later on; and the province, thus assured to English civil and military authority, became a basis for some of the most important operations by which the mutiny was crushed, and the sceptre of India restored to the Queen.

Within little more than a fortnight from the occupation of Delhi by the rebels, the British forces under General Anson, the Commander-in-Chief, were advancing on that city. The commander did not live to conduct any of the operations. He died of cholera almost at the beginning of the march. He had lived long enough to come in for much sharp censure. The temper of the time both in England and in India expected men to work by witchcraft rather than wit, and Anson was furiously denounced by some of the principal English journals because he did not recapture Delhi without having even to march an army to the neighbourhood of the city. He was described as ' a holiday soldier who had never seen service either in peace or in war.' His appointment was denounced as a shameless job,' and a tribute altogether to 'the claims of family and personal acquaintance.' We cannot venture now to criticise the mode of General Anson's appointment; and he had not time to show whether he was any better than a holiday soldier. But it would appear that Lord Canning had no poor opinion of his capacity, and was particularly impressed by his coolness and command of temper. He died, however, at the very outset of his march; and we only refer now to the severe attacks which were made upon him to illustrate the temper of the nation, and

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1857.

LUCKNOW.

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the manner in which it delighted to hear itself addressed. We are always rebuking other nations for their impatience and fretfulness under difficulties. It is a lesson of no slight importance for us to be reminded that when the hour of strain and pressure comes we are found to be in most ways very like our neighbours.

The siege of Delhi proved long and difficult. Another general died, another had to give up his command, before the city was recaptured. It was justly considered by Lord Canning and by all the authorities as of the utmost importance that Delhi should be taken before the arrival of great reinforcements from home. Meanwhile the rebellion was breaking out at new points almost everywhere in these northern and north-western regions. On May 30 the mutiny declared itself at Lucknow. Sir Henry Lawrence was governor of Oudh. He endeavoured to drive the rebels from the place, but the numbers of the mutineers were overwhelming. He had under his command, too, a force partly made up of native troops, and some of these deserted him in the battle. He had to retreat and to fortify the Residency at Lucknow, and remove all the Europeans, men, women and children thither, and patiently stand a siege. Lawrence himself had not long to endure the siege. On July 2 he had been up with the dawn, and after a great amount of work he lay on a sofa, not, as it has been well said, to rest, but to transact business in a recumbent position. His nephew and another officer were with him. Suddenly a great crash was heard,

and the room was filled with smoke and dust.

One

of his companions was flung to the ground. A shell had burst. When there was silence the officer who had been flung down called out, Sir Henry, are you hurt?' At first there was no answer. Then a weak voice was heard to reply in just the words that Browning has put into the mouth of the gallant French lad similarly questioned by the great Napoleon. I am killed,' was the answer that came faintly but firmly from Sir Henry Lawrence's lips. The shell had wounded him in the thigh so fearfully as to leave surgery no chance of doing anything for his relief. On the morning of July 4 he died calmly and in perfect submission to the will of Providence. He had made all possible arrangements for his successor, and for the work to be done. He desired that on his tomb should be engraven merely the words, 'Here lies Henry Lawrence, who tried to do his duty.' The epitaph was a simple, truthful summing up of a simple, truthful career. The man, however, was greater than the career. Lawrence had not opportunity to show in actual result the greatness of spirit that was in him. The immense influence he exercised over all who came within his reach bears testimony to his strength and nobleness of character better than any of the mere successes which his biographer can record. He was full of sympathy. His soul was alive to the noblest and purest aspirations. 'It is the due admixture of romance and reality,' he was himself accustomed to say, 'that best carries a man through life.' No professional teacher or philosopher

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ever spoke a truer sentence. As one of his many admirers says of him—' what he said and wrote, he did, or rather he was.' Let the bitterest enemy of England write the history of her rule in India, and set down as against her every wrong that was done in her name, from those which Burke denounced to those which the Madras Commission exposed; he will have to say that men, many men, like Henry Lawrence, lived and died devoted to the cause of that rule, and the world will take account of the admission.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

CAWNPORE.

DURING the later days of Sir Henry Lawrence's life it had another trouble added to it by the appeals which were made to him from Cawnpore for a help which he could not give. The story of Cawnpore is by far the most profound and tragic in its interest of all the chapters that make up the history of the Indian Mutiny. The city of Cawnpore stands in the Doab, a peninsula between the Ganges and the Jumna, and is built on the south bank of the Ganges, there nearly a quarter of a mile broad in the dry season, and more than a mile across when swelled by the rains. By a treaty made in 1775 the East India Company engaged to maintain a force in Cawnpore for the defence of Oudh, and the revenues of an extensive district of country were appropriated to the maintenance of the troops quartered there. In 1801, for some of the various reasons impelling similar transactions in India, Lord Wellesley 'closed the mortgage,' as Mr. Trevelyan puts it in his interesting and really valuable little book' Cawnpore,' and the territory lapsed into the possession of the Company. From that time it took rank as one of our first-class military stations. When Oudh was annexed to our dominions there was