CURRENT LITERATURE.
• readers. When, therefore, Colonel Malleson was asked to continue and complete it, he stipulated that the continuation should begin with the end of Sir John Kaye's second volume, and should ignore the third. It does not fall within our province to adjudicate on the question thus raised. Colonel Malleson's competence is beyond question, and though no man can be held to stand above personal or professional prejudices, his opinion is entitled to distinct weight. He discharges with energy the duty of doing justice to the services of the men whose exertions saved our Indian dominion. The achievements of Havelock, Outram, Neil, Vincent Eyre, Sir Henry Lawrence, to name some of the more prominent actors in the scene, are recounted in vigorous, though some- times rather turgid language, and with all fullness. It is only fair to give such publicity as we can to Colonel Malleson's strong opinion that Mr. William Taylor, Commissioner of Patna, served his country well, and has been treated with signal injustice, though the opinion will never be final till a more dispassionate inquiry has been made into his acts. We may note, as an interesting fact, that our author acquits Holkar of all complicity or sympathy with the mutineers. Of the literary merits of the volume we can speak without hesitation. It is a brilliant narrative, though brilliant sometimes with tinsel, in which a great number of threads of history are taken up and combined with singular skill. We have never road a volume in which this merit is
more conspicuously displayed, and a history which in unskilful hands might have become confused to the last degree is made remark- ably clear and intelligible, and everything that arrangement could do is done, for narratives necessarily as disconnected as early histories of Italy.
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