shadow. But the second was worse: it was a _positive_ delusion. We
fancied a resource where simply there was a snare--a mooring cable where
simply there was a rope for our execution--a sheet-anchor where simply
there was a rock waiting for our shipwreck.

Not the less, however, we maintain, that whilst in fact our ruin was
self-prepared, come it would, sooner or later, from the necessity of
Affghan society, had the actual occasion of that ruin been wanting. You
build a palace on the waters, and you complain that a monsoon has
overthrown it. True; but had there been no monsoon, equally it would
have been supplanted by the _natural_ unsteadiness of the waves.

Now, _fourthly_, however, for Cabool, and the crape-bound banners
"perituraque castra!" Fourthly and lastly, for the solution of that
hideous calamity, whose memory is accursed for ever. But the solution--
is not _that_ plain already? If what we allege be true, if the delusions
exposed under the third head are rightly stated, will not _they_ solve
the ruin of Cabool? Are not _they_ sufficient? No, nothing will solve
it--no causes are sufficient for such a result, unless a strong spirit
of delusion had been inflicted from heaven, distraction, frenzy,
judicial madness. No dangers from the enemy, no pressure from without,
_could_ have accomplished that wreck, had they not been aided by
treachery within the counsels of our own hearts.

It is an old saying of any subject too vast or too sad to measure by
hurried words--that "_de Carthagine satius est silere, quam parcius
dicere_." And in this case, where we have left ourselves too narrow a
space to turn round in, and where no space would exhaust the infinities
of the affliction, it is not our purpose to heighten, or rhetorically to
colour, any one feature of the dismal story. Rhetoric, and art of all