LAKE returned from Algiers in 1844 to find himself famous both in the literary and social world; for his book had gone through three editions and was the universal theme. Lockhart opened to him the "Quarterly." "Who is Eothen?" wrote Macvey Napier, editor of the "Edinburgh," to Hayward: "I know he is a lawyer and highly respectable; but I should like to know a little more of his personal history: he is very clever but very peculiar." Thackeray, later on, expresses affectionate gratitude for his presence at the "Lectures on English Humourists":- "it goes to a man's heart to find amongst his friends such men as Kinglake and Venables, Higgins, Rawlinson, Carlyle, Ashburton and Hallam, Milman, Macaulay, Wilberforce, looking on kindly." He dines out in all directions, himself giving dinners at Long's Hotel. "Did you ever meet Kinglake at my rooms?" writes Monckton Milnes to MacCarthy: "he has had immense success. I now rather wish I had written his book, WHICH I COULD HAVE DONE - AT LEAST NEARLY."We arereminded of Charles Lamb - "here's Wordsworth says he could have written Hamlet, IF HE HAD HAD A MIND." "A delightful Voltairean volume," Milnes elsewhere calls it.
"Eothen" was reviewed in the "Quarterly" by Eliot Warburton. "Other books," he says, "contain facts and statistics about the East; this book gives the East itself in vital actual reality. Its style is conversational; or the soliloquy rather of a man convincing and amusing himself as he proceeds, without reverence for others' faith, or lenity towards others' prejudices. It is a real book, not a sham; it equals Anastasius, rivals 'Vathek;' its terseness, vigour, bold imagery, recall the grand style of Fuller and of South, to which the author adds a spirit, freshness, delicacy, all his own." Kinglake, in turn, reviewed "The Crescent and the Cross" in an article called "The French Lake." From acordial notice of the book he passes to a history of French ambition in the Levant. It was Bonaparte's fixed idea to become an Oriental conqueror - a second Alexander: Egypt in his grasp, he would pass on to India. He sought alliance against the English with Tippoo Saib, and spent whole days stretched upon maps of Asia. He was baffled, first at Aboukir, then at Acre; but the partition of Turkey at Tilsit showed that he had not abandoned his design. To have refrained from seizing Egypt after his withdrawal was a political blunder on the part of England.
