son papier à copie sa face congestionné_." And yet Kinglake was no
cloistered scribe. Before his last illness he dined out frequently,
and was placed by many among the first half-a-dozen talkers in London.
His conversation, though delicate and finished, brimmed full of
interest in life and affairs: but let him enter his study, and its
walls became a hedge. Without, the world was moving: within, it was
always 1854, until by slow toiling it turned into 1855.


Style.

His style is hard, elaborate, polished to brilliance. Its difficult
labor recalls Thucydides. In effect it charms at first by its accuracy
and vividness: but with continuous perusal it begins to weigh upon
the reader, who feels the strain, the unsparing effort that this
glittering fabric must have cost the builder, and at length ceases to
sympathize with the story and begins to sympathize with the author.
Kinglake started by disclaiming "composition." "My narrative," he
says, in the famous preface to _Eothen_, "conveys not those
impressions which _ought to have been_ produced upon any
well-constituted mind, but those which were really and truly received,
at the time of his rambles, by a headstrong and not very amiable
traveller.... As I have felt, so I have written."


"_Eothen_."

For all this, page after page of _Eothen_ gives evidence of deliberate
calculation of effect. That book is at once curiously like and
curiously unlike Borrows' _Bible in Spain_. The two belong to the same