Page:The invasion of the Crimea vol. 1.djvu/464

 422 APPENDIX. upon these volumes by the exertions of the periodical press. Certainly my own reading of the criticisms brought to bear on the book has been not only very imperfect, but has been conducted without method ; and although I have taken other means besides my own scanty reading for learning what statements of mine upon matters of fact have been disputed in respectable publications, I cannot be sure, nor even indeed imagine, that I have dealt with every contra- diction upon matters of fact which has been taken in print to my statements. All I can say is, that when last I went through these volumes I did not knowingly pass by any error ; and it must be remembered that there is this safeguard — namely, that every public writer whose challenge upon a matter of fact I may have failed to notice, will not only be able to exclaim against me for my neglect of his strictures, but will even be likely to do so, because it is according to nature that any critic who may have taken pains to give to a book this kind of antagonistic assistance should be loth to see his industry wasted. Xow, then, to speak of the corrections upon matters of fact which I owe to the periodical press. In writing a book of this kind, one naturally glances at many things which are not in strictness the subject of the History. Thus, before I came to the time when their actions brought them strictly within the range of this narrative, I glanced at the antecedent career of several public men, and in re- ferring to those ' tidings from the Danube,' which I spoke of as stirring the public mind in England, I suffered myself to linger awhile on the ground whence the tidings had come. Well, in the course of those retrospective glances, I treated Lord Stratford's antecedent absence from Constan- tinople as lasting full double the number of months that it really did ; I said that, in 1836, St Amaud entered for the third time into 'the military profession,' when I ought rather to have said that he entered for the third time