“I relish,” Kinglake said in 1871, “the spectacle of Bismarck teaching the A B C of Liberal politics to the hapless French.  His last mot, they tell me, is this.  Speaking of the extent to which the French Emperor had destroyed his own reputation and put an end to the worship of the old Napoleon, he said:  ’He has killed himself and buried his uncle.’” Again, in 1874, noting the contre coup upon France resulting from the Bismarck and Arnim despatches, he said:  “What puzzles the poor dear French is to see that truth and intrepid frankness consist with sound policy and consummate wisdom.  How funny it would be, if the French some day, as a novelty, or what they would call a caprice, were to try the effect of truth; “though not naturally honest,” as Autolycus says, “were to become so by chance.”

He thought M. Gallifet dans sa logique in liking the Germans and hating Bismarck; for the Germans, in having their own way, would break up into as many fragments as the best Frenchman could desire, and Bismarck is the real suppressor of France.  Throughout the Franco-Prussian war he sided strongly with the Prussians, refusing to dine in houses where the prevailing sympathy with France would make him unwelcome as its declared opponent; but he felt “as a nightmare” the attack on prostrate Paris, “as a blow” the capitulation of Metz; denouncing Gambetta and his colleagues as meeting their disasters only with slanderous shrieks, “possessed by the spirit of that awful Popish woman.”  Bismarck as a statesman he consistently admired, and deplored his dismissal.  I see, he said, all the peril implied by Bismarck’s exit, and the advent of his ambitious young Emperor.  It is a transition from the known to the unknown, from wisdom, perhaps, to folly.

His Crimean volumes continued to appear; in 1875, 1880, finally in 1887; while the Cabinet Edition was published in 1887-8.  This last contained three new Prefaces; in Vol.  I. as we have seen, the memorial of Nicholas Kireeff; in Vol.  II. the latter half of the original Preface to Vol.  I., cancelled thence at Madame Novikoff’s request, though now carefully modified so as to avoid anything which might irritate Russia at a moment when troubles seemed to be clearing away.  In his Preface to Vol.  VII. he had three objects, to set right the position of Sir E. Hamley, who had been neglected in the despatches; to demolish his friend Lord Bury, who had “questioned my omniscience” in the “Edinburgh Review”; and to exonerate England at large from absurd self-congratulations about the “little Egypt affair,” the blame of such exaggeration resting with those whom he called State Showmen.