The first two volumes of his “Crimea” had appeared in 1863.  They were awaited with eager expectation.  An elaborate history of the war had been written by a Baron de Bazancourt, condemned as unfair and unreliable by English statesmen, and severely handled in our reviews.  So the wish was felt everywhere for some record less ephemeral, which should render the tale historically, and counteract Bazancourt’s misstatements.  “I hear,” wrote the Duke of Newcastle, “that Kinglake has undertaken the task.  He has a noble opportunity of producing a text-book for future history, but to accomplish this it must be stoically impartial.”

The beauty of their style, the merciless portraiture of the Second Empire, the unparalleled diorama of the Alma fight, combined to gain for these first four-and-twenty chapters an immediate vogue as emphatic and as widely spread as that which saluted the opening of Macaulay’s “History.”  None of the later volumes, though highly prized as battle narratives, quite came up to these.  The political and military conclusions drawn provoked no small bitterness; his cousin, Mrs. Serjeant Kinglake, used to say that she met sometimes with almost affronting coldness in society at the time, under the impression that she was A. W. Kinglake’s wife.  Russians were, perhaps unfairly, dissatisfied.  Todleben, who knew and loved Kinglake well, pronounced the book a charming romance, not a history of the war.  Individuals were aggrieved by its notice of themselves or of their regiments; statesmen chafed under the scientific analysis of their characters, or at the publication of official letters which they had intended but not required to be looked upon as confidential, and which the recipients had in all innocence communicated to the historian.  Palmerstonians, accepting with their chief the Man of December, were furious at the exposure of his basenesses.  Lucas in “The Times” pronounced the work perverse and mischievous; the “Westminster Review” branded it as reactionary.  “The Quarterly,” in an article ascribed to A. H. Layard, condemned its style as laboured and artificial; as palling from the sustained pomp and glitter of the language; as wearisome from the constant strain after minute dissection; declaring it further to be “in every sense of the word a mischievous book.”  “Blackwood,” less unfriendly, surrendered itself to the beauty of the writing; “satire so studied, so polished, so remorseless, and withal so diabolically entertaining, that we know not where in modern literature to seek such another philippic.”

Reeve, editor of the “Edinburgh,” wished Lord Clarendon to attack the book; he refused, but offered help, and the resulting article was due to the collaboration of the pair.  It caused a prolonged coolness between Reeve and Kinglake, who at last ended the quarrel by a characteristic letter:  “I observed yesterday that my malice, founded perhaps upon a couple of words, and now of three years’ duration, had not engendered corresponding anger in you; and if my impression was a right one, I trust we may meet for the future on our old terms.”