gambetta, 118. 
 Gatty, Dr., 10. 
 Gerontaion, 10 1.
 
 INDEX 
 
 '5i 
 
 Gladstone, W. E., 10, 70, 94, 
 95. 99, io 7, IX 5> I2 4, 143- 
 
 H5- 
 Gladstone, Mrs., 143. 
 
 Gortschakoff, 57, 97, 105-108, 
 
 122. 
 Grant, Miss, 121. 
 Gregory, Sir W., 112, 126. 
 Gregory, Lady, 3, 38, 111, 
 
 126, 133. 
 Greville Memoirs, 60. 
 Grey, Earl, 93, 108. 
 Grundy, Mrs., no. 
 Guiccioli, Mme., 18. 
 Gull, Sir W., 147. 
 
 Hallam, A., n. 
 Hamley, Sir E., 118. 
 Hampden, J., 46. 
 Harrington, Lord, 18. 
 Harrison, F., 114. 
 Hartington, Lord, 124. 
 Hatherley, Lord, 144. 
 Hay, Mr., 66. 
 
 Hayward, Abraham, 3, 19, 33, 
 95, 100, 102, 112, 124, 126, 
 
 Herbert, Auberon, 115. 
 Holland, Lady, 99. 
 Homer, 7, 10, 24, 27, 61. 
 Hood, Thomas, 17. 
 Hook, Theodore, 112. 
 Hoseason, 10. 
 
 Houghton, Lord, 3, 11, 13, 
 
 16, 17, 34-36, 99, US- 
 Howard, Mrs., 82. 
 Huxley, Professor, 139. 
 
 Inglis, Sir R., 23-24. 
 Inkerman, 77-79. 
 Irby, Miss, 98. 
 
 Jelf, W. E., 26. 
 Johnstone, Butler, 134. 
 Jowett, B., 125, 136. 
 
 Karabelnaya, 72, 85. 
 
 Keate, Dr., 10, 21, 22. 
 
 Kemble, Adelaide, 128. 
 
 Kemble, J. M., n, 13. 
 
 Kenyon, J., 39. 
 
 Kinglake, A. W., parentage 
 and birth, 5 ; school at 
 Ottery, 9; Eton, 10; Cam- 
 bridge, n-13; tour in the 
 East, 14; called to the 
 Bar, 1 7 ; further travel, 1 8 ; 
 shyness in society, 18 ; 
 manners and appearance, 
 19; "Eothen" published, 
 20; its popularity, 26-32; 
 writes in " Quarterly Re- 
 view," 33 ; accompanies 
 Lord Raglan to the Crimea, 
 39 ; enters Parliament for 
 Bridgewater,4o ; first failure 
 in the House, and subse-
 
 152 
 
 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 quent speeches, 41, etc. ; 
 unseated for bribery, 45 ; 
 publishes the first two 
 volumes of " Invasion of 
 the Crimea," 48 ; further 
 volumes, 55 ; the book dis- 
 cussed, 56-86 ; and com- 
 pared with " Eothen," 86- 
 89 ; his first acquaintance 
 with Madame Novikofif, his 
 tribute to her brother, M. 
 Kireeff, 91 ; her history, 
 character, literary work, 92- 
 95, 99 ; Kinglake's review 
 of her book " Russia and 
 England," 95-98 ; his letters 
 to her when abroad, 100, 
 etc. ; his later years, friends, 
 daily habits, in ; the 
 Athenaeum "Corner," 112 ; 
 his comment on Sir Charles 
 Dilke's Civil List motion, 
 114; on the French char- 
 acter, 116; on Gortscha- 
 koff's circular, 122 ; his sin- 
 gular dream, 125; increasing 
 deafness, 126; sickness and 
 death, 127; his traits of 
 manner, temperament, 
 speech, as reported by sur- 
 viving friends, 127, etc.; 
 attendance on Hayward's 
 last hours, 133 ; antipa- 
 thies and likings, 137, etc.; 
 
 opinion of Gladstone and 
 Disraeli, 139, etc. ; reserve 
 as to his own religious feel- 
 ings, 147. 
 
 Kinglake, Captain, 127. 
 
 Kinglake, Dr. Hamilton, 5, 6, 
 7, 9, 126-127. 
 
 Kinglake, Mr. Robert, 5, 6. 
 
 Kinglake, Mr. William, 5, 6. 
 
 Kinglake, Mrs. Hamilton, 4, 
 126-127. 
 
 Kinglake, Mrs. William (the 
 elder), 6, 8. 
 
 Kinglake, Mr. Serjeant, 5, 6. 
 
 Kinglake, Mrs. Serjeant, 48. 
 
 Kinglake, Rev. W. C, 5, 6. 
 
 Kireeff, Alexander, 92, 96. 
 
 Kireeff, Nicholas, 90. 
 
 Knox, Alexander, 7. 
 
 Korniloff, 73, 120. 
 
 Lafayette, Mme. de, 46. 
 " Lama, The," 16. 
 Lamb, Charles, 34. 
 Landseer, Edwin, 17. 
 Lane-Poole, Mr., 66, 67. 
 Laveleye, M., 98. 
 Layard, A. H., 49. 
 Lear, Edward, 146. 
 Le Brun, Mme., 99. 
 Lecky, Mr., 126. 
 Lever, Charles, 134. 
 Lewis, Sir G. Cornewall, 87. 
 Liddon, Canon, 104.
 
 INDEX 
 
 153 
 
 Lieven, Princess, 93, 108. 
 Lind, Jenny, 13. 
 Lockhart, J. G., 33. 
 Lucas, Mr., 49. 
 Lucan, Lord, 72, 76. 
 Lyons, Lord, 114. 
 
 Macaulay, 13, 33, 48, 51. 
 
 MacCarthy, 34. 
 Marie of Anjou, 23. 
 Marlen Bells, 13, 25. 
 Martineau, Miss, 2. 
 Massey, Mr., 112. 
 Maurice, F. D., n. 
 Menschikoff, Prince, 67-68. 
 Merime'e, Prosper, 129. 
 Methley, 10, 14, 21. 
 Mexborough, Lord, 10, 126. 
 Miller, Captain, 64. 
 Miller, Larrey, 21-22. 
 Milman, Dean, ^^. 
 " Minden Yell," 62, 78. 
 Mirliton, 137. 
 Monckton Milnes. See 
 
 Houghton. 
 Montalembert, M. de, 44. 
 Morier, Sir Robert, 99, 102, 
 
 136. 
 " Most, Mr.," 45. 
 Motley, Mr., 17. 
 Murray, John, 20. 
 Murray, Messrs., 97. 
 
 Napier, Macvey, 33. 
 
 Napoleon I., 34-35, 54, 69, 
 
 82, 117. 
 Napoleon, Louis, 41, 43, 71, 
 
 81, etc., 117, 119, 130. 
 Napoleon, Prince, 74. 
 Newcastle, Duke of, 48, 61, 
 
 70, 72. 
 Nicholas, Czar, 62, 68, 79-81, 
 
 93, 122. 
 Nolan, Captain, 62. 
 Norton, Mrs., 19. 
 " Nouvelle Revue," 4, 97. 
 Novikoff, Mme., 4, 90-110, 
 
 118-119, 126-127, i3°» J 34» 
 
 137-138, 146. 
 Nugent, Lord, 2. 
 Nurses, The Lady, 85. 
 
 Okes, Dr., 21-22. 
 Oliphant, L., 46, 112. 
 Ollivier, Mr., 20. 
 Osborne, Bernal, 18, 99, 134. 
 
 Ostend, 122. 
 Ottery St. Mary, 9. 
 Ourusoff, Prince, 119. 
 " Owl, The," 46-47. 
 
 Pad wick, Henry, 42. 
 "Pall Mall Gazette," 122. 
 Palmerston, Lord, 41, 70. 
 Panmure, Lord, 60, 70. 
 Pamell, C. S., 139. 
 Paton, Sir N., 146.
 
 154 
 
 A. W. KINGLAKE 
 
 Peel, Lady E., 135. 
 Peel, Sir R. (senior), 23. 
 Peel, Sir R. (junior), 41, 102, 
 
 135; 
 
 Pelissier, Marshal, 71-72. 
 
 Pennefather, General, 73, 77. 
 Pere Enfantin, 23. 
 Pharisees, the, 103. 
 Platonic, 38, 120. 
 Pleydell, Counsellor, 146. 
 Poitier, M., 38. 
 Pollington, Lord, 10, 14, 21. 
 Pollock, Sir F., 113, 145. 
 Poole, Mrs., 35. 
 Portraits, 127. 
 Praed, Mackworth, 10. 
 Prince Consort, 60. 
 Procter, Adelaide, 17. 
 Procter, B. W., 15, 16, 23. 
 Procter, Mrs., 15, 16, 17, 21. 
 
 Quaire, Mme. de, 126. 
 
 Raglan, Lord, 39, 40, 59, etc 
 Raglan, Lady, 40, 58. 
 Rawlinson, Sir H., 33, 112. 
 Re'camier, Mme., 99. 
 Reeve, H., 50. 
 Robespierre, 46. 
 Robinson, Crabb, 16. 
 Rogers, Thorold, 104. 
 Ruskin, J., 88. 
 
 Salisbury, Lord, 97, 143. 
 
 Salvation Army, 14. 
 Sartoris, Mr., 128. 
 Savile, Mr., 10. 
 Scarlett, General, 74-75. 
 Schwetschke, G., 140. 
 Schouvaloff, Count, 140. 
 Sidmouth, no. 
 Simpson, Mrs., 19, 53, 82. 
 Skene, Miss, 1. 
 Skepper, Anne, 15. 
 Skirrow, Ch., 134. 
 Skobeleff, General, 98, 99, 
 
 120. 
 Smith, Dr. Wm., 95. 
 Smith, Sydney, 7, 8. 
 Spedding, J., n. 
 Spring Rice, Hon. S., 11. 
 St. Arnaud, 18, 65, 116. 
 St. Simon, 23. 
 Stanhope, Lady H., 6. 
 Stanhope, Lord, 135. 
 Stanley, Dean, 2, 65, 104, 131, 
 
 135- 
 Stanley, Lady A., 135. 
 
 Stansfeld, Rt. Hon. J., 102. 
 
 Sterling, J., 11. 
 
 Steyne, Lord, 103. 
 
 Stirling, Sir W., 112. 
 
 Storks, Mr., 112. 
 
 Stratford de Redcliffe, Lord, 
 
 61, 62, 65, etc., 101, 122. 
 
 Strachan, Sir R., 131. 
 
 Strzelecki, Count, 112. 
 
 Swift, Dean, 100.
 
 INDEX 
 
 155 
 
 Talleyrand, 129. 
 
 Tangier, 8. 
 
 Taunton, 4, 5, 8, 9, 13. 
 
 Tennyson, 11, 12, 16, 22, 58, 
 
 69. 
 Thackeray, 1, 7. x 5. 33- 
 Thiers, M., 113- 
 Thompson, Dr., 11. 
 Ticknor, G., 112. 
 "Timbuctoo," 12. 
 " Times, The," 49. 98, 99. * 37. 
 
 138. 
 Todleben, 49. 73. 78-79. JI 9. 
 
 123. 
 Tower, Tom, 86. 
 Trench, R. C, 11. 
 Trevelyan, Sir G., 47. 
 "Tristram Shandy," 145- 
 Twisleton, E., 112. 
 Tyndall, Professor, 102. 
 Tynte, Colonel, 40. 
 
 "Vanity Fair," 127. 
 Vathek, 34. 
 
 Venables, G., 17, 33, 112. 
 Verg, Count de, 17. 
 
 Victoria, Queen, 80, 84, 121. 
 Villiers, Charles, 99. 
 Voltaire, 84. 
 
 Waddy, Colonel, 78. 
 
 Wales, Prince of (Regent), 24- 
 
 25- 
 Wales, Prince of (late), 120. 
 
 Warburton, Canon, 3, 137. 
 
 Warburton, Eliot, 2, 14, 1 7, 20, 
 
 21, 34-35. I2 9. J 37. 
 Waverley, 58. 
 Wellington, Duke of, 80, 108, 
 
 131- 
 Westbrook, Colonel, 42. 
 
 Wilberforce, Samuel, 33. 
 
 Wolff, Drummond, 112. 
 
 Woodforde, Dr., 6. 
 
 Woodforde, Mary, 6. 
 
 Wordsworth, W., 11, 34, 5 6 - 
 
 Wordsworth, Charles, 12. 
 
 Wynter, Dr., 26. 
 
 Yea, Lacy, 60, 63. 
 Yonge, Miss, 1.
 
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 EOTHEN 
 
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