A. W. Kinglake | Page 5

coarseness, the kindness, of that hard old worldling our Lady of Bitterness." In the presence of one man, Tennyson, she laid aside her shrewishness: "talking with Alfred Tennyson lifts me out of the earth earthy; a visit to Farringford is like a retreat to the religious." A celebrity in London for fifty years, she died, witty and vigorous to the last, in 1888. "You and I and Mr. Kinglake," she says to Lord Houghton, "are all that are left of the goodly band that used to come to St. John's Wood; Eliot Warburton, Motley, Adelaide, Count de Verg, Chorley, Sir Edwin Landseer, my husband." "I never could write a book," she tells him in another letter, "and one strong reason for not doing so was the idea of some few seeing how poor it was. Venables was one of the few; I need not say that you were one, and Kinglake."
Kinglake was called to the Chancery Bar, and practised apparently with no great success. He believed that his reputation as a writer stood in his way. When, in 1845, poor Hood's friends were helping him by gratuitous articles in his magazine, "Hood's Own," Kinglake wrote to Monckton Milnes refusing to contribute. He will send 10 pounds to buy an article from some competent writer, but will not himself write. "It would be seriously injurious to me if the author of 'Eothen' were affiched as contributing to a magazine. My frailty in publishing a book has, I fear, already hurt me in my profession, and a small sin of this kind would bring on me still deeper disgrace with the solicitors."
Twice at least in these early years he travelled. "Mr. Kinglake," writes Mrs. Procter in 1843, "is in Switzerland, reading Rousseau." And in the following year we hear of him in Algeria, accompanying St. Arnaud in his campaign against the Arabs. The mingled interest and horror inspired in him by this extra-ordinary man finds expression in his "Invasion of the Crimea" (ii. 157). A few, a very few survivors, still remember his appearance and manners in the forties. The eminent husband of a lady, now passed away, who in her lifetime gave Sunday dinners at which Kinglake was always present, speaks of him as SENSITIVE, quiet in the presence of noisy people, of Brookfield and the overpowering Bernal Osborne; liking their company, but never saying anything worthy of remembrance. A popular old statesman, still active in the House of Commons, recalls meeting him at Palmerston, Lord Harrington's seat, where was assembled a party in honour of Madame Guiccioli and her second husband, the Marquis de Boissy, and tells me that he attached himself to ladies, not to gentlemen, nor ever joined in general tattle. Like many other famous men, he passed through a period of shyness, which yielded to women's tactfulness only. From the first they appreciated him; "if you were as gentle as your friend Kinglake," writes Mrs. Norton reproachfully to Hayward in the sulks. Another coaeval of those days calls him handsome--an epithet I should hardly apply to him later--slight, not tall, sharp featured, with dark hair well tended, always modishly dressed after the fashion of the thirties, the fashion of Bulwer's exquisites, or of H. K. Browne's "Nicholas Nickleby" illustrations; leaving on all who saw him an impression of great personal distinction, yet with an air of youthful ABANDON which never quite left him: "He was pale, small, and delicate in appearance," says Mrs. Simpson, Nassau Senior's daughter, who knew him to the end of his life; while Mrs. Andrew Crosse, his friend in the Crimean decade, cites his finely chiselled features and intellectual brow, "a complexion bloodless with the pallor not of ill-health, but of an old Greek bust."
CHAPTER II
--"EOTHEN"

"Eothen" appeared in 1844. Twice, Kinglake tells us, he had essayed the story of his travels, twice abandoned it under a sense of strong disinclination to write. A third attempt was induced by an entreaty from his friend Eliot Warburton, himself projecting an Eastern tour; and to Warburton in a characteristic preface the narrative is addressed. The book, when finished, went the round of the London market without finding a publisher. It was offered to John Murray, who cited his refusal of it as the great blunder of his professional life, consoling himself with the thought that his father had equally lacked foresight thirty years before in declining the "Rejected Addresses"; he secured the copyright later on. It was published in the end by a personal friend, Ollivier, of Pall Mall, Kinglake paying 50 pounds to cover risk of loss; even worse terms than were obtained by Warburton two years afterwards from Colburn, who owned in the fifties to having cleared 6,000 pounds by "The Crescent and the Cross." The volume was an octavo of 418 pages; the