Moreover, he had shown in his former work that he possessed another qualification for his task. History cannot be written at a heat. Patient inquiry, long meditation, the fortitude necessary for the abandonment of convenient conclusions too hastily come to, are all indispensable to success. But with this pursuit of the necessary details, unity of effect, as numberless failures have shown, is almost incompatible. Now, Mr Kinglake had given remarkable proof that he could bestow a microscopic attention on particulars without sacrifice of breadth. It is generally believed that he spent nine years in bringing the single volume of ‘Eothen’ up to the standard of his own fastidious taste. The sarcastic advice of Pope to an aspiring author—“Keep your piece nine years”—had been literally accepted, but with a result very different from that which the adviser anticipated. Instead of becoming dissatisfied with a work looked at after a long interval and with changed feelings, Mr Kinglake proved that he could not only “strike the second heat”—the process which Ben Jonson says is so necessary for the forging of ideas into happy forms of expression—but that he could bring his thoughts again and again to the intellectual smithy to be recast and shaped without finding the fire extinct. Here, then, was evidence of a quality most valuable to one who must long and patiently grope amid masses of evidence and details, sometimes conflicting, often worthless, and yet retain freshly the power of throwing the selected results into a form clear, harmonious, and striking.