leaving the imagination unimpressed; whereas
the wild scenes of Defoe filled the whole mind, and impressed
vividly through the influence of that sense of the poetical which, in
some degree at least, all minds are capable of entertaining.

On a nearly similar principle, the country has not yet been able
rightly to appreciate the disasters of Affghanistan. It has been
unable to bestow upon them what we shall venture to term the historic
prominence. When one after one the messengers reach Job, bearing
tidings of fatal disasters, in which all his children and all his
domestics have perished, the ever-recurring 'and I only am escaped
alone to tell thee,' strikes upon the ear as one of the signs of a
dispensation supernatural in its character. The narrative has already
prepared us for events removed beyond the reach of those common laws
which regulate ordinary occurrences. Did we find such a piece of
history in any of our older chronicles, we would at once set it down,
on Macaulay's principle, as a ballad thrown out of its original verse
into prose, and appropriated by the chronicler, in the lack of less
questionable materials. But finding it in the Record of eternal truth,
we view it differently; for there the supernatural is not dissociated
from the true. How very striking, to find in the authentic annals of
our own country a somewhat similar incident; to find the 'I only am
escaped alone to tell thee' in the history of a well-equipped British
army of the present day! There occurs no similar incident in all our
past history. British armies have capitulated not without disgrace. In
the hapless American war, Cornwallis surrendered a whole army to
Washington, and Burgoyne another whole army to Gates and Arnold.

The British have had also their disastrous retreats.

The retreat from Fontenoy was at least precipitate; and there was much
suffered in Sir John Moore's retreat on Corunna. But such retreats
have not been wholly without their share of glory, nor have such
surrenders been synonymous with extermination. In the annals of
British armies, the 'I only have escaped alone to tell thee' belongs
to but the retreat from Cabul. It is a terrible passage in the history
of our country--terrible in all its circumstances. Some of its earlier
scenes are too revolting for the imagination to call up.

It is all too humiliating to conceive of it in the character of an
unprincipled conspiracy of the civilised, horribly avenged by
infu