_G. C., February 25th_.--I shall be very glad to see the article in print. I am sure it will make a great sensation. Kinglake would induce people to believe that the Emperor was under an urgent necessity to turn away the attention of his subjects from his action at home, and that he therefore dragged us into the war fourteen or fifteen months after the _coup d'etat_. It would, I think, be worth while to get some facts respecting his status in France at that time. If I am not mistaken, he was in no trouble or danger at all; for the nation had accepted him as a sort of deliverer from the _rouges_, the fear of whom had been terrifying people out of their senses. _G. C., March 4th_.--The article quite comes up to my expectations, and I like it very much. I cannot think it obnoxious to the charge of dulness; but on that point I may not be an impartial judge, as the diplomatic details are to me intensely interesting. I have hardly any observations to make that would be worth your attending to, but I will mention one or two things that have occurred to me. And this he did at considerable length, suggesting several confirmations, modifications, or additions. So long as this article was to be considered as an ordinary contribution to the 'Edinburgh Review,' it bore merely the authority of the 'Review,' which, however great, was in no sense official; but now that the share of Lord Clarendon in its authorship is revealed, it assumes an extreme importance, as an original, though necessarily partial, account of what took place, and may be held as definitely settling the fate of some of the extraordinary misstatements which--foisted on the credulity of the public by the literary skill, the brilliant language, and the unblushing audacity of Mr. Kinglake--have been accepted as history, and have passed into current belief. Perhaps nothing concerning the Russian war is more commonly repeated than the statement that we were tricked into it by the Emperor of the French for his own selfish ends, and in his desire to be received into the brotherhood of sovereigns; that our ministers were blindly following the lead of Louis Napoleon, and were guilty of a very gross blunder. It is unnecessary and would be out of place to enter here on the examination and demolition of all this, as given in the pages of the 'Edinburgh Review;' and equally would it be out of place to discuss the question--as unknown to Kinglake or to Reeve in 1863 as it was to Palmerston or Clarendon ten years earlier--whether we were not then, whether we have not been ever since, 'putting our money on the wrong horse.' If we were, if we have been--a thing which many among us are still unwilling to believe--it is at least certain that in 1853, as in 1840, it was all but universally held in this country that it would be prejudicial and dangerous to our most important interests for either Russia or France to obtain sovereign control over the