remarkable talents, but something of a "terrible example" in
regard to the practice, which has already been noticed as characteristic
of the century, of devoting enormously long histories to special
subjects and points. Kinglake, who was a native of Somerset, an Eton and
Cambridge man, a barrister subsequently, for some years a Member of
Parliament, and a man of independent means, first distinguished himself
in letters by the very brilliant and popular book of travels in the East
called _Eothen_ which was published in 1847. That there is something of
manner and trick about this is not to be denied; but it must be allowed
that the trick and manner have been followed, apparently with success,
in travel-writing for about half a century, while it cannot be fairly
said that Kinglake himself had any exact models, though he may have owed
something to Beckford and a little to Sterne. It is not very easy to say
whether Kinglake's literary reputation would have stood higher or lower
if he had written nothing else; but as a matter of fact, before many
years were over, he attempted a much more ambitious task in the _History
of the Crimean War_, the first two volumes of which appeared in 1863,
though the book was not finished till twenty years later. That this
history shows no small literary faculties no competent judge can deny.
The art of word-painting--a dubious and dangerous art--is pushed to
almost its furthest limits; the writer has a wonderful gift of combining
the minutest and most numerous details into an orderly and intelligible
whole; and the quality which the French untranslatably call _diable au
corps_, or, as we more pedantically say, "daemonic energy," is present
everywhere. But the book is monstrously out of proportion,--a single
battle has something like an entire volume, and the events of some two
years occupy eight,--and, clear as the individual pictures are, the
panorama is of such endless length that the mind's eye retains no proper
notion of it. In the second place, the style, though brilliant, is hard
and brassy, full of points that are more suitable to the platform or the
newspaper than to the historic page,--not so much polished as varnished,
and after a short time intolerably fatiguing. In the third,--and this is
the gravest fault of all,--the author's private or patriotic likes or
dislikes pervade the whole performance and reduce too much of it to a
tissue of extravagant advocacy or depreciation, made more d