In whatever set he may have lived he made his mark at Cambridge. Lord Houghton remembered him as an orator at the Union; and speaking to Cambridge undergraduates fifty years later, after enumerating the giants of his student days, Macaulay, Praed, Buller, Sterling, Merivale, he goes on to say: “there, too, were Kemble and Kinglake, the historian of our earliest civilization and of our latest war; Kemble as interesting an individual as ever was portrayed by the dramatic genius of his own race; Kinglake, as bold a man-at-arms in literature as ever confronted public opinion.” We know, too, that not many years after leaving Cambridge he received, and refused, a solicitation to stand as Liberal representative of the University in Parliament. He was, in fact, as far as any of his contemporaries from acquiescing in social conventionalisms and shams. To the end of his life he chafed at such restraint: “when pressed to stay in country houses,” he writes in 1872, “I have had the frankness to say that I have not discipline enough.” Repeatedly he speaks with loathing of the “stale civilization,” the “utter respectability,” of European life; {14a} longed with all his soul for the excitement and stir of soldiership, from which his shortsightedness debarred him; {14b} rushed off again and again into foreign travel; set out immediately on leaving Cambridge, in 1834, for his first Eastern tour, “to fortify himself for the business of life.” Methley joined him at Hamburg, and they travelled by Berlin, Dresden, Prague, Vienna, to Semlin, where his book begins. Lord Pollington’s health broke down, and he remained to winter at Corfu, while Kinglake pursued his way alone, returning to England in October, 1835. {14c} On his return he read for the Chancery Bar along with his friend Eliot Warburton, under Bryan Procter, a Commissioner of Lunacy, better known by his poet-name, Barry Cornwall; his acquaintance with both husband and wife ripening into life-long friendship. Mrs. Procter is the “Lady of Bitterness,” cited in the “Eothen” Preface. As Anne Skepper, before her marriage, she was much admired by Carlyle; “a brisk witty prettyish clear eyed sharp tongued young lady”; and was the intimate, among many, especially of Thackeray and Browning. In epigrammatic power she resembled Kinglake; but while his acrid sayings were emitted with gentlest aspect and with softest speech; while, like Byron’s Lambro: “he was the mildest mannered man That ever scuttled ship or cut a throat, With such true breeding of a gentleman, You never could divine his real thought,”