From the morrow of Inkerman to the end, through no
fault of his, the historian's chariot wheels drag. More and more
one sees how from the nature of the task, except for the flush of
contemporary interest then, except by military students now, it is
not a work to be popularly read; the exhausted interest of its
subject swamps the genius of its narrator. Scattered through its
more serious matter are gems with the old "Eothen" sparkle, of
periphrasis, aphorism, felicitous phrase and pregnant epithet.
Such is the fine analogy between the worship of holy shrines and
the lover's homage to the spot which his mistress's feet have trod;
such France's tolerance of the Elysee brethren compared to the Arab
laying his verminous burnous upon an ant-hill; the apt quotation
from the Psalms to illustrate the on-coming of the Guards; the
demeanour of horses in action; the course of a flying cannon-ball;
the two ponderous troopers at the Horse Guards; Tom Tower and his
Croats landing stores for our soldiers from the "Erminia." Or
again, we have the light clear touches of a single line; "the
decisiveness and consistency of despotism"--"the fractional and
volatile interests in trading adventure which go by the name of
Shares"--"the unlabelled, undocketed state of mind which shall
enable a man to encounter the Unknown"--"the qualifying words which
correct the imprudences and derange the grammatical structure of a
Queen's Speech": but these are islets in the sea of narrative,
not, as in "Eothen," woof-threads which cross the warp.
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