Page:The invasion of the Crimea vol. 1.djvu/460

418 APPENDIX. guilty, because the Staff, so far from coming off scathless, had been more than decimated. When my correspondent at that foreign station shall see the book itself, he will know that I disclose this fully, giving the names of the two wounded officers ; and, indeed, it would have been strange if I had omitted to do so, for Leslie and Weare, the two Staff officers wounded, were both of them struck down on the part of the field where I was, and one of them fell within a few paces of me. Thus, then, it appears that even a careful and accurate man who has to put up with his newspaper's account of a book, at a time when he remains debarred from access to the book itself, is so misled by this method of seeking for the real purport of a volume that he thinks it his duty to address the author with a view to correct a gross error — a gross error not existing in the book itself, but appearing to do so in the mind of one who receives his account of it from a newspaper. On the 18th of March last, another letter was written, which I doubt not to be also an instance of the effect pro- duced upon a mind of fair intelligence by accounts purport- ing to give the tenor of a book. When Captain Mends thought it his duty to address his letter to the newspaper about the buoy, he introduced the subject by writing, and suffering to be printed and published, the following words : — ' As I have been referred to by many as to the truth of ' Mr Kinglake's statement in his "Invasion of the Crimea," ' " that the landing of our army at Old Fort was materially ' " delayed by the wilful displacement of a hnoj by the ' " French," I feel called upon in justice,' &c. ]S r ow Cap- tain Mends not only made that statement, but suffered it to be printed in the newspaper with inverted commas, ex- actly as given above. Well, those words are not in the book. Not only is there no such passage in the book — not only is there ho assertion that 'material delay was oc-