riated savages. It is a quite melancholy enough object of
contemplation, in even its latter stages. A wild scene of rocks and
mountains darkened overhead with tempest, beneath covered deep with
snow; a broken and dispirited force, struggling hopelessly through the
scarce passable defiles,--here thinned by the headlong assaults of
howling fanatics, insensible to fear, incapable of remorse, and
thirsting for blood,--there decoyed to destruction through the
promises of cruel and treacherous chiefs, devoid alike of the sense of
honour and the feeling of pity; with no capacity or conduct among its
leaders; full of the frightful recollections of past massacres,
hopeless of ultimate escape; struggling, however, instinctively on
amid the unceasing ring of musketry from thicket and crag, exhibiting
mile after mile a body less dense and extended, leaving behind it a
long unbroken trail of its dead; at length wholly wasting away, like
the upward heave of a wave on a sandy beach, and but one solitary
horseman, wounded and faint with loss of blood, holding on his
perilous course, to tell the fate of all the others. And then, the
long after-season of grief and suspense among anxious and at length
despairing relations at home, around many a cheerless hearth, and in
many a darkened chamber, and the sadly frequent notice in the
obituaries of all our public journals, so significant of the disaster,
and which must have rung so heavy a knell to so many affectionate
hearts, 'Killed in the Khyber Pass.' To find passages of parallel
calamity in the history of at least civilised countries, we have to
ascend to the times of the Roman empire during its period of decline
and disaster, when one warlike emperor, in battle with the Goth,

'in that Serbonian bog,
Betwixt Damieta and Mount Cassus old,
With his whole army sank;'

or when another not less warlike monarch was hopelessly overthrown by
the Persian, and died a miserable slave, exposed to every indignity
which the invention of his ungenerous and barbarous conqueror could
suggest.

Britain in this event has received a terrible lesson, which we trust
her scarce merited and surely most revolting successes in China will
not have the effect of wholly neutralizing. The Affghan war, regarded
as a war of principle, was eminently unjust; regarded as a war of
expediency, it was eminently imprudent. It seems to have originated
with men of narrow and defective genius, not over