In fact, the claims of his Crimean book, which compelled him latterly to refuse all other literary work, gave little time for correspondence. Its successive revisions formed his daily task until illness struck him down. Sacks of Crimean notes, labelled through some fantastic whim with female Christian names—the Helen bag, the Adelaide bag, etc.—were ranged round his room. His working library was very small in bulk, his habit being to cut out from any book the pages which would be serviceable, and to fling the rest away. So, we are told, the first Napoleon, binding volumes for his travelling library, shore their margins to the quick, and removed all prefaces, title-pages, and other superfluous leaves. So, too, Edward Fitzgerald used to tear out of his books all that in his judgment fell below their authors’ highest standard, retaining for his own delectation only the quintessential remnants. Vols. III. and IV. appeared in 1868, V. in 1875, VI. in 1880, VII. and VIII. in 1887; while a Cabinet Edition of the whole in nine volumes was issued continuously from 1870 to 1887. Our attempt to appreciate the book shall be reserved for another chapter. CHAPTER IV “THE INVASION OF THE CRIMEA” WAS the history of the Crimean War worth writing? Not as a magnified newspaper report,—that had been already done—but as a permanent work of art from the pen of a great literary expert? Very many of us, I think, after the lapse of fifty years, feel compelled to say that it was not. The struggle represented no great principles, begot no far-reaching consequences. It was not inspired by the “holy glee” with which in Wordsworth’s sonnet Liberty fights against a tyrant, but by the faltering boldness, the drifting, purposeless unresolve of statesmen who did not desire it, and by the irrational violence of a Press which did not understand it. It was not a necessary war; its avowed object would have been attained within a few weeks or months by bloodless European concert. It was not a glorious war; crippled by an incompatible alliance and governed by the Evil Genius who had initiated it for personal and sordid ends, it brought discredit on baffled generals in the field, on Crown, Cabinet, populace, at home. It was not a fruitful war; the detailed results purchased by its squandered life and treasure lapsed in swift succession during twenty sequent years, until the last sheet of the treaty which secured them was contemptuously torn up by Gortschakoff in 1870. But a right sense of historical proportion is in no time the heritage of the many, and is least of all attainable while the memory of a campaign is fresh. On Englishmen who welcomed home their army in 1855, the strife from which shattered but victorious it had returned, loomed as epoch-making and colossal, as claiming therefore permanent record from some eloquent artist of attested descriptive power. Soon the report gained ground that the destined chronicler was Kinglake, and all men