" He saw life differently; more practically, if more
selfishly; to one rhapsodizing about the "plain living and high
thinking" 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 admiration;
quotes, nay, misquotes, in "Eothen," from the little known
"Timbuctoo"; {3} and from "Locksley Hall"; and supplied long
afterwards an incident adopted by Tennyson in "Enoch Arden,"
"Once likewise in the ringing of his ears
Though faintly, merrily--far and far away -
He heard the pealing of his parish bells," {4}
from his own experience in the desert, when on a Sunday, amid
overpowering heat and stillness, he heard the Marlen bells of
Taunton peal for morning church. {5}
In whatever set he may have lived he made his mark at Cambridge.
Lord Houghton remembered him as an orator at the Union; and
speaking to Cambridge undergraduates fifty years later, after
enumerating the giants of his student days, Macaulay, Praed,
Buller, Sterling, Merivale, he goes on to say: "there, too, were
Kemble and Kinglake, the historian of our earliest civilization and
of our latest war; Kemble as interesting an individual as ever was
portrayed by the dramatic genius of his own race; Kinglake, as bold
a man-at-arms in literature as ever confronted public opinion.
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