With his constituents he was more at ease and more effective.  His seat for Bridgewater was challenged at a general election by Henry Padwick, a hanger-on to Disraeli and a well-known bookmaker on the turf, who, with an Irish Colonel Westbrook, tried to cajole the electors and their wives by extravagant compliments to the town, its neighbourhood, its denizens; a place celebrated, as Captain Costigan said of Chatteris, “for its antiquitee, its hospitalitee, the beautee of its women, the manly fidelitee, generositee, and jovialitee of its men.”  Kinglake met them on their own ground.  In his flowery speeches the romance of Sinai and Palestine faded before the glories of the little Somersetshire town.  What was the Jordan by comparison with the Parrett?  Could Libanus or Anti-Libanus vie with the Mendip and the Quantock Hills?  The view surveyed by Monmouth from St. Mary’s Tower on the Eve of Sedgemoor transcended all the panoramas which the Holy Land or Asia Minor could present!  But his more serious orations were worthy of his higher fame.  In the panic of 1858, when the address of the French colonels to the Emperor, beseeching to be led against England, had created serious alarm on this side the Channel, he went down to Bridgewater to enlighten the West of England.  “Why,” he asked, “do we fear invasion?  The population of France is peaceful, the ‘turnip-soup Jacques Bonhomme’ is peaceful, the soldiers of the line are peaceful.  Why are we anxious?  Because there sits in his chamber at the Tuileries a solitary moody man.  He is deeply interested in the science and the art of war; he told me once that he was contemplating a history of all the great battles ever fought.  He holds absolute control over vast resources both in men and money; he has shown that he can attack successfully at a few weeks’ notice the greatest European military power:  gout or indigestion may at any moment convert him into an enemy of ourselves.  Until France returns to parliamentary government this danger is imminent and continual.  Our safety lies in our fleet, and in that alone.  If for twenty-four hours only the Channel were denuded of our ships in time of war with France, they would hurl upon our shores a force we could not meet.  Such denudation must be made impossible; our fleet so augmented and strengthened as to provide impregnably at all times for home defence no less than for foreign necessities.  Our danger, I repeat, lies in no hostility on the part of the French army, in no ferocity on the part of the French people, in no present unfriendliness on the part of the French Emperor:  it arises from the fact that a revolutionary government exists in France, which has armed one man, under the name of Emperor—­Dictator rather, I should say—­with a power so colossal, that until such power is moderated, as all power ought to be, no neighbour can be entirely safe.”  This speech was reproduced in “The Times.”  Montalembert read it with admiration.  “Who,” he asked Sir M. E. Grant Duff, “who is Mr. Kinglake?” “He is the author of ‘Eothen.’” “And what is ‘Eothen?’ I never heard of it.”