abetted Afghan war. Indeed, with an Afghan war looming astern and ahead, almost from end to end of the history, we feel like the night-passenger in a scantily lighted street, who, as he goes on from lamp-post to lamp-post, is chased by the lengthening shadows from behind, until these cross and blend with the deepening shadows from before. On this matter we must touch hereafter, however slightly; but we would rather expatiate on ground less poached by the hoof of party, and treat at greatest length that which is least familiar in Lawrence's history.

We began with Henry. It is indeed hardly possible to speak of one brother without thinking of the other. The bands that united, and the forces that disjoined these twin stars, their contrasts and resemblances, have a strong fascination for the author; he recurs to the subject again and again. To it we also shall necessarily recur.

work shows a great readiness in transfer- | exceptional acerbity with which the auring himself to an Indian atmosphere, a thor regards all who have in any manner wonderful mastery of the mass of necessary reading, a great power of assimilating Indian matter, as well as of realizing the men, the moral scenery, and the subjects, of which he had to treat. And though the book contains nearly twelve hundred pages, it is marvellously readable; and one who is neither a lover of contemporary history, nor tolerant of prolixity, has not found, nor has he skipped, a tedious page. It is not in the nature of things possible, that a work which intersects so many fields and touches so many complex events, actors in which survive on every side, should fail to call up a hundred questions, and be open to serious corrections. These will, we trust, be well weighed and profited by. For the book, take it all in all, is a noble one, and we believe that it will live. It is not of that easy writing, which makes such hard read ing to some of us; the style is vivid but scholarly, and sparsely gemmed with apt and scholarly quotation. It is usually restrained even in its fire, when the writer glows with admiration of his hero or of the faithful lieges, or in wrath against cruelty, injustice, or insincerity. There is nothing of the mannerism which latterly threatened to swallow up everything else in the Indian histories of Sir John Kaye nothing save this, that our author has borrowed that writer's fashion of constantly calling each character in his narrative, unless he be a governor-general, or in his estimation a black sheep (or both in one) by his simple baptismal name. This jars on our old-fashioned taste, and we long for that ancient dignity of history, which gave men their due style, or dispensed with the prænomen altogether. But the book, as a whole, does not fail of dignity.

Witnessing its successful achievement, and considering how destitute the author was of local "experience," we are apt to think that he might have been less hard upon Lord Lytton, who, he tells us, threw local experience to the dogs, and would none of it! Lord Lytton's name brings up what to many of us detracts most from our enjoyment of the book; namely, the

Edwardes has told us of the rugged and frugal upbringing of the Lawrences. It would be hard to conceive of a more fitting father for such sons than Colonel Alexander Lawrence, whose youth and prime had been full of hard service and gallant deeds, leaving him for memorial and reward a body worn with wounds and toil, the price of his commission, and a pension of rool.; a pittance, he grimly remarked, that would do little more than pay his doctors. The income of this somewhat wayward and impracticable veteran was, however, augmented more than once, not without importunity on his part, both by the crown and the Company.

The mother, a Knox, claiming collateral descent from the great John, is less distinctly brought before us. But, we are told, she prided herself on her descent; and, simple, thrifty, homely, God-fearing, as she was, her relation to the reformer was not that of blood alone.

Before Colonel Lawrence left the army, the household was migratory; and their quarters were at Richmond, in Yorkshire, when John, the sixth son and eighth child, was born, March 4th, 1811. The elder boys had been sent to a school at London

tears....

The characters

derry (now known as Foyle College), then | by the dawk, there was one bearing an Irish under a maternal uncle. The selection post-mark. It was from the old Simpson probably had nothing to do with the stir- brothers at Londonderry. ring associations of Derry, to which the biographer more than once refers, but much with the fact that the boys, being the master's nephews. could remain the whole year, or, in other words, were to have no holidays, a state of things which John Lawrence himself strove to reproduce with his Punjab "boys" of after years.

At twelve John in turn passed to his uncle's at Foyle. And it is worthy of remark that this small Ulster school should have sent to India, within the limits of one generation, men of such note as Lord Gough, Sir Robert Montgomery, and the three Lawrences (Sir George, Sir Henry, and Sir John).

We may here appropriately introduce an anecdote of later days. Two Simpsons, twin brothers, in very humble circumstances, had been ushers at Foyle. On Christmas-day, 1851,* the three members of the Punjab Board of Administration had eaten their dinner together at the old Residency House of Anarkalli. There had been a brief silence, when Sir Henry turned abruptly to John and said: "I wonder what the two poor old Simpsons are doing at this moment, and whether they have had any better dinner than usual!"

were written in a tremulous hand, and in many places were almost illegible from the writer's but the pen of the old man had afterwards It began: "My dear, kind boys;' been drawn through the word "boys," and there had been substituted for it the word "friends." It went on to thank the donors, in the name of his brother as well as of himself, for their most generous gift, which, he said, would go far to keep them from want during the short time that might be left to them; but far above the actual value of the present, was the preciousness of the thought that they had not been forgotten by their old pupils, in what seemed to be the very high position to which they had risen. He did not know what the "Board of Administration" meant, but he felt sure it was something very important; and he added in a postscript to his letter, with childlike simplicity, that he had looked out the Punjab in "the old school atlas," which they had so often used together, but he could not find either it or Lahore ! 'Oh," said Sir Henry, when he came to this part in the letter, to his friend Dr. Hathaway, "if you could only see, as I can see it now, that grimy old atlas, grown still more grimy by its use during the thirty years which have passed since I knew what it does not contain !" (Vol. i., pp. 371, 372.)

it, and the poor old fellow trying to find in it

As regards Lawrence's school experiences, it is recorded that on first going to school at Bristol he was nicknamed "Paddy," and received many kicks in the character of an Irishman; whilst at Foyle he was called "English John," and re ceived many (probably many more) as being an Englishman! Indeed Henry also, writing to Major George Broadfoot in 1845, says: "My education consisted in kicks; I was never taught anything, no, not even at Addiscombe."*

After a few remarks had been made upon the singular coincidence, that the three men who had been at school together as boys so many years back, now found themselves associated together once more as the rulers of the Punjab, Henry Lawrence, with the impulsive generosity which formed so prominent a part of his character, exclaimed, "I'll tell you what we will do. The Simpsons must be very old, and I should think nearly blind; they cannot be well off; let us each put down 50l. and send Hardly as Colonel Lawrence thought it to them to-morrow as a 'Christmas-box from his services had been requited, it would a far-off land, with the good wishes of three of seem that for a soldier with so numerous a their old pupils, now members of the Punjab family provision came abundantly, though Board of Administration at Lahore."" "All the manna did not fall from the expected right," said John, "I'll give 50l." "All right," said Montgomery, "I'll give another!" The subject was nearly forgotten, when one morning, amongst the pile of letters brought in

...

The book says 1850, but Montgomery was not then a member of the Board.

quarter. Of his seven sons, five, i.e., all who survived the age of eighteen, found careers in the Indian service through the friendship of one worthy director, Mr. Life of Sir Henry Lawrence, vol. i., p. 30.

hilla horsemen, or campos and pultuns (battalions) under European adventurers, Frenchmen, Savoyards, Germans, Neapolitans, English, Scotch, and Irish, usu

John Hudleston, of the Madras Civil Service. Whatever arguments may be alleged for the modern competitive system (and after all is said, the great argument lies in its being the inevitable companion of de-ally in the service of native princes, but mocracy), it will hardly live to vaunt a sometimes for their own hands, and albetter result than Mr. Hudleston con- ways leaving anarchy behind. But fortutributed to the good of his country in the nately, over much of this region, where nomination of those five brothers. the old village community survived, things went on in isolated organisms; the peasantry continuing to till their fields, and to deposit their quota with the master for the time being, as if it were a natural secretion.

A living Church dignitary is said to boast that he in truth saved India, though he never saw it! For Dean Merivale was offered, and declined, the nomination to Haileybury which, on his refusal, fell to John Lawrence. The latter would have Many whom Lawrence must have known been a soldier, like his three elder broth- well at Delhi had been already grown men ers: "A soldier I was born, and a soldier when, in the palace there, the treacherous I will be!" said he rebelliously. And ruffian Gholám Kádir gouged out the eyes indeed, twenty-seven years later, Henry of the emperor Sháh 'Alam with his dag. Lawrence, when making way for John as ger. Others must have been past middle head of the Punjab Administration, wrote: age when George Thomas, an Irishman "My brother will, I think, do very well, from Tipperary, fought and looted his way but it is because he is in heart and action to an independent principality at Hansi, more of a soldier than half the men who and with his ten battalions and sixty wear red coats."* The calm counsel and pieces of artillery, after repeatedly "batinfluence of their sister Letitia prevailed ing the Sikhs," (like the "Old Tippe with John, and he went to Haileybury. rary" of later days *) had got within four That he did not make much impression marches of Lahore, where he intended to on the heads of the college, is clear from plant the capital of his future empire, the recollection of contemporaries. Mr. when he was recalled to defend his nest J. H. Batten tells how in 1857 he visited against Perron's Mahrattas, and to termiold Dr. Le Bas, who had been dean innate his brief career of power. Hansi in their time, and having enabled him to identify the John Lawrence, then so much in the mouths of men, with the tall Irishman who had distinguished himself by making Orange bonfires on the grassplot, the venerable man drily asked, "But what has become of all our good students?"

In September, 1829, John Lawrence sailed for India, in company with his brother Henry, five years his senior, who was returning from sick-leave. Friendly prophets had predicted distinction for Henry, none for John. After a time of illness, home-sickness, and depression, in Calcutta, he was posted to Delhi at his own request, and thenceforward we hear no more of depression.

The "Delhi Territory," as it was called, came into our hands after Lord Lake's victories in 1803. It was up to 1832 a "non-regulation province," and formed the extreme north-west "march" of British India. In condition, memories, and survivals, no province remained within such a measurable distance of the India of 17831803, when its unhappy plains were swept over, this way and that way, by the cavalry of rival Mahratta powers, Mogul and Ro

Life of Sir Henry Lawrence, vol. ii., p. 202.

Lawrence's own day was the headquarters of the gallant James Skinner, Sikander Sahib as the natives called him the half-caste son of a Scotch subaltern and a Rajpoot girl (the captive of his spear) — who had himself fought for years in the Mahratta ranks, but was now the trusted and honored commander of a brigade of "irregular horse," which formed the original pattern of those famed Indian cavalry of our own day, whose sabres have flashed to good purpose from "Cambalu, seat of Cathayan Can," to "great Alcairo." Such memories, and the close neighborhood of quasi-independent States, with the presence of the mogul's court and the great city, all tended to produce a variety of life and of lawlessness, far beyond what was to be found nearer the heart of British rule. The assistants of the resident were liable to be employed on any kind of duty within the great frontier province, and their experience was apt to be of a strangely varied and invigorating kind. After a longish apprenticeship at Delhi, Lawrence was placed in acting charge of the district of Paniput, forming that northern part of the territory, on the plains of

* Lord Gough was so called.

12

which the fate of upper India has often | Paniput. It shows both his prompt ac
been fought out, from the mythic war of tion and his ready wit, but it is too
Pandus and Kurus down to the crushing long for abridgement. Another remark-
Mahratta defeat by the Afghans in 1761.
The three or four years that Lawrence
passed at Paniput, almost constantly in
solitude as regards European companion-
ship, were probably the most important of
his life in the making of the man. His
work there is admirably depicted in a
contribution too terse for abridgement,
made by Mr. Charles Raikes to the pages
of his friend's "Life."

able story, which must also be read in the original, is that of his tracking the murderer of his friend William Fraser, commissioner of Delhi, who was shot, one evening whilst riding home, by an emis sary of the Nawab Shamsuddín of Ferozepore (south of Delhi), in March, 1835.

William Fraser, a younger brother of the well-known traveller James Baillie Fraser, was a remarkable person. DurWhen he came to England on furlough, ing the settlement of the hill provinces, still a young man, it is said that he used taken from the Goorkhas in 1815, Fraser to pour forth a continuous flow of stories was commissioner in charge. By nature of his hairbreadth escapes and adventures a soldier of the most chivalrous stamp, during those early years; and in later he had been twice wounded in the assaults days, at Southgate or Brocket Hall, it of Kalanga (where Sir R. Gillespie fell), was the Sunday evening's treat of his and he succeeded in persuading Lord. children to hear one of those stirring Hastings to give him military rank. The stories. The mention of them would have rank of major was conferred upon him, been tantalizing if left thus vague. But, in Skinner's Horse, with which corps he as the author says, appropriately to his had been much associated, and the epony former character of biographer of Mo-mus of which was his bosom friend. And hammed:

When, after the death of the Arabian
prophet, disputes arose as to the meaning of a
Sura, recourse was had to "the breasts of the

faithful," and there a satisfactory answer or
explanation was often found. From "the
breasts of the faithful scattered everywhere

I have gathered up such fragments as I
could of the history of his earlier and more ad-
venturous career; and from these, as well as
from my own recollections of his conversation,
and from five or six stories, which, shortly after
his marriage, with the aid of his ever-ready
and faithful helper, he himself committed to
writing, I am able to give some slight idea of
the dauntless tracker of criminals, of the
"mighty hunter before the Lord," of the giant
in strength and in courage, in roughness and
in kindliness, in sport and in work, which John
Lawrence then was. (Vol. i., pp. 65, 66.)

Fortunate above all has been the pres-
ervation of those stories which he com-
mitted to writing, not merely for their
substantial interest (and such illustrations
of the real peasant life of India are very
rare), but as showing how admirably this
man could write when he braced himself
to do it, and did not dash off his say
"in
""
shirt sleeves as to expression and
grammar. One most striking story told
here is that of his arresting “red-hand
a murderer whose crime had been com.
mitted at the magistrate's own gate at

from 1816 to his death we find in the Bengal Army List the name of the civilian William Fraser as 'major with local rank," in Skinner's corps; the only example probably of such a position in the annals of British India. Fraser's was no nominal soldiering; whenever the yel low brigade took the field, their major went with them; thus he was present, and again wounded, before Bhurtpore in 1825-26. He was probably the most famous sportsman of upper India; and was noted for repeatedly engaging the lion (which then still survived in the western parts of the Delhi territory) or the tiger, on horseback with spear and sword only. Skinner erected a grandiose marble monument to his friend in Delhi church, afterwards destroyed by the mutineers. On it were carved two lions couchant, and some Persian verses, with these English lines:

Deep beneath this marble stone
A spirit kindred to our own
Sleeps in Death's profound repose,
Freed from human cares and woes:
Like us his heart, like ours his fame;
He bore on earth a gallant name.
Friendship gives to us the trust
To guard the hero's honored dust.

Had the sentiment of these lines, ascribed to Skinner himself, been graven in Greek beside a Thessalian fountain, instead of simple English rudely carved by a Delhi stone-cutter, they would have been prized as the gem of an anthology.

wa.

The author adduces the story of the dying emperor, who, when he felt the approaching end, bade his servant set him on his feet, "for an emperor ought to leave the world standing," and standing died. That was a nearer parallel to the dying act of Vespasian, which occurred in our own day and our own city, in the case of a gallant and good old soldier who was certainly thinking of no imperial parallels, and aiming at no sensational effects- we mean the last governor of Chelsea, Sir Sidney Cotton (he too one of another quintet of brethren sent into the public service in India, whom a competitive system will not easily match). The brave old man, when he knew his last morning had come, bade them dress him in full uniform as if he were going to a levee. He judged that it so became one who was altogether a soldier to meet the summons into the presence of the King of kings.

All the stories told do not pertain to | right mind, and actually casting up his settlePaniput. Lawrence had been only "aet- ment accounts! ing" there; a term which has suggested to the minds of the natives, in accordance with their pronunciation of it, and with that striving after meaning in sylla bles which leads to so many etymological fallacies, the interpretation ek-tăng, "oneleg," as if the temporary incumbent had but one leg in the official stirrup. One leg only had John Lawrence in Paniput, and when the post became permanently vacant he was displaced by a senior but less competent man. Three succeeding years were spent at Gurgaon and at EtáThe former district lay south of Delhi, on the border of the Rajpút states and of the dry regions inhabited by sons of robbers, themselves robbers but half reclaimed. They used to talk freely with him, and express their regrets of the palmy days departed, when "the good old rule and simple plan" prevailed, which they expressed in the pithy adage, "Fiskt láthí ústka bhains" (this might be rendered pretty closely, "Horum vaccula quorum bacula"). At Etáwa, S.E. of Agra, a dismal monotony of dust, his duties were those of "settlement," ie., of fixing the land assessment for a term of years; a subject on which Mr. Bosworth Smith gives the needful explanations with a brevity and lucidity which do him great credit, and almost fit him to play that part which (according to a story he quotes) Victor Jacquemont desired from Holt Mackenzie, viz., to explain in five minutes the various systems of Indian land revenue. In Etawa, as at Paniput and Gurgáon, Lawrence was storing up that honey of experience, on which the ruler of after days was nourished and fed others; but he loved it not, and rather shocks his biographer by calling it, in a letter of later days, "that hole!"

In the end of 1839 Lawrence had a bad attack of jungle-fever, and for some time his life was despaired of.

He had often been heard to say that many a man need not die if he made up his mind not to do so. One day the doctor who had been attending him told him that he feared he could hardly live till the following morning, and took leave of him accordingly. No sooner was he gone than his patient roused himself to the emergency. Now was the chance of putting his favorite maxim to the test. He determined not to die, and bade his servant give him a bottle of burgundy which lay in a box beneath his bed. He drank it off, and next day when the doctor called, by way of form, expecting to find that all was over, he found John Lawrence sitting up at his desk, clothed and in his

Lawrence was sent home; a joyous holiday it seems to have been; but the distinctest fragment of it surviving is preserved in the amber of that delightful book, "Caroline Fox's Journals; " a book of which the most disparaging criticism we have heard is, that it resembles one of those Scotch cakes that are all plums.

What the furlough gave him_besides health and holiday was a wife. Two testimonies of Lord Lawrence's own as to what his wife had been to him are quoted; one of these, wholly unpremeditated and almost unconscious, we copy: —

One evening, in his drawing-room at Southgate, looking up from his book, in which he had been engrossed, he discovered, to his surprise, that his wife had left the room. "Where's mother?" said he to one of his He returned to his book, and, looking up again daughters. "She's up-stairs," replied the girl. a few minutes later, put the same question to his daughter, and received the same answer. Once more he returned to his reading, and tion on his lips. His sister Letitia here broke once more he looked up with the same quesin," Why, really, John, it would seem as if you could not get on for five minutes without your he. (Vol. i., pp. 143-44) wife." "That's why I married her," replied

was the daughter of a clergyman in Don. The lady, Miss Harriette Hamilton, egal, who had previously held a living in County Meath, a district much disturbed by agrarian conspirators, exercising the savage cruelties that still disgrace parts of Ireland. Lady Lawrence's brother,