The letters to the ‘New York Herald,’ narrating the Abyssinian campaign, were afterwards elaborated into permanent form, the last half of Stanley’s book, ‘Coomassie and Magdala.’ The campaign has become a chapter of history; the detention of Consul Cameron by the tyrannical King Theodore, of Abyssinia, continued for years; the imprisonment and abuse of other officers and missionaries, to the number of sixty; the fruitless negotiations for their release; the despatch from India of a little army of English and Punjabis, under Sir Robert Napier, afterwards Lord Napier, of Magdala; the marching columns of six thousand men, with as many more to hold the sea-coast, and the line of communication; the slow advance for months through country growing more wild and mountainous, up to a height of ten thousand feet; Napier’s patient diplomacy with chiefs and tribes already chafing against Theodore’s cruelties; the arrival before the stronghold; the sudden impetuous charge of the King’s force; the quick repulse of men armed with spears and match-locks before troops handling rocket-guns, Sniders, and Enfields; the surrender of the captives, and their appearance among their deliverers; the spectacle of three hundred bodies of lately-massacred prisoners; the next day’s assault and capture of the town; Theodore shot by his own hand; the return to the coast: all this Stanley shared and told. His telling, in its final form,[11] has for setting an account of antecedent events, the early success and valour of Theodore, his degeneracy, the queer interchange of courtesies and mutual puzzlements between Downing Street and Magdala, and the organisation of the rescue force. These historical prefaces were characteristic of Stanley’s books; the story of what he saw had an illuminating background of what had gone before, worked out by assiduous study. The record of the campaign is told with plentiful illustration of grand and novel landscape, of barbaric ways, of traits in his companions. There is a pervading tone of high spirits and abounding vitality. At first looked at a little askance, as an American, by the other correspondents, he soon got on very good terms with them. ‘Their mess,’ he writes, ‘was the most sociable in the army, as well as the most loveable and good-tempered’; and he names the London correspondents, individually, as his personal friends. Lord Napier was courteous, and gave him the same privileges as his English colleagues. With the officers, too, he got on well. There is occasional humorous mention in the book, and more fully in the Journal, of a certain captain whose tent he shared for a while, and whom he names ‘Smelfungus,’ after Sterne; he might have been dubbed ‘Tartarin de Tarascon,’ for he was a braggadocio, sportsman, and warrior, whose romances first puzzled, and then amused, Stanley, until he learned that a severe wound, and a sun-stroke, had produced these obscurations in a sensible and gallant fellow.