in part gained its purpose; won temporary success; gave to his style the glitter, rapidity, point, effectiveness, of a pungent editorial; went home, stormed, convinced, vindicated, damaged, triumphed:  but it missed by excessive polish the reposeful, unlaboured, classic grace essential to the highest art.  Over-scrupulous manipulation of words is liable to the “defect of its qualities”; as with unskilful goldsmiths of whom old Latin writers tell us, the file goes too deep, trimming away more of the first fine minting than we can afford to lose.  Ruskin has explained to us how the decadence of Gothic architecture commenced through care bestowed on window tracery for itself instead of as an avenue or vehicle for the admission of light.  Read “words” for tracery, “thought” for light, and we see how inspiration avenges itself so soon as diction is made paramount; artifice, which demands and misses watchful self-concealment, passes into mannerism; we have lost the incalculable charm of spontaneity.  Comparison of “Eothen” with the “Crimea” will I think exemplify this truth.  The first, to use Matthew Arnold’s imagery, is Attic, the last has declined to the Corinthian; it remains a great, an amazingly great production; great in its pictorial force, its omnipresent survey, verbal eloquence, firm grasp, marshalled delineation of multitudinous and entangled matter; but it is not unique amongst martial records as “Eothen” is unique amongst books of travel:  it is through “Eothen” that its author has soared into a classic, and bids fair to hold his place.  And, apart from the merit of style, great campaigns lose interest in a third, if not in a second generation; their historical consequence effaced through lapse of years; their policy seen to have been nugatory or mischievous; their chronicles, swallowed greedily at the birth like Saturn’s progeny, returning to vex their parent; relegated finally to an honourable exile in the library upper shelves, where they hold a place eyed curiously, not invaded: 

“devoured
As fast as they are made, forgot as soon
As done. . . .  To have done, is to hang
Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail,
In monumental mockery.”

CHAPTER V—­MADAME NOVIKOFF

The Cabinet Edition of “The Invasion of the Crimea” appeared in 1877, shortly after the Servian struggle for independence, which aroused in England universal interest and sympathy.  Kinglake had heard from the lips of a valued lady friend the tragic death-tale of her brother Nicholas Kireeff, who fell fighting as a volunteer on the side of the gallant Servian against the Turk:  and, much moved by the recital, offered to honour the memory of the dead hero in the Preface to his forthcoming edition.  He kept his word; made sympathetic reference to M. Kireeff in the opening of his Preface; but passed in pursuance of his original design to a hostile impeachment of Russia, its people, its church,