think it best not to set my mind running in a new path, lest I should take to re-writing.”  Note, by the way, the slovenliness of this epistle, as coming from so great a master of style; that defect characterizes all his correspondence.  He wrote for the Press “with all his singing robes about him”; his letters were unrevised and brief.  Mrs. Simpson, in her pleasant “Memories,” ascribes to him the eloquence du billet in a supreme degree.  I must confess that of more than five hundred letters from his pen which I have seen only six cover more than a single sheet of note-paper, all are alike careless and unstudied in style, though often in matter characteristic and informing.  “I am not by nature,” he would say, “a letter-writer, and habitually think of the uncertainty as to who may be the reader of anything that I write.  It is my fate, as a writer of history, to have before me letters never intended for my eyes, and this has aggravated my foible, and makes me a wretched correspondent.  I should like very much to write letters gracefully and easily, but I can’t, because it is contrary to my nature.”  “I have got,” he writes so early as 1873, “to shrink from the use of the pen; to ask me to write letters is like asking a lame man to walk; it is not, as horse-dealers say, ‘the nature of the beast.’  When others talk to me charmingly, my answers are short, faltering, incoherent sentences; so it is with my writing.”  “You,” he says to another lady correspondent, “have the pleasant faculty of easy, pleasant letter-writing, in which I am wholly deficient.”

In fact, the claims of his Crimean book, which compelled him latterly to refuse all other literary work, gave little time for correspondence.  Its successive revisions formed his daily task until illness struck him down.  Sacks of Crimean notes, labelled through some fantastic whim with female Christian names—­the Helen bag, the Adelaide bag, etc.—­were ranged round his room.  His working library was very small in bulk, his habit being to cut out from any book the pages which would be serviceable, and to fling the rest away.  So, we are told, the first Napoleon, binding volumes for his travelling library, shore their margins to the quick, and removed all prefaces, title-pages, and other superfluous leaves.  So, too, Edward Fitzgerald used to tear out of his books all that in his judgment fell below their authors’ highest standard, retaining for his own delectation only the quintessential remnants.  Vols.  III. and IV. appeared in 1868, V. in 1875, VI. in 1880, vii. and viii. in 1887; while a Cabinet Edition of the whole in nine volumes was issued continuously from 1870 to 1887.  Our attempt to appreciate the book shall be reserved for another chapter.

CHAPTER IV—­“THE INVASION OF THE CRIMEA”