A. W. Kinglake: A Biographical and Literary Study

in fee, who, with baksh?sh in their purses, a theory in their brains, an unfilled diary-book in their portmanteaus, sought out the Holy Land, the S

y Lord Youngent another-an amusing one; my Lord Woolsey another-a pious one; there is the 'Cutlet and the Cabob'-a sentimental one; Timbuctoothen-a humorous one." Lord Carlisle's honesty, Lord Nugent's fun, Lord Lindsay's piety, failed to float their books. Miss Martineau, clear, frank, unemotional Curzon, fuddling the Levantine monks with rosoglio that he

s been atoned by a careful study of all his speeches in and out of Parliament. His reviews in the "Quarterly" and elsewhere have been noted; impressions of his manner and appearance at different periods of his life have been recovered from co?val acquaintances; his friend Hayward's Letters, the numerous allusions in Lord Houghton's Life, Mrs. Crosse's lively chapters in "Red Letter Days of my Life," Lady Gregory's intere

could have recalled. To Mr. Estcott, his old acquaintance and Somersetshire neighbour, I am indebted for recollections manifold and interesting; but above all I tender thanks to Madame Novikoff, his intimate associate and correspondent during the last twenty years of his life, who has supplemented her brilliant sketch of him in "La Nouvelle Revue" of 1896 by oral and written information lavish in quantity and of paramou

, died at the age of ninety through injuries received in the hustings crowd of a contested election. His mother belonged to an old Somersetshire family, the Woodfordes of Castle Cary. She, too, lived to a great age; a slight, neat figure in dainty dress, full of antique charm and grace. As a girl she had known Lady Hester Stanhope, who lived with her grandmother, Lady Chatham, at Burton Pynsent, her own father, Dr. Thomas Woodforde, being Lady Chatham's medical attendant. [6] The future prophetess of the Lebanon was then a wild girl, scouring the countryside on bare-backed horses; she showed great kindness to Mary Woodforde, afterwards Kinglake's mother. It was as his mother's son that she received him long afterwards at Djoun. To his mother Kinglake was passionately attached; owed to her, as he tells us in "Eothen," his home in the saddle and his love for Homer. A tradition is preserved in the family that on the day of her funeral, at a churchyard five miles away, he was missed from the household group reassembled in the mourning home; he was found to have ordered his horse, and galloped back in the darkness to his mother's grave

d Lumford, it had twice repelled the Royalists with loss. It was the centre of Monmouth's rebellion and of Jeffrey's vengeance; the suburb of Tangier, hard by its ancient castle, still recalls the time when Colonel Kirke and his regiment of "Lambs" were quartered in the town. But long before the advent of the Kinglakes its glory had departed; its manufactures had died out, its society become P

in "Eothen" depicts his intellectual fall from the varied interests and expanding enthusiasm of liberal home teaching to the regulation gerund-grinding and Procrustean discipline of school. "The dismal change is ordained, and then-thin meagre Latin with small shreds and patches of Greek, is thrown like a pauper's pall over all your early lore; instead of sweet kn

Sir F. Hanmer, Lords Canning and Dalhousie, Selwyn, Shadwell. He wrote in the "Etonian,

e, dear

to all hi

the "Methley" of his travels, who became successively Lord Pollington and Earl of Mexborough. The Homeric lore which Methley exhibited in the Troad, is curiously illustrated by an Eton story, th

es, J. M. Kemble, Brookfield, Thompson. With none of them does he seem in his undergraduate days to have been intimate. Probably then, as afterwards, he shrank from camaraderie, shared Byron's di

excitement that the co

y when first he leave

nking" of Wordsworth's sonnet, he answered: "You know that you prefer dining with people who have good glass and china and plenty of servants." For Tennyson's poetry he even then felt admir

e in the ring

y, merrily-fa

ling of his pari

ay, amid overpowering heat and stillness, he heard th

cquiescing in social conventionalisms and shams. To the end of his life he chafed at such restraint: "when pressed to stay in country houses," he writes in 1872, "I have had the frankness to say that I have not discipline enough." Repeatedly he speaks with loathing of the "stale civilization," the "utter respectability," of European life; [14a] longed with all his soul for the excitement and stir of soldiership, from which his shortsightedness debarred him; [14b] rushed off again and again into foreign travel; set out immediately on leaving Cambridge, in 1834, for his first Eastern tour, "to fortify himself for the business of life." Methley joined him at Hamburg, and they travelled by Berlin, Dresden, Prague, Vienna, to Semlin, where his book begins. Lord Pollington's health broke down, and he

e mildest

ttled ship or

e breeding of

ld divine his

ch other in capacity for rival exhibition, or for mutual exasperation, should have maintained so firm a friendship, often surprised the

aging fires

the thing that f

as a girl had known Mrs. Procter well, "made friendly company yesterday to a lonely meal, and brought back memories of Mr. Kinglake's kind spoiling of a raw young woman, and of the wit, the egregious vanity, the coarseness, the kindness, of that hard old worldling our Lady of Bitterness." In the presence of one man, Tennyson, she laid aside her shrewishness: "talking with Alfred Tennyson lifts me out of the earth earthy; a visit to Farringford is like a retreat to the religious." A celebrity in London for fift

his magazine, "Hood's Own," Kinglake wrote to Monckton Milnes refusing to contribute. He will send ￡10 to buy an article from some competent writer, but will not himself write. "It would be seriously injurious to me if the auth

ing their company, but never saying anything worthy of remembrance. A popular old statesman, still active in the House of Commons, recalls meeting him at Palmerston, Lord Harrington's seat, where was assembled a party in honour of Madame Guiccioli and her second husband, the Marquis de Boissy, and tells me that he attached himself to ladies, not to gentlemen, nor ever joined in general tattle. Like many other famous men, he passed through a period of shyness, which yielded to women's tactfulness only. From the first they appreciated him; "if you were as gentle as your friend Kinglake," writes Mrs. Norton reproachfully to Hayward in the sulks. Another co?val of those days calls him handsome-an epithet I sho