Bowden.




ALEXANDER WILLIAM KINGLAKE


January 10, 1891. His Life.

Alexander William Kinglake was born in 1812, the son of a country
gentleman--Mr. W. Kinglake, of Wilton House, Taunton--and received a
country gentleman's education at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge.
From college he went to Lincoln's Inn, and in 1837 was called to the
Chancery Bar, where he practised with fair but not eminent success. In
1844 he published _Eothen_, and having startled the town, quietly
resumed his legal work and seemed willing to forget the achievement.
Ten years later he accompanied his friend, Lord Raglan, to the Crimea.
He retired from the Bar in 1856, and entered Parliament next year as
member for Bridgwater. Re-elected in 1868, he was unseated on petition
in 1869, and thenceforward gave himself up to the work of his life. He
had consented, after Lord Raglan's death, to write a history of the
Invasion of the Crimea. The two first volumes appeared in 1863; the
last was published but two years before he succumbed, in the first
days of 1891, to a slow incurable disease. In all, the task had
occupied thirty years. Long before these years ran out, the world had
learnt to regard the Crimean struggle in something like its true
perspective; but over Kinglake's mind it continued to loom in all its
original proportions. To adapt a phrase of M. Jules Lemaître's, "_le
monde a changé en trente ans: lui ne bouge; il ne lève plus de dessus