are supposed to furnish the best materials of history, but which are often in reality only one-sided compilations of garbled documents— counterfeits which the ministerial stamp forces into currency, defrauding a present generation, and handing down to posterity a chain of dangerous lies."

Through the numerous characters thus depicted, with the immediate surrounding influences acting upon them, we obtain clearer views of the actual nature of Indian policy than the most elaborate analysis of mere events could supply. The work abounds in portraits of this kind, drawn with skill and vigour, and imparting to the busy scene that life and movement which constitute the true elements of the historical narrative.

The murder of Sir Alexander Burnes was the melancholy presage of all the horrors that followed. We had succeeded in placing Shah Soojah on the throne, and sending Dost Mahomed and his family into captivity. But we had no sooner achieved this object than our troops, surrounded by savage enemies, under the very walls within which Shah Soojah sat in his new state which we had won for him, were exposed not merely to the basest perfidies, but to open hostilities, beginning with the assassination of our Envoy. Caubul was in a state of insurrection against the hated Feringhees. Shah Soojah did nothing but look on at the humiliation and slaughter, and our position grew worse and worse every day. There is no doubt that a vigorous demonstration in the first instance would have saved us; but throughout the whole of this most disastrous war, an invincible panic seems to have struck down the courage and selfpossession of our soldiers and their commanders. The curse which had fallen on Sir Giles Overreach might be applied with too much truth to the army of Caubul. Orphans' tears had, indeed, glued their swords to the scabbards, and undone widows sat upon their arms and paralyzed them!

Elphinstone, who commanded at Caubul, was mentally and physically incompetent to grapple with the difficulties of the situation. His frame was paralyzed with disease-his mind clouded with suffering. He knew nothing of the country, and appears to have combined in a strange mixture the opposite qualities of obstinacy and credulity. The result was perpetual oscillation. To increase the misfortunes of the crisis, he insisted upon the maintenance of an authority which he either abused or suffered to lapse into inaction. When Brigadier Shelton, a brave rough soldier, was brought into the camp to help him, instead of availing himself of his services, he did nothing but thwart him and annihilate his utility. Everything was against us. Even the cantonments in which our troops lay, exposed to daily harassing assaults, were injudiciously chosen; and when it was

proposed to take refuge in the Balla Hirsar, where, at least, the safety of Shah Soojah would have been compromised with our own, it was negatived. The same doom brooded over us on all occasions. The destiny of the Greek drama was not more clear, certain, and fatal, than the awful retribution which tracked in disgrace and ruin the whole tragedy, or series of tragedies, of this most unrighteous war.

It was

At last the whole country rose up in insurrection. evident that, independently of their own differences, the entire population was resolved to exterminate the invaders. The incidents of suffering in masses, and of individual heroism, under these appalling circumstances, are probably unparalleled. Many such illustrations might be accumulated; but the larger calamity of a whole army of British troops, defeated at all points, disgraced, and insulted, and perishing in the snows of a wild country, or cut to pieces in its savage passes, reduces these individual miseries to absolute insignificance. Meanwhile, Shah Soojah was gazing down from the windows of his palace upon the daily decimation of our troops by starvation and the knives of the Afghans. He was infected not only by the general panic, but by special fears for himself.

Some faint notion may be formed of the scenes he witnessed from a scrap out of the description of one of the numerous straggling actions our troops were compelled to fight in self-preservation. The enemy had swept down upon a village from whence our commissariat had been drawing supplies of grain. It was necessary to drive them out of the village. As usual, councils were divided as to what ought to be done, and, as usual, the wrong advice was taken. A weak detachment was sent out to occupy, and, adds Mr. Kaye, "with a fatuity only to be accounted for by the belief that the curse of God was upon these unhappy people, they had taken out a single gun!" The battle had raged for some time, our regiments broken and disordered, now flying, and now re-forming only to be scattered again; and now follows a scene of degradation to the British soldiers, such as we believe to be strange to our annals, and which, we trust, we shall never have occasion to record again :

"The artillerymen were falling fast at their gun; and Shelton, thinking it insecure, withdrew it to a safer position. Emboldened by this, the enemy continued the attack with increased vigour; and again the British troops began to cower beneath the fire of their assailants. "For now was seen again that spectacle which had before struck terror into our ranks, and scattered our fighting men like sheep. A party of the enemy, headed by a band of furious Ghazees, emerged from the gorge, and crawling up the hill, suddenly burst upon our wavering battalions. The British troops had been losing heart before

this; and now it needed little to extinguish the last remaining spark of courage that warmed them. At this inauspicious moment, Shelton, who had been ever in the thickest of the fire, and who escaped by very miracle the balls which flew about the one-armed veteran, and struck him five times with no effect, fell back a few paces to order some more men to the front. Seeing the back of their commander towards the enemy, our front-rank men gave way; and, in a minute, infantry and cavalry were flying precipitately down the slope of the hill. The Afghan horse, seizing the opportunity, dashed upon our retreating force; and presently friend and foe were mixed up in inextricable confusion. The artillerymen alone were true to themselves and their country. Thinking only of the safety of their gun, they dashed down the steep descent and drove into the very midst of the Afghan horsemen. But they could not resist the multitudes that closed around them; and the gun, so nobly served and so nobly protected, fell a second time into the hands of the enemy.

"The rout of the British force was complete. In one confused mass of infantry and cavalry-of European and native soldiers-they fled to the cantonment walls. Elphinstone, who had watched the conflict from the ramparts, went out, infirm as he was, and strove, with all the energy of which, in his enfeebled state, he was master, to rally the fugitives. But they had lost themselves past recovery; they had forgotten that they were British soldiers. The whole force was now at the mercy of the Afghans."

Baffled, beaten, mocked, and hunted, we attempted to negociate, but even here we failed; and at this crisis there suddenly appeared upon the scene to give increased efficiency and consolidation to the rebellion, a young Barukzye chief, Akbar Khan, the son of that Dost Mahomed, the enterprising and intelligent ruler whom we had driven from his seat, to make room for a king who possessed neither the resolution nor the power to protect his generous allies from the vengeance of his own people.

We need not pursue the story; the treaty, ignominious in more aspects than that of its insulting dictation, entered into with Akbar Khan, and the disastrous retreat from Caubul. It was here that poor Macnaghten perished, and no man was ever placed in a more difficult strait; with the military authorities. always opposed to him, his advice always set aside or evaded, or not acted upon till it was too late; his manly hopes dragged down at last to the desperate conviction that nothing more could be done by engaging the enemy in the field, and that the last resource lay in a game of dexterous diplomacy; it is matter of wonder, as Mr. Kaye observes, not that he was pressed down by "the tremendous burthen of anxiety which had sat upon him throughout seven weeks of unparalleled suffering and disaster, but that he had borne up so long and so bravely under its weight." It would be well to draw a veil for ever over the horrible scenes

The Murder of Macnaghten.

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that ensued, if it might not be hoped that the relation of them would serve as a warning to the future. In the last extremity, Macnaghten consented to give a meeting to Akbar Khan to negociate terms. He was warned of intended treachery, but, like poor Burnes, he would not believe in it. Accompanied by his friends Lawrence, Trevor, Mackenzie, and a few horsemen, he rode out of the cantonments; but, remembering a beautiful Arab horse of his own which Akbar Khan had much coveted, he sent back for it that he might present it to the Sirdar.

"Near the banks of the river, midway between Mahmood Khan's fort and the bridge, about 600 yards from the cantonment, there were some small hillocks, on the further slope of which, where the snow was lying less thickly than on other parts, some horse-cloths were now spread by one cf Akbar Khan's servants. The English officers and the Afghan Sirdars had exchanged salutations and conversed for a little while on horseback. The Arab horse, with which Mackenzie had returned, had been presented to Akbar Khan, who received it with many expressions of thanks, and spoke also with gratitude of the gift of the pistols which he had received on the preceding day. It was now proposed that they should dismount. The whole party accordingly repaired to the hill-side. Macnaghten stretched himself at full length on the bank; Trevor and Mackenzie, burdened with presentiments of evil, seated themselves beside him. Lawrence stood behind his chief until urged by one of the Khans to seat himself, when he knelt down on one knee, in the attitude of a man ready for immediate action. A question from Akbar Khan, who sat beside Macnaghten, opened the business of the conference. He abruptly asked the Envoy if he were ready to carry out the proposals of the preceding evening? Why not?' asked Macnaghten. The Afghans were by this time gathering around in numbers, which excited both the surprise and the suspicion of Lawrence and Mackenzie, who said, that if the conference was to be a secret one, the intruders ought to be removed. With a movement of doubtful sincerity some of the chiefs then lashed out with their whips at the closing circle; but Akbar Khan said that their presence was of no consequence, as they were all in the secret with him.

"Scarcely were the words uttered, when the Envoy and his companions were violently seized from behind. The movement was sudden and surprising. There was a scene of terrible confusion, which no one can distinctly describe. The officers of the Envoy's staff were dragged away, and compelled each to mount a horse ridden by an Afghan chief. Soon were they running the gauntlet through a crowd of Ghazees, who struck out at them as they passed. Trevor unfortunately slipped from his insecure seat behind Dost Mahomed Khan, and was cut to pieces on the spot. Lawrence and Mackenzie, more fortunate, reached Mahmood Khan's fort alive.

"In the meanwhile, the Envoy himself was struggling desperately on the ground with Akbar Khan. The look of wondering horror that

sat upon his upturned face will not be forgotten by those who saw it to their dying days. The only words he was heard to utter were, Az barae Khoda,' (For God's sake.') They were, perhaps, the last words spoken by one of the bravest gentlemen that ever fell a sacrifice to his erring faith in others. He had struggled from the first manfully against his doom, and now these last manful struggles cost the poor chief his life. Exasperated past all control by the resistance of his victim, whom he designed only to seize, Akbar Khan drew a pistol from his girdle-one of those pistols for the gift of which only a little while before he had profusely thanked the Envoy-and shot Macnaghten through the body. Whether the wretched man died on the spot-or whether he was slain by the infuriated Ghazees, who now pressed eagerly forward, is not very clearly known-but these miserable fanatics flung themselves upon the prostrate body of the English gentleman, and hacked it to pieces with their knives."

It is almost incredible that this treacherous and bloody deed, committed in the open day-light, should have been permitted to pass, not only unrevenged, but without even an attempt to revenge it. The same had happened in the case of Burnes. General Elphinstone was paralyzed by worse disabilities than rheumatic gout.

Then came the retreat-the crowning retribution of all. It is impossible to convey any adequate impression of the narrative Mr. Kaye has collected, for the first time, into a complete whole of these dreadful scenes. After sixty-five days of such humiliation as had never before been borne by a British force, they prepared to consummate the work of self-abasement by abandoning their position, and "leaving the trophies of war in the hands of an insolent enemy." The snow was deep upon the ground, the elements as well as man were against them, and, to aggravate their misfortunes, the rush of camp-followers that overwhelmed the soldiery, prevented the possibility of maintaining anything like military order.

"Not a mile of the distance had been accomplished before it was seen how heavily this curse of camp-followers sate upon the doomed army. It was vain to attempt to manage this mighty mass of lawless and suffering humanity. On they went, struggling through the snow -making scant progress in their confusion and bewildermentscarcely knowing whether they were escaping, or whether they were rushing on to, death."

When they had advanced farther in their dismal route, attacked by the enemy who harassed them at every step, these camp-followers, clustering about the fighting men, literally paralyzed their movements. They hoped to shake off the incubus by moving on lightly under cover of the night-but in vain.

"It was a bright frosty night. The snow was lying only par