Silent to acquaintances about the progress of his work, he was communicative to his few intimates, though never reading aloud extracts or allowing them to be seen.  In 1872 he would speak pathetically of his “Crimean muddle,” perplexed, as he well might be, by the intricacies of Inkerman.  Asked if he will not introduce a Te Deum on the fall of Louis Napoleon, he answered that to write without the stimulus of combat would be a task beyond his energy; “when I took the trouble to compose that fourteenth chapter, the wretched Emperor and his gang were at the height of their power in Europe and the world; but now!” He was insatiate as to fresh facts:  utilized his acquaintance with Todleben, whom he had first met on his visit to England in 1864; sought out Prince Ourusoff at a later time, and inserted particulars gleaned from him in Vol.  IX., Chapter V.

In 1875 he told Madame Novikoff that his task was done so far as Inkerman was concerned, and was proud to think that he had rescued from oblivion the heroism of the Russian troops in what he calls the “Third Period” of the great fight, ignored as it was by all Russian historians of the war.  He made fruitless inquiries after a paper said to have been left behind him by Skobeleff, explaining that “India is a cherry to be eaten by Russia, but in two bites”; it was contrary to the general’s recorded utterances and probably apocryphal.  Russophobe as regarded Turkey, he sneered at England’s sentimental support of nationalities as “Platonic”:  a capital epithet he called it, and envied the Frenchman who applied it to us, declaring that it had turned all the women against us.  He was moved by receiving Korniloff’s portrait with a kind message from the dead hero’s family, seeing in the features a confirmation of the ideal which he had formed in his own mind and had tried to convey to others.  Readers of his book will recall the fine tribute to Korniloff’s powers, and the description of his death, in Chapters VI. and xiii. of Vol.  IV. (Cabinet Edition).

Many of his comments on current events are preserved in the notes or in the memories of his friends.  Sometimes these were characteristically cynical.  He ridiculed the newspaper parade of national sympathy with the Prince of Wales’s illness:  “We are represented as all members of the royal family, and all in family hysterics.”  Dizzy’s orientalization of Queen Victoria into an Empress angered him, as it angered many more.  The last Empress Regnant, he said, was Catherine ii. and it seems to be thought that by advising the Queen to take that great monarch’s title, we shall exercise a wholesome influence on the morals of our women.  He would quote Byron’s

“Russia’s mighty Empress
Behaved no better than a common sempstress;”

“there was an old-fashioned sacredness, which, however foolish intrinsically, was still useful, in our title of ‘The Queen’; nor do we see the policy of adding a Supreme de Volaille to the bread and wine of our Sacrament.”