promptings to goodness tugging at his heart, would have tramped
bravely and soberly home.

It is so much the custom to obliterate from religious memoirs all
vigorous human traits, all incidents which do not tend to edification,
and all contemporary criticism which cannot be smoothed into praise,
that what is left seems to the disheartened reader only a pale shadow
of life. It is hard to make any biography illustrate a theme, or prove
an argument; and the process by which such results are obtained is
so artificial as to be open to the charge of untruth. Because General
Havelock was a good Baptist as well as a good soldier, because he
expressed a belief in the efficacy of prayer (like Cromwell's "Trust
in God, and keep your powder dry "), and because he wrote to his wife,
when sent to the relief of Lucknow, "May God give me wisdom and
strength for the work!"--which, after all, was a natural enough thing
for any man to say,--he was made the subject of a memoir determinedly
and depressingly devout, in which his family letters were annotated
as though they were the epistles of Saint Paul. Yet this was the man
who, when Lucknow _was_ relieved, behaved as if nothing out of the
ordinary had happened to besiegers or besieged. "He shook hands with
me," wrote Lady Inglis in her journal, "and observed that he feared
we had suffered a great deal." That was all. He might have said as
much had the little garrison been incommoded by a spell of unusual
heat, or by an epidemic of measles.

As a matter of fact, piety is a by no means uncommon attribute of
soldiers, and there was no need on the part of the Reverend Mr. Brock,
who compiled these shadowy pages, to write as though General Havelock
had been a rare species of the genius military. We know that what
the English Puritans especially resented in Prince Rupert was his