has perished miserably,--we can barely hope that
our later successes may have had so far the effect of effacing the
memory of our earliest disasters, that we shall be enabled to sit down
under their cover on the eastern bank of the Indus, 'just where we
were before.' And even this is much in the circumstances.

We have seen the British in India repeat the same kind of fatal
experiment which cost Napoleon his crown, and from which Charles XII.
dated his downfall; and repeat it, in the first instance at least,
with a result more disastrous than either the flight from Pultowa or
the retreat from Moscow. And though necessarily an expedition on a
similar scale, it seemed by no means improbable that its ultimate
consequences might bear even more disastrously on British power in the
East, than the results of the several expeditions into Russia, under
Charles and Napoleon, bore on the respective destinies of Sweden and
of France. That substratum of opinion in the minds of an hundred
millions of Asiatics, on which British authority in India finds its
main foundation, bade fair to be shivered into pieces by the shock.

There are passages in all our better histories that stand out in high
relief, if we may so speak, from the groundwork on which they are
based. They appeal to the imagination, they fix themselves in the
memory; and after they have got far enough removed into the past to
enable men to survey them in all their breadth, we find them caught up
and reflected in the fictions of the poet and the novelist.

But it is wonderful how comparatively slight is the effect which
most of them produce at the time of their occurrence. It would seem
as if the great mass of mankind had no ability of seeing them in
their real character, except through the medium of some superior
mind, skilful enough to portray them in their true colours and
proportions. Who, acquainted with the history of the plague in
London, for instance, can fail being struck with the horrors of
that awful visitation, as described in the graphic pages of Defoe?
Who, that experienced the visitation of similar horrors which
swept away in our own times one-tenth part of the human species,
could avoid remarking that the reality was less suited to impress
by its actual presence, than the record by its touching pictures
and its affecting appeals? The reality appealed to but the fears
of men through the instinct of self-preservation, and even this
languidly in some cases,