“There is a fair lady at Claridge’s,
Whose smile is more charming to me,
Than the rapture of ninety-nine marriages
Could possibly, possibly, be;—­”

is the final dedicatory stanza.  It is the gracious fooling of a philosopher who understood his company.  “There are folks,” says Mr. Counsellor Pleydell, “before whom a man should take care how he plays the fool, because they have either too much malice or too little wit.”  Kinglake knew his associates, and was not ashamed desipere in loco, to frolic in their presence.

One point there was on which he never touched himself or suffered others to interrogate him, his conception of and attitude towards the Unseen.  He wore his religion as Sir William Gull wore the fur of his coat, inside.  Outwardly he died as he had lived, a Stoic; that on the most personal and sacred of all topics he should consult the Silences was in keeping with his idiosyncrasy.  Another famous man, questioned as to his religious creed, made answer that he believed what all wise men believe.  And what do all wise men believe?  “That all wise men keep to themselves?”

Footnotes: 

{1} When “Heartsease” first appeared, Percy Fotheringham was believed to be a portrait; but the accomplished authoress in a letter written not long before her death told me that the character was wholly imaginary.

{2} Pedigrees are perplexing unless tabulated; so here is Kinglake’s genealogical tree.

Kinglakes of Saltmoor.  Woodfordes of
                            castle Cary.
          | |
   +-------------------+ |
   | William=Mary Woodforde. 
Robert |
   | +--------------------+
+--------------+ | |
| | | |
serjeant Rev.  W.C.  A.W.  King- Dr. Hamilton
John king- Kinglake Lake Kinglake. 
Lake. ("Eothen.”)

{3} “Eothen,” p. 33.  Reading “Timbuctoo” to-day one is amazed it should have gained the prize.  Two short passages adumbrate the coming Tennyson, the rest is mystic nonsense.  “What do you think of Tennyson’s prize poem?” writes Charles Wordsworth to his brother Christopher.  “Had it been sent up at Oxford, the author would have had a better chance of spending a few months at a lunatic asylum than of obtaining the Prize.”  A current Cambridge story at the time explained the selection.  There were three examiners, the Vice-Chancellor, a man of arbitrary temper, with whom his juniors hesitated to disagree; a classical professor unversed in English Literature; a mathematical professor indifferent to