period and, in a sense, to the same fashion. Each combines a
tantalizing personal charm with a strong, almost fierce, coloring of
circumstance. The central figure in each is unmistakably an
Englishman, and quite as unmistakably a singular Englishman. Each
bears witness to a fine eye for theatrical arrangement. But whereas
Borrow stood for ever fortified by his wayward nature and atrocious
English against the temptation of writing as he ought, Kinglake
commenced author with a respect for "composition," ingrained perhaps
by his Public School and University training. Borrow arrays his page
by instinct, Kinglake by study. His irony (as in the interview with
the Pasha) is almost too elaborate; his artistic judgment (as in the
Plague chapter) almost too sure; the whole book almost too clever. The
performance was wonderful; the promise a trifle dangerous.


The "Invasion."

"Composition" indeed proved the curse of the _Invasion of the Crimea_:
for Kinglake was a slow writer, and composed with his eye on the page,
the paragraph, the phrase, rather than on the whole work. Force and
accuracy of expression are but parts of a good prose style; indeed
are, strictly speaking, inseparable from perspective, balance, logical
connection, rise and fall of emotion. It is but an indifferent
landscape that contains no pedestrian levels: and his desire for the
immediate success of each paragraph as it came helped Kinglake to miss
the broad effect. He must always be vivid; and when the strain told,
he exaggerated and sounded--as Matthew Arnold accused him of
sounding--the note of provinciality. There were other causes. He was,
as we have seen, an English country gentleman--_avant tout je suis
gentilhomme anglais_, as the Duke of Wellington wrote to Louis XVIII.