three-fourths of its matter, the Preface appears in Vol. I. of the
Cabinet Edition. The erasure was no slight sacrifice to an author
of Kinglake's literary sensitiveness, mutilating as it did the
integrity of a carefully schemed composition, and leaving visible
the scar. He sets forth the strongly sentimental and romantic side
of Russian temperament. Love of the Holy Shrines begat the war of
1853, racial ardour the war of 1876. The first was directed by a
single will, the second by national enthusiasm; yet the mind of
Nicholas was no less tossed by a breathless strife of opposing
desires and moods than was Russia at large by the struggle between
Panslavism and statesmanship. Kinglake paints vividly the imposing
figure of the young Kireeff, his stature, beauty, bravery, the
white robe he wore incarnadined by death-wounds, his body captured
by the hateful foes. He goes on to tell how myth rose like an
exhalation round his memory: how legends of "a giant piling up
hecatombs by a mighty slaughter" reverberated through mansion and
cottage, town and village, cathedral and church; until thousands of
volunteers rushed to arms that they might go where young Kireeff
had gone. Alexander's hand was forced, and the war began, which
but for England's intervention would have cleared Europe of the
Turk. We have the text, but not the sermon; the Preface ends
abruptly with an almost clumsy peroration.

The lady who inspired both the eulogy and the curtailment was
Madame Novikoff, more widely known perhaps as O. K., with whom
Kinglake maintained during the last twenty years of life an
intimate and mutual friendship. Madame Olga Novikoff, nee Kireeff,
is a Russian lady of aristocratic rank both by parentage and
marriage. In a lengthened sojourn at Vienna with her brother-in-
law, the Russian ambassador, she learned the current business of