If the time for the history is happily chosen, so is the historian. Few men who have written so little have so established their reputation as Mr Kinglake. His ‘Eothen,’ immensely popular at first, has settled into an English classic. It is full of interest, full of remarkably vivid descriptions, full of original writing; and though the style does not reject effects which a very pure taste would condemn, yet it possesses the eminent merits of vigour, condensation, and richness. In the fulness of the fame thus earned, Mr Kinglake accompanied the army to the Crimea. The scenes of the war consequently possessed for him a reality which no reading, no imagination, no second-hand description can impart. He had seen the Euxine covered with the vast flotilla of the Allies. He had set foot on the hostile coast at the same time as the combined armies. He had accompanied them in their compact advance, when their columns seemed but spots and patches in the vast circle of sea and plain. His own eyes had beheld the battle of the Alma, and the signs of death and suffering that remained next day to mark the phases of the struggle. And when afterwards he came to record the incidents of the war, though no individual observation could embrace all the details, there was always present with him the invaluable power which personal knowledge confers, to define, to affirm, or to reject. And as it was soon understood that he intended to write the history of the war, he, in his double capacity of approved author and actual spectator, became almost, as a matter of course, the depositary of a vast amount of information connected with the subject, oral and documentary, private and official. He had a large acquaintance with the political as well as the military actors in the drama. Few men, then, could have had so free access as he to the materials of which the history must be wrought.