Old times return to me as I handle the familiar pages.  To the schoolboy six and fifty years ago arrives from home a birthday gift, the bright green volume, with its showy paintings of the impaled robbers and the Jordan passage; its bulky Tatar, towering high above his scraggy steed, impressed in shining gold upon its cover.  Read, borrowed, handed round, it is devoured and discussed with fifth form critical presumption, the adventurous audacity arresting, the literary charm not analyzed but felt, the vivid personality of the old Etonian winged with public school freemasonry.  Scarcely in the acquired insight of all the intervening years could those who enjoyed it then more keenly appreciate it to-day.  Transcendent gift of genius! to gladden equally with selfsame words the reluctant inexperience of boyhood and the fastidious judgment of maturity.  Delightful self-accountant reverence of author-craft! which wields full knowledge of a shaddock-tainted world, yet presents no licence to the prurient lad, reveals no trail to the suspicious moralist.

CHAPTER III—­LITERARY AND PARLIAMENTARY LIFE

Kinglake returned from Algiers in 1844 to find himself famous both in the literary and social world; for his book had gone through three editions and was the universal theme.  Lockhart opened to him the “Quarterly.”  “Who is Eothen?” wrote Macvey Napier, editor of the “Edinburgh,” to Hayward:  “I know he is a lawyer and highly respectable; but I should like to know a little more of his personal history:  he is very clever but very peculiar.”  Thackeray, later on, expresses affectionate gratitude for his presence at the “Lectures on English Humourists":- “it goes to a man’s heart to find amongst his friends such men as Kinglake and Venables, Higgins, Rawlinson, Carlyle, Ashburton and Hallam, Milman, Macaulay, Wilberforce, looking on kindly.”  He dines out in all directions, himself giving dinners at Long’s Hotel.  “Did you ever meet Kinglake at my rooms?” writes Monckton Milnes to MacCarthy:  “he has had immense success.  I now rather wish I had written his book, which I could have done—­at least nearly.”  We are reminded of Charles Lamb—­“here’s Wordsworth says he could have written Hamlet, if he had had A mind.”  “A delightful Voltairean volume,” Milnes elsewhere calls it.

“Eothen” was reviewed in the “Quarterly” by Eliot Warburton.  “Other books,” he says, “contain facts and statistics about the East; this book gives the East itself in vital actual reality.  Its style is conversational; or the soliloquy rather of a man convincing and amusing himself as he proceeds, without reverence for others’ faith, or lenity towards others’ prejudices.  It is a real book, not a sham; it equals Anastasius, rivals ‘Vathek;’ its terseness, vigour, bold imagery, recall the grand style of Fuller and