Though Alexander William Kinglake's ambition was to be remembered for his eight-volume history of the Crimean War, his fame rests on Eothen (1844), a classic account of his travels in the Near East in the early 1830s. Kinglake was born in Taunton, Somerset, England, the son of a prosperous attorney-at-law and banker, William Kinglake, whose family had owned land in the area for about four hundred years. His mother, born Mary Woodforde of Castle Cary and Taunton, was a pretty and lively woman, as capable in the household as she was familiar with the world of books and men. Alexander Kinglake was the oldest of six surviving children, four boys and two girls. Under the tutelage of his mother, the pale, delicate boy learned, as he later wrote in Eothen, to "find a home in his saddle, and to love old Homer, and all that Homer sung." The heroes...