her very loveliness, his true companion sprang.  A being thus ardent will often go wrong in her strenuous course; will often alarm, sometimes provoke; will now and then work mischief and even perhaps grievous harm; but she will be our own Eve after all; the sweet-speaking tempter whom heaven created to be the joy and the trouble of this pleasing anxious existence; to shame us away from the hiding-places of a slothful neutrality, and lead us abroad in the world, men militant here on earth, enduring quiet, content with strife, and looking for peace hereafter.” {11} Beautiful words indeed! how came the author of a tribute so caressingly appreciative, so eloquently sincere, to remain himself outside the gates of Paradise? how could the pen which in the Crimean chapter on the Holy Shrines traced so exquisitely the delicate fancifulness of purest sexual love, perpetrate that elaborate sneer over the bachelor obsequies of Carrigaholt—­“the lowly grave, that is the end of man’s romantic hopes, has closed over all his rich fancies and all his high aspirations:  he is utterly married.” {12}

“Gai, gai, mariez vous,
Mettez vous dans la misere! 
Gai, gai, mariez vous,
Mettez vous la corde au cou!” {13}

There is generally a good reason for prolonged celibacy, a reason which the bachelor as generally does not betray:  Kinglake remained single, by his own account, because he had observed that women always prefer other men to their own husbands.  Yet, although unmarried, perhaps because unmarried, he heartily admired many clever women; formed with them sedate but genuine friendships, the l’amour sans ailes, sometimes called “Platonic” by persons who have not read Plato; found in their illogical clear-sightedness, in their [Greek word which cannot be reproduced], to use the master’s own untranslatable phrase, a titillating stimulus which he missed in men.  He thought that the Church should ordain priestesses as well as priests, the former to be the Egerias of men, as the latter are the Pontiffs of women.  And Lady Gregory tells us, that when attacked by gout, he wished for the solace of a lady doctor, and wrote to one asking if gout were beyond her scope.  She answered:  “Dear Sir,—­Gout is not beyond my scope, but men are.”

In 1854 he accompanied Lord Raglan to the Crimea.  “I had heard,” writes John Kenyon, “of Kinglake’s chivalrous goings on.  We were saying yesterday that though he might write a book, he was among the last men to go that he might write a book.  He is wild about matters military, if so calm a man is ever wild.”  He had hoped to go in an official position as non-combatant, but this was refused by the authorities.  His friend, Lord Raglan, whose acquaintance he had made while hunting with the Duke of Beaufort’s hounds, took him as his private guest.  Arrested for a time at Malta by an attack of fever, he joined our army before hostilities began, rode with Lord Raglan’s staff at the Alma fight, likening the novel sensation