The Sun.
London, England, 1863-01-22 00:00:00

abour should not be applied in the works of the
Suez Canal.

The Viceroy replied that he had never thought
that France was ready to favour such a system, and
that he had no intention of alluding to the works
of the Suez Canal in his remarks.

The Viceroy's speech :has produced a great effect.
CAIRO, lAN. 21.
An envoy of Ismail Pasha will leave for Con-
stantinople to notify his Highness's accession to the
Viceroyalty,

LITERATURE.

Kinglake's Invasion of the Crimea.

The Invasion of the Crimea; its Origin and an
Account of its Progress down to the Death of
Lord. Raglan. By Alexander William Kinglake.

Vole. I. and 11. William Blackwood and Sons.
One of the most remarkable historical works of
this century has here, at length, made its appear-
ance. Long and eagerly as it has been expected,
it will be none the less cordially welcomed because
of the protracted delay of its publication. That
delay has rather whetted curiosity than blunted the
edge of it. Civilian though the author is, and there-
fore disqualified, to a certain extent, from assuming
any very conspicuously recognisable place as a dis-
tinctly military historian, he, nevertheless, is known
far and wide to have been so lavishly endowed with
many rare ana exceptional qualifications of another
kind—qualifications peculiarly fitting him for the
very task he has here undertaken, that of penning
this elaborate record of the Invasion of the Crimea,
that soldiers even have not disdained to look forward
with solicitude to the appearance of Mr. Kinglake's
annals of the Great Warlike Enterprise of our gene-
ration. As those of a Master of mere Style, our
author's abilities were known to be consummate.
And as according to Buffon's terse and truthful
axiom, le style c'est l'homme—the writer of
" Eothen" may well be considered to have long
since assumed high rank among his contemporaries.
By this second and grander contribution to our
national literature, that position, won for himself
at a single bound, as it were, upon the apparition of
" Eothen," has been not simply confirmed, but in-
contestibly advanced and elevated. The exquisite
finish of " the Style" (here, in very deed, " the
Man") has,moreover, been wrought out during nine
years of deliberate study by this pen of power and
fascination. Mr. Kinglake thus consuming precisely
the mystic number of years recommended by
Horace under the symbol of the wine cups—

tribus aut novem,
Miscentur cyathis pocula comraodis,
Qui Musas amat impares,
Terms ter cyathos attonitus petet
Yates."

Sentence after sentence has thus been touched into
beauty, and tempered to a marvellous flexibility and
keenness—each, as it were, as one of those ribbon-
like blades, from the City of the Rose and the Aloe,
glittering, incisive, and damascened. In the mere
manner of it, the work here submitted to us is, in
fact, as near perfection as could well be. The writer
has not alone, always completely at his command a
most copious and ornate vocabulary—he evidences
perpetually, in prose, that rarest gift of the
lyrist, the curiosa jelicitas verborum. His nar-
rative is ever pre-eminently picturesque. Mr.
Kinglake's version of History never reads
like an old Almanack. It has the
charm of romance and the passion of oratory.
One of the distinctive marvels of the work is this,
that a result so symmetric—(we speak here of the
mere arrangement of the narrative)--should have
been evolved, apparently with the utmost facility,
from a mass of evidence, both oral and written, in
itself, one might have supposed, as bewilderingly
chaotic as it is voluminous. State papers, public
and private correspondence among administrators,
and warriors, and diplomatists, and sovereigns,
military despatohee, ministerial documents, the
blue-books of England and the livres fauna of
France, these, and multitudes of other printed mat-
ters, have been pouring in, all the while he has been
preparing this History of the Crimea, upon Mr.
Kinglake—pouring in upon him singly or in
showers—always bringing, to his serene and medi-
tative intellect, help, and not (as another might
have dreaded) embarrassment. The Raglan papers
alone might, from their very abundance and diver-
sity, have confused a less sagacious or a less con-
templative intelligence. With masterly discrimi-
nation, however, Mr. Kinglake has extracted from
these multifarious sources of information only what
was really of worth to himself as a narrator. And
with the facts thus collected he has tessellated his his-
tory. Now that that history is finished, or at least
that one part of it lies before us completed, we can
recognise in it the minute elaboration, the perma-
nence, and the splendour of a masterpiece of
enamelling. Slowly, as the work has been growing
up, under the careful hands of this great artist-
craftsman—the Ministers, the Admirals, and
the Generals of England, knowing all the while
what work it was that was in course of fabrica-
tion—" I declare," he exclaims, looking back down
the perspective of his silent labours during these last
nine years, "I declare Ido not remember that any
one of these public men has ever said to me that
there was anything which, for the honour of our
arms, or for the credit of the nation, it would be
well to keep concealed. Every man has taken it
for granted," he adds, "that what is best for the
repute of England is the truth." The circumstance
is one not unworthy, indeed, of being thus noted
down, for while it will not, as the writer observes,
in any way surprise his own countrymen, it can
hardly fail, we should imagine with him, to appear
"passing strange" in the eyes of foreigners. The
History of the Crimean War, as here related by
Mr. Kinglake in these two opening volumes,
carries the reader on through more than 1,000
pages from the Origin of the War itself to the
close of the Battle of the Alma. When the
Second book is shut, it leaves the banners of
the Allies fluttering in triumph, bullet -riddled
and blackened with gunpowder, upon that blood-
stained plateau of Crim Tartary, thenceforth famous
in the annals of France and England. It is not
in his description of a military exploit, however, in
his delineation of the vicissitudes of a battle-field,
or in his enumeration of the intricate movements of
armies confronting each other in deadly strife,
that Mr. Kinglake's chief excellence can be said,
to our thinking, in any way to consist. There he is
beyond all doubt of it, immeasurably surpassed, not
only by the great military annalists of our own and
of other literatures, from Zenophon to Jomini and
Napier, but by such luminous narrators among civi-
lians as M. Thiers and Lord Macaulay. It is in his
limning of men rather than of events, in his por-
traiture of the actors rather than in his representa-
tion of the scenes themselves, that the author of this
extraordinary work may be said in some respects to
surpass almost all the historical contributors either
to ancient or to modern literature. Dead and
gone many of the personages here depicted are long
since—the Emperor Nicholas, Lord Raglan, Mar-
shal St. Arnaud, Admiral Lyons, the Earl of
Aberdeen -- yet one after another they are
brought before us on this magic mirror of the past
by a touch from the potent wand of this magician
of the pen. A sentence often, a single phrase
sometimes, depicts the individual referred to, not
partially or faintly, but vividly and com-
pletely and instantaneously as in a photograph.
Nov it is Admiral Lyons, with that "anxious,
craving expression of features," having about it
something that reminded men of a greater name !
Now it is that other gallant Sea-Captain of ours,
Admiral D uncles, with his " square Scottish head and
his rough, shrewd, good-humoured eyebrows, grown
grey in the service of a political party !" Living