overpowering heat and stillness, he heard the Marlen bells of
Taunton peal for morning church. {5}

In whatever set he may have lived he made his mark at Cambridge.
Lord Houghton remembered 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 solicitation to stand as Liberal representative of
the University in Parliament. He was, in fact, as far as any of
his contemporaries from acquiescing in social conventionalisms and
shams. To the end of his life he chafed at such restraint: "when
pressed to stay in country houses," he writes in 1872, "I have had
the frankness to say that I have not discipline enough."
Repeatedly he speaks with loathing of the "stale civilization," the
"utter respectability," of European life; {6} longed with all his
soul for the excitement and stir of soldiership, from which his
shortsightedness debarred him; {7} rushed off again and again into
foreign travel; set out immediately on leaving Cambridge, in 1834,
for his first Eastern tour, "to fortify himself 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, returning to England
in October, 1835. {8} On his return he read for the Chancery Bar