bar, placed themselves in the power of that chieftain in another conference, at the close of which they found themselves prisoners in his camp. Of General Elphinstone, who besides the natural infirmities of age, suffered from a state of health which had impaired the powers of mind and body, we need only add, that he died in captivity; and that from the first he appears to have been conscious of his unfitness for the service, which he would gladly have declined, could he have done so with honour. The responsibility of his errors lies with those who appointed him to the post, and, at the same time, suffered brave men to be neglected. We return to Lady Sale and her companions, now compelled to retrace their steps through the dreadful scenes of recent slaughter, and with feelings which it would indeed be vain to attempt to describe.

"The road was covered with awfully mangled bodies, all naked: fifty-eight Europeans were counted in the Tunghee and dip of the Nullah; the natives innumerable. Numbers of camp followers, still alive, frost-bitten and starving; some perfectly out of their senses and idiotic. Major Ewart, 54th, and Major Scott, 44th, were recognized as we passed them; with some others. The sight was dreadful; the smell of the blood sickening; and the corpses lay so thick it was impossible to look from them, as it required care to guide my horse so as not to tread upon the bodies: but it is unnecessary to dwell on such a distressing and revolting subject."

For the details of the captivity we must refer our readers to the volume itself, which few of the reading public will be without; but briefly it may be stated, that Lady Sale, while she tells us that nothing could satisfy her woman's vengeance against Mahomed Akbar for the assassination of the Envoy, and massacre of an army, placed by treaty under his nominal escort, yet admits that on the whole he treated his prisoners well.

"It is true," she adds, "we have not common comforts, but what we denominate such are unknown to Affghan females; they always sleep on the floor, &c., hardships unknown to us. It is true, we have been taken about the country, exposed to heat, cold, rain, &c.; but so were their

In aggravation of their sufferings (but for this Mahomed Akbar could not be accountable) came an earthquake, in which the whole party escaped only by miracle from being crushed and buried under falling ruins.

"I had gone up stairs to see after my clothes; for servants being scarce, we get a sweeper, who also acts as saces, to wash for us; and I hang them up to dry on the flat roof: we dispense with starch and ironing and in our present situation we must learn to do everything that is useful. But to return to the earthquake. For some time I balanced myself as well as I could; till I felt the roof was giving way. I fortunately succeeded in removing from my position before the roof of our room fell in with a dreadful crash. The roof of the stairs fell in as I descended them, but did me no injury. All my anxiety was for Mrs. Sturt; but I could only see a heap of rubbish. I was nearly bewildered, when I heard the joyful sound, 'Lady Sale, come here, all are safe;' and I found the whole party injured in the court yard."

The rest of the tale is soon told. Winter wore wearily away. With returning spring it became practicable to force the mountain passes with new armies, rushing, now, to victory and revenge. Fearful was that revenge, and another dark spot does it add to the darkest page in the history of our Indian conquests. Villages burnt-vineyards uprooted-the inhabitants of towns put to the sword - the great bazaar of Cabool levelled to the ground (once an architectural monument of the middle ages, remarkable through the East-now in its ruins, a monument of British vandalism)-and the whole country laid waste; these were the glories of the second campaign, the deeds which Englishmen will never name without a blush, and over which humanity will long weep. We will not dwell upon a picture which has but one redeeming feature-the rescue of the prisoners.

else.

selves; I must not use the word dress: and making up these articles has given us occupation; increased by having to work with raw cotton, which we have to twist into thread for ourselves. We suffered more from uncleanliness than anything It was above ten days after our departure from Cabool, before I had the opportunity to change my clothes, or even to take them off and put them on again, and wash myself: and fortunate were those who did not possess much live stock. was not until after our arrival here (at Spéwakee, Cabool) that we completely got rid of lice, which we denominated infantry: the fleas, for which Afghanistan is famed (and particularly Cabool), we call light cavalry "

It

ward march. But their dangers were not yet ended, and more than once, utterly incapable of defence, they ran the most imminent risk of being retaken by powerful bodies of Affghans still lingering in their neighbourhood. The next day, however, certain information was received of the exact position of the armies under General Nott and General Pollock, happily not far distant. The army of General Nott was the nearest to the party, and we learn with astonishment, that, while they were yet in peril, General Nott refused to send a brigade to their assistance, alleging that his troops were fatigued. They were only saved at the last moment by the forced march of a brigade dispatched by General Pollock. At the head of that brigade was General Sale, and to save his wife and daughter, with their fellow-captives, was the birth-day service of his sixtieth year.

Two large parties of Affghans were about to attack the little band, when the advance of General Sale with the 3rd dragoons compelled them to retire. Lady Sale was suffering from fever, and, incapable of sitting upon her horse. was enduring the torture of riding in one of the rude jolting-cars of the country, when a letter arrived with the news that her husband was at hand. Instantly her strength was renovated, and, shaking off fever and all ills, she awaited with anxiety the moment of his arrival. Every eye was strained in the direction in which it was supposed he would appear. A cloud of dust was his forerunner. We can imagine the sensations with which that cloud was seen to rise on the wind. "It is he! It is Sale! We are saved, we are saved!"

"It is impossible to express our feelings on Sale's approach. To my daughter and myself

happiness so long delayed, as to be almost unexpected, was actually painful, and accompanied by a choking sensation, which could not obtain

the relief of tears. When we arrived where the infantry were posted, they cheered all the captives as they passed them; and the men of the 13th pressed forward to welcome us individually. Most of the men had a little word of hearty congratulation to offer, each in his own style, on the restoration of his colonel's wife and daughter: and then my highly-wrought feelings found the desired relief; and I could scarcely speak to thank the soldiers for their sympathy, whilst the long withheld tears now found their course. On arriving at the camp, Captain Backhouse fired a royal sa

lute from his mountain train guns; and not only our old friends, but all the officers in the party came to offer congratulations, and welcome our return from captivity."

Here we might appropriately conclude, but we cannot do so without again calling attention to the cause of the miseries and disasters we have been describing. Upon the impolicy of the war we need say nothing-upon that there is but one opinion; but upon the conduct of the war there must be a further inquiry, and we demand one into the system which now governs military patronage- the root of the evil. One day, if the system continues, it will cost us our Eastern Empire. Napoleon rose by appreciating talent whenever it was available for his purpose, and fell when he became jealous of the fame of his best generals, and sought chiefly to strengthen his throne by renewing the privileges of a worn-out aristocracy. The system ought to be immediately the subject of a parliamentary investigation. If, however, the inquiry, which is inevitable, should be confined to court martials, the first court martial to be appointed should be one to inquire into the case of Colonel Dennie; and the first man to demand that inquiry, presuming that he is able to meet the charges brought against him by the biographer of that distinguished officer who might have saved the army, is the present Lord Keene-created a baron of the United Kingdom for his alleged military services at Ghuznee.

W.

THIS is a rambling, discursive book-the work of a clever and acute observer; but nowise remarkable for either thinking or style. It has been put together with as little pains as we ever remember to have seen exemplified in the operation of book-making. But it is, upon the whole, amusing; and it leads us to think favourably of the author himself. Sir George Lefevre (for so the writer is confidently named in some of the periodical publications of the day) has seen much of life-a great deal more than he chooses to communicate; and in what he has here revealed, it is not always easy to distinguish between 'Dichtung' and 'Wahrheit:' -to borrow the title of Goethe's Memoirs, which he had chosen by way of motto. Nothing, at any rate, can be more careless than his manner of throwing together his loose remarks on men and things; nothing more commonplace than two-thirds of the matter with which he has fill ed up the predestined and favourite number of three volumes. But the remaining portion consists of quaint anecdote, and descriptions of

scenes and characters, such as only an intimate acquaintance with the interior of foreign life could have enable him to delineate; joined with the shrewd judgments of a cosmopolite on the world about him. A little more knowledge of languages, we should have thought, would have done him no harm: his German is somewhat elementary; his sins against French orthography (albeit an accomplishment on which he prides himself) unpardonable; while with Polish and Russian, though he lived sixteen years in these countries, he does not seem to possess any ac quaintance. He at least disfigures the names of places and people in a manner only equalled by the most slovenly of modern tourists. But as he has managed to live and thrive without them, so he succeeds in giving his reader a tolerable insight into many things, of which some writers of greater pretensions covey no idea. Altogether, had we been consulted, in our consulting capacity, as to whether the records of the life of our medical friend should be given to the public, we should have felt

some difficulty in advising on the case: as it is, we are glad that no opportunity was afforded us of giving the austerer counsel.

The travelling physician' first introduces himself to us in his capacity of medical student; having just picked up knowledge enough to fancy himself the victim of all the ills which flesh is heir to. It was under this conviction that he started on his travels, after obtaining his degree at Edinburgh. Each pain and ache,' says he, every uncomfortable sensation which Texperienced, seemed to indicate the last stage of consumption. I was continually feeling my 'pulse, taking a deep inspiration to discover 'whether I had any pain in my chest, attentive 'to every little symptom which might tend to 'strengthen the opinion which I had formed of my case. I had two objects to attain, and 'their mutual accomplishment was necessary 'to my existence. I had to regain my own 'health, and to procure the means of so doing 'by endeavouring to restore the health of ' others.'

The unpromising resource of East or West India practice was of course the first thing | which offered itself under these peculiar circumstances; but fortunately, as it turned out for our physician, his endeavours for employment in those quarters did not succeed; and in September 1819, after a period of that trying and anxious uncertainty which is usually allott ed to the young pilgrim in his outset in that profession-one of the roughest passages in the life of all, and one with the sufferings of which there is the least sympathy to be met withhe found himself comfortably established as travelling physician to Lord --9 then leaving England in the last stage of consumption. We might, were it proper, fill up the blank with the name of a Scottish nobleman of no ordinary character; one of those sanguine temperaments so often found in conjunction with predisposition to this malady; the projector of schemes of singular magnitude, who lived, like many similar projectors, a little before his time, and would have found in our days a much wider field of action, and fellow-visionaries as zealous as himself.

English physicians had not then attained the melancholy learning with which they now estimate the several varieties of air and temperature in the regions to which they recommend the victims of that appalling complaint. They consigned their patients to various by-places of the newly opened Continent; but with results much the same. Spain was talked of for wintering-then Montpelier-then Toulouse-and Pau was finally determined on, where the southern breezes blow freshly from the glittering icy wall of the Pyrenees, full in sight. Qui diable 6 Vous a conseillé de venir ici' said the Basques, as they pointed to their mountains. The first breezes of spring heralded the departure of the poor invalid, and procured the doctor his release, and a pleasant solitary tour in the Pyrenees, where a village Esculapius seems to have laughed him out of his fancies about his health; and we hear no more of his consumption.

After the termination of this engagement, we

find him again in London, exerting himself 'to get on' in the usual course of his profession. He nearly succeeded in a great canvass for a Dispensary but at last, although he could prove by his books that he had secured twothirds of the bona fide subscribers, the candidate whom he feared the least created up. 'wards of a hundred old women, whose proxies threw me,' he says, 'into the minority! I was in a rage, and the directors were in a rage, and a council was called, and a law was pass'ed which prevented such proceedings for the future; but had no retrospective influence, and it did not help me.'

After three or four more years of hard study, anxious expectations, and no fees, he accepts a situation with Prince --- at Paris, as family physician, for five years.

The Prince was a man who lived for the day, and only thought of the morrow as able to procure him possibly more entertainment than the day. He seldom read, and if he did, it was only a pamphlet, or the last new novel published by Avocat. With politics he never troubled himself, or he had, perhaps, been too much troubled by them. As regarded general literature, however, he seemed to be quite au fuit; he knew the merits of most authors, and could equally point out their defects. Speak of chemistry, he seemed throughly acquainted with the principles of the science. Physics he had a natural talent for. and was often occupied in inventing some plan to counteract the loss in

vertical motion. He was a very fair mathematician. He was an excellent modern linguist, and could speak half a dozen languages fluently. He knew nothing of the classics. His conversation was replete with anecdote, for his memory was most retentive, and he turned every thing he heard to his own account: he made it in fact his own. So far from appearing to have neglected his education, he seemed on the contrary to have studied a great deal; and yet his whole information was derived from what he had picked up in conversation, and little from books. social powers were great, and as he was not pedantic, but gallant and amiable in the exhe was adored by the fair sex. The character drawn by Segur of the famous Potemkin would apply in many respects to the Prince.

treme,

SO

His

'I may observe, that his occupations were most trivial. He would rise at five o'clock, put on his robe-de-chambre, and sit at his table in his study till ten or eleven o'clock A. M. During the whole of this time he was employed in sketching something upon paper, chewing the corner of his pocket-handkerchief, and taking snuff; wholly absorbed in these occupations, he hardly lifted his head from the table until he was summoned to

breakfast. Then his latent faculties became free, and he would converse during the whole of this repast with his maître-d'hôtel, or his cook, if he had no other company. He seldom, however, was driven to such expedients; for as his table had the first reputation, there were seldom wanting guests in the shape of cousins or nephews, or even of intimate friends. This repast, which generally lasted an hour, was always taken in the robe-dechambre; and then he retired again to his cabinet, where he remained until it was time to dress him

VOL. I.

39