indeed, as was always supposed, largely autobiographical, and the
references in them to the struggle with the Indian climate point sadly
forward to the writer's own fate, ten years later, when, like the hero
of his novel, Edward Oakfield, he fell a victim to Indian heat and
Indian work. The novel was published in 1853, while its author was at
home on a long sick leave, and is still remembered for the anger and
scandal it provoked in India, and the reforms to which, no doubt, after
the Mutiny, it was one of the contributing impulses. It is, indeed, full
of interest for any student of the development of Anglo-Indian life and
society; even when one remembers how, soon after it was published, the
great storm of the Mutiny came rushing over the society it describes,
changing and uprooting everywhere. As fiction, it suffers from the Rugby
"earnestness" which overmasters in it any purely artistic impulse, while
infusing a certain fire and unity of its own. But various incidents in
the story--the quarrel at the mess-table, the horse-whipping, the court
martial, the death of Vernon, and the meeting between Oakfield and
Stafford, the villain of the piece, after Chilianwallah--are told with
force, and might have led on, had the writer lived, to something more
detached and mature in the way of novel-writing.

But there were few years left to him, "poor gallant boy!"--to quote the
phrase of his poet brother; and within them he was to find his happiness
and his opportunity in love and in public service, not in literature.

Nothing could be more pathetic than the isolation and revolt of the
early letters. The boy Ensign is desperately homesick, pining for Fox
How, for his mother and sisters, for the Oxford he had so easily
renounced, for the brothers parted from him by such leagues of land and
sea.