died out, nor is likely to do so. And for _that_ there is good reason: a
sorrow which is past decays gradually, and hushes itself to sleep; not
so a sorrow which points too ominously to the future. The last book on
this horrible tragedy is that of Mr Lushington;[1] and in point of
ability the best; the best in composition; the best for nobility of
principle, for warning, for reproach. But, for all that, we do not agree
with him: we concede all his major propositions; we deny most of his
minors. As for the other and earlier discussions upon this theme,
whether by boots, by pamphlets, by journals, English and Indian, or by
Parliamentary speeches, they now form a library; and, considering the
vast remoteness of the local interest, they express sublimely the
paramount power of what is moral over the earthy and the physical. A
battle of Paniput is fought, which adds the carnage of Leipsic to that
of Borodino, and, numerically speaking, heaps Pelion upon Ossa; but who
cares? No principle is concerned: it is viewed as battle of wolves with
tiger-cats; and Europe heeds it not. But let a column of less than 5000,
from a nation moving by moral forces, and ploughing up for ever new
soils of moral promise, betray itself, by folly or by guilt, into the
meshes of a frightful calamity, and the earth listens for the details
from the tropics to the arctic circle. Not Moscow and Smolensko, through
all the wilderness of their afflictions, ever challenged the gaze of
Christendom so earnestly as the Coord Cabool. And why? The pomp, the
procession of the misery, lasted through six weeks in the Napoleon case,
through six days in the English case. Of the French host there had been
originally 450,000 fighting men; of the English, exactly that same
amount read as the numerator of a fraction whose denominator was 100.
Forty-five myriads had been the French; forty-five hundreds the English.
And yet so mighty is the power of any thing moral, because shadowy and
illimitable, so potent to magnify and unvulgarize any interest, that
more books have been written upon Cabool, and through a more enduring