TIME glides on with a motion so silent and often imperceptible, that it is difficult to believe that not much short of twenty years have elapsed since England was struck by one of the most startling, unexpected, and painful blows that have happened to her in the whole course of her history-the strangelysudden, brief, and terrible episode of the Mutiny in India. There are few things that bring home to us more distinctly the passage of life than the effort of recollecting how long it is since a great historical event occurred. It seems yesterday and we who look back upon it now were, many of us, as mature and full-grown to our own consciousness as we are to-day; yet it is seventeen years ago. Strange thought, which makes the middleaged observer draw his breath more quickly, and betrays to him how the table-land of life begins to verge towards the declining slope. Of all the great public crises which have passed over the country within the memory of the present generation, this event of the Mutiny is the most striking and terrible. The political changes which we have undergone have been indeed of a most weighty and fundamental character, and may affect us and our children far more deeply than anything happening beyond the boundary of the four seas can do; but politics do not affect the personal happiness, the imagination, and the emotions of a country, as did the great revolt which for a moment menaced our national pride and supremacy, and cut deep into the

national heart. All the passions that can inflame a people, rage— righteous, but sometimes almost wild in its natural vehemenceshame, horror, indignation, grief, tragic and primitive influences which sway humanity at their will, but which, in our age of civilisation and modified emotions, so seldom have full scope-burst like a flood into the heart of the race, which became as the heart of one man, in that sudden return, so to speak, to savagery, that sudden uprisal of the Pagan, supposed slain or conquered, against the Civilised; we do not say the Heathen against the Christian, for Christianity, we fear, has but little to do on either side in such a conflict of race against race, conqueror against conquered. it should so happen-and there are some signs in the air which, for the moment at least, look alarmingly like it that England has begun to enter upon the cycle of decadence,-decadence at least from that primary place in the world's regard which she once held,

If

the historian of the future will trace in the Indian Mutiny the first blow that assailed her in mid career, and made defeat and downfall possible words in her vocabulary. The costly Crimean war, with its unsatisfactory conclusion, had given to the country a wondering consciousness that all our arrangements were not so perfect as we thought; but still as everything did finally end in success, and as there were, as always, prodigies of individual valour upon which we could plume ourselves, and an ally

on whose shoulders we could lay the blame, whatever uneasiness there might be in the national mind was dissipated. No prevision of harm had ever dawned upon England. It was true that a few old croakers, people whose only claim to attention was the fact that they knew what they were talking about, were heard by times in corners, harmless Cassandras to whom nobody paid any attention; but neither doubt nor caution were in the general thoughts. Then all at once, before we could draw breath, the storm out of a clear sky burst upon us. The country staggered like a ship at sea when the first blast of a sudden storm strikes its careless sails. Then there came an awful pause, of incredulity, of refusal to believe, of vain hopes that the news might be false or exaggerated; then followed those details which drove the nation mad. There is no other word for it. Does not the reader feel even now the fierce throb in his throat, the wild rage, horror, sleepless thirst and longing for vengeance that took possession of him, were he the peacefullest man that ever trod English soil? Yes, vengeance! had not time and space interfered, England, mad, would have rushed bodily into that land of blood to take her revenge for her outraged women, her tortured captives. When soldiers die with arms in their hands, their very dearest and nearest consent, with pride in their mourning; but the horrors of savage warfare, the torments, the insults, the shame, and cruel anguish which make a servile insurrection always doubly terrible, had ceased to be known to England for centuries. We no longer believed in such things; we were full of theories that anything like them had ceased to be possible. We had gone to sleep tranquilly upon our volcano-we had put confidingly in the very

jaws of the wolf many innocent and helpless heads, beings that could but endure and could not resist; and the awakening from our security was terrible. For a moment not only the life and happiness of every British resident in India, but the British supremacy in India and prestige throughout the world, seemed on the edge of certain destruction. Our neighbours standing round with that suppressed delight in our misfortunes which neighbours are not unapt to show, especially to one who has been somewhat arrogant in his prosperity, waited for the tidings of our ruin-and we ourselves were not sure that we did not expect by each new mail to receive the same dreaded tidings. Disaster came after disaster, misery after misery. Never, we think, in any time of war has the popular heart beat so entirely as one; and with good reason-for the few Englishmen who were standing at bay, scattered one here and one there over the vast continent, stood not only for England against all the powers of darkness, but for justice and peace against red rapine and war-for modern civilisation, with its code of mercy, forbearance, and law, against the diabolical carnage and outrage of the savage world. And our savage enemy was not a rude savage like any African man of the woods, but the crafty and cultivated savage of a civilisation older than our own, trained to a more exquisite knowledge of possible barbarities, and to some devilish refined perception of how he could most deeply wound.

and still less any overt act, to escape from her mysterious masses. Her constitution has been changed, and everything is different. For her the Mutiny has been as a convulsive new birth, altering the whole tenor of her public life; for England, it still remains the most extraordinary, tragical, and terrible incident of the century, the strangest interruption of her career that has ever befallen her. Such a story cannot be told without exciting reminiscences warmer and stronger than are most of our actual experiences in life. The recollections of the Crimean war, the only other struggle in which our country has been actually engaged during the knowledge of most living men, pales to nothing before the burning memory of those horrors in India which revealed to us all at once the depths of blackness and of nobleness still surviving in that human nature, which we began to believe had been fundamentally altered by the fact that the world had reached its nineteenth Christian century. Yet the time which has elapsed is long enough to have made it possible for the reader to go over again with some calmness that terrible ground-to understand how an event so appalling came about, and to consider as history what he once regarded with irrestrainable passion as immediate event. Everything that tends to encourage a clearer view of the great country which Providence has given us the guidance of, to make us more distinctly aware of the nature of the work, and its risks, and such rewards as are possible, is an advantage to England, and especially to the new race growing up to govern and labour in India. Sir Hope Grant's modest and soldierly narrative, which neither dwells upon the horrors past, nor exaggerates the tremendous struggle, but tells the

story of daily conflict with the gravity and simplicity which so specially belong and do honour to his profession, will be received with satisfaction both by those to whom the Indian Mutiny is one of the most vivid and terrible recollections of their lives, and by those to whom it is simple history, a landmark of the past.

Such a book as this shows better, perhaps, than any description can do, the advantages of the practical worker in any eventful period of history. The soldier's line of thought is entirely apart from any consideration of the causes which bring about wars, mutinies, or rebellions. The great questions which lie at the root of the struggle, the principles involved, are happily removed by their preliminary character altogether out of his field of observation. With these the statesman, the philosopher, the legislator have to do. The soldier's task is more simple and straightforward. He is not called upon to conciliate opposing principles, but to overcome external difficulties,— to guide one body of men, to subdue and overcome another; and the practical aim thus given to all his thoughts acts upon his mind, and shapes a quite special type of character, than which there is nothing more attractive or delightful. We are very apt to ignore the mental qualities which are necessary to make a good soldier, even in a subordinate position; the quickness of eye and promptitude of mind, the daring and the wariness, the power of calculation yet capability of setting all calculations at defiance, which a man must possess to whom any responsibility is given in a moment of danger; and to consider the very ordinary gift of personal courage which many fools possess, and some wise men lack, as worth more to a fighting man than the brains which are liable to be blown

out at any moment. No one, however, is unaware of the great mental as well as bodily strain to which every commander in the field must be subjected, or can be unconscious of the fact that a great General requires genius to inspire him as much as a great Poet. The peculiarity in the soldier's case, however, is that his genius, though involving all the higher exercises of mental power, imagination as well as calculation, is so modified and shaped by the practical uses to which it is bent, that he himself in most cases is infinitely less conscious of his high intellectual standing than are his equals in other lofty pursuits. It would seem to be the tendency of abstract thought to magnify the importance of the mind beyond all other human things a weakness which leads to innumerable aberrations, and often marks with mortal imperfection those powers of reason, only too clear and too far-reaching, which, despising all conditions except intellectual ones, go astray, without being aware of it, from all the possibilities of life. The soldier's experience is exactly the reverse. Practical difficulties are the first thing he has to consider; he is bound to fact, even when called upon to exercise a high faculty of imagination, and to throw himself mentally into his adversary's position, in order to divine what that adversary is likely to do. This continual practical aim and strong hold of reality over the mind and thoughts, saves him from all the ordinary drawbacks of intellectualism, and gives him a simplicity, unconsciousness, and humility of mind, which are as important morally as they are refreshing and delightful. We do not know a more attractive picture than that of the honest and simple soldier, scarcely aware of the intellectual power which he must possess in

order to be what he is, taking credit for nothing but a desire to do his duty, expecting neither glory nor the name of hero, but only the approbation of his brothers in arms, and the reputation of "a good officer”and standing faithful at once to God and his country without ever thinking that he has any power of election in the matter, or any possible alternative. There are circumstances in which this calm matter - ofcourse becomes absolutely sublime. This is the special charm which the reader will find in Sir Hope Grant's simple book, as in so many other unaffected records of military toil. The soldier - historian may pause now and then to note the valour of a brother officer, or the daring of some adventurous party; but he treats his own doings as if they were mere brick-making, and goes on steadily, not to say stolidly, through his record of each day's labour, as if it were the most ordinary occupation in the world. When he has the chance of a frolic, he goes into it with the light-heartedness of a schoolboy; then turns his horse's head to face death and desperation, with the coolness of a workman returning to everyday work. He is indeed so little effective, at the first glance, in a pictorial point of view, that the spectator has to look again, and by the help of other lights than those which his hero offers, before he can form any idea of the real greatness of the man with whom he has to do.

The causes of the Indian Mutiny will never, we suppose, be fully known, at least to any European; -why the many different and often conflicting races should have been moved all at once, with one impulse, to this desperate and foolish attempt to throw over the sovereignty of the stranger; why they should have chosen that moment, and

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why, having made their first step so successfully, they should have fallen into such feebleness afterwards, are questions which we do not attempt to answer. It is, of course, always sufficiently comprehensible that the natives of a great country should from time to time be moved with intolerable impatience at thought of their conquered condition, especially when they have education enough to calculate on their own surpassing power of numbers, and on the comparative weakness of the stranger in the midst of them. According to all human probability, this feeling will and must continue to exist, and it is one for which every conquering race must be prepared; but this permanent danger is not enough of itself to account for so sudden and so violent an outburst of national passion. No better lesson could be given of the facility with which the popular mind receives impression, and the impossibility of dissipating such an impression when once formed, than by the story of the "greased cartridges," which the mysterious leaders of the Hindoo race took advantage of as the occasion necessary to rouse their followers. We scarcely need to recall the facts to the reader. The introduction of the Enfield rifle was the simple cause of the first convulsion: the cartridges for this rifle were greased with some preparation actually containing tallow, and supposed also to contain lard, the fat of the cow and the hog, both of which implied pollution and loss of caste to the native soldier. Captain Knollys, who has carefully edited and furnished some important and valuable chapters introductory and commentatory to Sir Hope Grant's narrative, enters in detail into this question, and to all appearance proves that those cartridges were never really

used, nor meant to be used, by the Sepoys. Several boxes of greased ammunition were indeed, he informs us, sent to India and served out to a few companies of Sepoys, but only for the purpose of "subjecting it to the tests of climate." "It was carried in the pouch, handed on from man to man, and finally sent back to England. Not a round was used by the Sepoys for practice purposes." Not only was this the case, but the ferment roused by this imaginary attempt upon their caste, was met by an immediate change of exercise, and permission to lubricate their own cartridges in their own way, so as to forestall the very shadow of reasonable objection. Reasonable objections, however, were not at all the real danger; and all the precautions which were used to prevent or remove the insane panic which had taken possession of the popular mind were in vain. Many other rumours of visionary terror were circulated among them to bring this unreasoning panic to a head. They were warned that their conquerors were about to make a grand attempt to pollute and degrade the oriental races to their own level. They were told that the Company's officers had sprinkled the blood of cows and pigs over the public stores of salt, with this diabolical purpose; that they had mixed animal fat with the ghee used by the Hindoos; that they had adulterated flour with ground. bones, and polluted the very wells by throwing meat into them. These curious follies of the imagination remind us of nothing so much as of Manzoni's story of the fables current among the Milanese at the time of their great plague-fables much of the same description, and producing the same madness of panic and revenge. Captain Knollys deprecates the idea of "judging natives by the same standard as we judge Euro