were awaited with eager expectation. An elaborate history of the
war had been written by a Baron de Bazancourt, condemned as unfair
and unreliable by English statesmen, and severely handled in our
reviews. So the wish was felt everywhere for some record less
ephemeral, which should render the tale historically, and
counteract Bazancourt's misstatements. "I hear," wrote the Duke of
Newcastle, "that Kinglake has undertaken the task. He has a noble
opportunity of producing a text-book for future history, but to
accomplish this it must be STOICALLY impartial."

The beauty of their style, the merciless portraiture of the Second
Empire, the unparalleled diorama of the Alma fight, combined to
gain for these first four-and-twenty chapters an immediate vogue as
emphatic and as widely spread as that which saluted the opening of
Macaulay's "History." None of the later volumes, though highly
prized as battle narratives, quite came up to these. The political
and military conclusions drawn provoked no small bitterness; his
cousin, Mrs. Serjeant Kinglake, used to say that she met sometimes
with almost affronting coldness in society at the time, under the
impression that she was A. W. Kinglake's wife. Russians were,
perhaps unfairly, dissatisfied. Todleben, who knew and loved
Kinglake well, pronounced the book a charming romance, not a
history of the war. Individuals were aggrieved by its notice of
themselves or of their regiments; statesmen chafed under the
scientific analysis of their characters, or at the publication of
official letters which they had intended but not required to be
looked upon as confidential, and which the recipients had in all
innocence communicated to the historian. Palmerstonians, accepting
with their chief the Man of December, were furious at the exposure
of his basenesses. Lucas in "The Times" pronounced the work