He also wrote, on the envelope of the first section, 'No
secrets as far as I am concerned'. A more singular set of state
papers was never compiled. Sitting there, in the solitude of his
palace, with ruin closing round him, with anxieties on every
hand, with doom hanging above his head, he let his pen rush on
for hour after hour in an ecstasy of communication, a tireless
unburdening of the spirit, where the most trivial incidents of
the passing day were mingled pell-mell with philosophical
disquisitions; where jests and anger, hopes and terrors,
elaborate justifications and cynical confessions, jostled one
another in reckless confusion. The impulsive, demonstrative man
had nobody to talk to any more, and so he talked instead to the
pile of telegraph forms, which, useless now for perplexing Sir
Evelyn Baring, served very well--for they were large and blank--
as the repositories of his conversation. His tone was not the
intimate and religious tone which he would have used with the
Rev. Mr. Barnes or his sister Augusta; it was such as must have
been habitual with him in his intercourse with old friends or
fellow-officers, whose religious views were of a more ordinary
caste than his own, but with whom he was on confidential terms.
He was anxious to put his case to a select and sympathetic
audience--to convince such a man as Lord Wolseley that he was
justified in what he had done; and he was sparing in his
allusions to the hand of Providence, while those mysterious
doubts and piercing introspections, which must have filled him,
he almost entirely concealed.
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