" When the expenses of production were
paid, the balance was spent on a whitebait dinner at Greenwich, and
on offerings of flowers and jewellery to the lady guests invited.
It came to an end, leaving no successor equally brilliant, high-
toned, wholesome; its collected numbers figure sometimes at a
formidable price in sales and catalogues. {15}
The first two volumes of his "Crimea" had appeared in 1863. They
were awaited with eager expectation. An elaborate history of the
war had been written by a Baron de Bazancourt, condemned as unfair
and unreliable by English statesmen, and severely handled in our
reviews. So the wish was felt everywhere for some record less
ephemeral, which should render the tale historically, and
counteract Bazancourt's misstatements. "I hear," wrote the Duke of
Newcastle, "that Kinglake has undertaken the task. He has a noble
opportunity of producing a text-book for future history, but to
accomplish this it must be STOICALLY impartial."
The beauty of their style, the merciless portraiture of the Second
Empire, the unparalleled diorama of the Alma fight, combined to
gain for these first four-and-twenty chapters an immediate vogue as
emphatic and as widely spread as that which saluted the opening of
Macaulay's "History.
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