We have thus stated our one point of difference with the author of these fascinating volumes. With this exception we have little to do but to praise—and indeed, as a piece of writing, we have nothing to do but to praise the work from beginning to end. How materials in many respects so unpromising could be made so interesting, is marvellous. Many a reader who remembers what a tangled skein of politics it was that led to the war—many a soldier who has a confused recollection of a jumble of Holy Places, and the Four Powers, and Vienna Conferences, and who would be glad to know what it was he was fighting about, now that it is all over—will take up these volumes as a duty, and will be surprised to find that the narrative approached in so resolute a frame of mind, is more easy to read and more difficult to lay down than the most popular of the popular novels. The dispute about the Holy Places, though not in itself in any appreciable degree the cause of the war, was the introduction to the events that led to hostilities. There is something almost ludicrous, something more befitting the times of Philip Augustus and of Cœur de Lion than those of Louis Napoleon and Lord Palmerston, in the idea of great European potentates appearing as the backers of two denominations of monks, who were quarrelling about the key of a church-door in Palestine. Nevertheless, the Czar, as the chief of a people whose passions were strongly aroused by the dispute, had a real and legitimate interest in the matter. To suppose that the President of the French Republic, or any section of the people over whom he presided, really cared whether the Greek or the Latin Church had the custody of this important key, would be absurd. But the President it was who opened the question by advocating the claims of the Latins. His object in doing so is by no means clear. Mr Kinglake accounts for it by saying, “The French President, in cold blood, and under no new motive for action, took up the forgotten cause of the Latin Church of Jerusalem, and began to apply it as a wedge for sundering the peace of the world.” Now, that Louis Napoleon was desirous of disturbing the peace of the world, is Mr Kinglake’s argument throughout. It is to his book what the wrath of Achilles is to the ‘Iliad;’ and he tells us that the reason for this truculent desire was to prop up the French Empire. But that reason, though it may plausibly explain the acts of the French Emperor, does not account in the least for the acts of the French President. We presume Mr Kinglake hardly wishes us to infer that Louis Napoleon sowed the seeds of war during his Presidency, as provision for the possible necessities of a possible Empire. Yet the historian’s theory would seem to demand the inference.