This I have endeavoured to do, with such aid as I could command from his few remaining contemporaries. His letters to his family were destroyed by his own desire; on those written to Madame Novikoff no such embargo was laid, nor does she believe that it was intended. I have used these sparingly, and all extracts from them have been subjected to her censorship. If the result is not Attic in salt, it is at any rate Roman in brevity. I send it forth with John Bunyan’s homely aspiration: And may its buyer have no cause to say, His money is but lost or thrown away. CONTENTS CHAP. PAGE I. EARLY YEARS 1 II. “EOTHEN” 20 III. LITERARY AND PARLIAMENTARY LIFE 33 IV. “THE INVASION OF THE CRIMEA” 56 V. MADAME NOVIKOFF 90 VI. LATER DAYS, AND DEATH 111 INDEX 149 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS KINGLAKE IN THE LATE FIFTIES _Frontispiece_ ELIOT WARBURTON 14 LORD RAGLAN 40 MADAME NOVIKOFF 92 KINGLAKE IN THE EARLY SEVENTIES 128 CHAPTER I EARLY YEARS THE fourth decade of the deceased century dawned on a procession of Oriental pilgrims, variously qualified or disqualified to hold the gorgeous East in fee, who, with _bakshîsh_ in their purses, a theory in their brains, an unfilled diary-book in their portmanteaus, sought out the Holy Land, the Sinai peninsula, the valley of the Nile, sometimes even Armenia and the Monte Santo, and returned home to emit their illustrated and mapped octavos. We have the type delineated admiringly in Miss Yonge’s “Heartsease,” {1} bitterly in Miss Skene’s “Use and Abuse,” facetiously in the Clarence Bulbul of “Our Street.” “Hang it! has not everybody written an Eastern book? I should like to meet anybody in society now who has not been up to the Second Cataract. My Lord Castleroyal has done one—an honest one; my Lord Youngent another—an amusing one; my Lord Woolsey another—a pious one; there is the ‘Cutlet and the Cabob’—a sentimental one; Timbuctoothen—a humorous one.” Lord Carlisle’s honesty, Lord Nugent’s fun, Lord Lindsay’s piety, failed to float their books. Miss Martineau, clear, frank, unemotional Curzon, fuddling the Levantine monks with rosoglio that he might fleece them of their treasured hereditary manuscripts, even Eliot Warburton’s power, colouring, play of fancy, have yielded to the mobility of Time. Two alone out of the gallant company maintain their vogue to-day: Stanley’s “Sinai and Palestine,” as a Fifth Gospel, an inspired Scripture Gazetteer; and “Eothen,” as a literary gem of purest ray serene.