stances called to play a leading part in this first scene, sank below the average level of promptitude, energy, and daring.
Fifty years before, an outbreak at Vellore, in the Madras Presidency — curiously similar in the character of its origin — had, fortunately, found a man equal to the occasion. In a few hours Gillespie, who commanded a regiment of British Cavalry at a neighbouring station, had come galloping to the rescue. The retribution, which his troopers dealt to the mutineers, had crushed the outbreak and taught the native army a long-remembered lesson. There was no such spirit now in the Meerut head-quarters. Those, on whose firmness and promptitude salvation depended, were neither firm nor prompt. Had their example been followed — had other Englishmen, at critical moments, shown the same passivity, want of resource, the same anxiety to secure their own position to the neglect of others still more endangered, the Mutiny must have assumed a different. a far more serious aspect — our hold on Upper India must have been lost, and recovered — if indeed it proved recoverable — by a struggle the dimensions of which it is impossible to conjecture. On the other hand, a Nicholson or Havelock would have been presently thundering on the track of the mutineers, and have brought them, before they were many miles on their road, to a swift and terrible account. Order, unbroken, would have reigned in Delhi: the English would have held a fort and arsenal from which they could have defied
