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 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." We
are reminded of Charles Lamb--"here's Wordsworth says he could have
written Hamlet, 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 amusing himself as he proceeds, without reverence
for others' faith, or lenity towards others' prejudices. It is a
real book, not a sham; it equals Anastasius, rivals 'Vathek;' its
terseness, 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 second Alexander: Egypt in his grasp, he