hailed the selection; yet the sceptic who in looking back to-day decries the greatness of the campaign may perhaps no less hesitate to approve the fitness of its chosen annalist. His fame was due to the perfection of a single book; he ranked as a potentate in _style_. But literary perfection, whether in prose or poetry, is a fragile quality, an _afflatus_ irregular, independent, unamenable to orders; the official tributes of a Laureate we compliment at their best with the northern farmer’s verdict on the pulpit performances of his parson: “An’ I niver knaw’d wot a meän’d but I thow’t a ’ad summut to saäy, And I thowt a said wot a owt to ’a said an’ I comed awaäy.” Set to compile a biography from thirty years of “Moniteurs,” the author of Waverley, like Lord Chesterfield’s diamond pencil, produced one miracle of dulness; it might well be feared that Kinglake’s volatile pen, when linked with forceful feeling and bound to rigid task-work, might lose the charm of casual epigram, easy luxuriance, playful egotism, vagrant allusion, which established “Eothen” as a classic. On the other hand, he had been for twenty years conversant with Eastern history, geography, politics; was, more than most professional soldiers, an adept in military science; had sate in the centre of the campaign as its general’s guest and comrade; was intrusted, above all, by Lady Raglan with the entire collection of her husband’s papers: her wish, implied though not expressed, that they should be utilized for the vindication of the great field-marshal’s fame, he accepted as a sacred charge; her confidence not only governed his decision to become the historian of the war, but imparted a personal character to the narrative.