Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Life of Lord Lawrence, Vol. 1 of 2
Each was to be called off in a measure, or for the time, from his proper calling. The elder brother, the ardent artilleryman, was in comparatively early life to drop the soldier and to take to civil work, and after living to be named, should he survive Lord Canning, the provisional Governor General of India, was destined, while defending against desperate odds the capital of his province, to die at last a soldier's death, beloved as no Englishman in India has been beloved before or since.
The younger brother, who had been born a soldier, but whom Providence or Fate had willed should be a civilian, was destined, during his brilliant government of the Punjab, to do more in the hour of our utmost peril than any mere soldier could have done, to tell some of the bravest generals that what they thought impossible he would make possible to call forth armed men, as it were, by thousands from the ground, and to launch them, one after the other, at that distant spot where his insight told him that an empire must be lost or won; then to rule the empire he had done so much to save; and, last of all, to die in ripe Old age, surrounded by those most dear to him, and to be buried, amidst the regrets of a nation, in Westminster Abbey, honoured, perhaps, as no anglo-indian has before been honoured a man who never swam with the stream, who bravely strove to stem the current, and regard less alike Of popular and of aristocratic favour, pleaded with his latest breath for what he thought to be right and just. To the biography of men whose lives have been so strangely chequered, of men who have not so much made history as become, as it were, a history in themselves, belongs of in herent right the highest interest and importance alike of history and of biography.
The life of Henry Lawrence has been'long since written, in the greater part at least, by one who knew him well. It has fallen to my lot, under disadvantages which neither I nor my readers are likely to undervalue, to attempt the biography of John Lawrence. During the more eventful period of Lord Lawrence's life, I knew him only as most Englishmen know him now, from his deeds. But during his last few years it was my happiness to know him well and I am speaking the simple truth when I say that, to converse with a man who had done such deeds, and yet seemed so utterly unconscious of them; who had such vast stores of Indian knowledge, and yet gave them forth as though he were a learner rather than a teacher; who was brave and strong and rough as a giant, but tender as a woman and simple as a child, seemed to me then, and seems still, to have been a privilege for which, if one was not a great deal the better, one would deserve to be a great deal the worse. If I am able to describe John Law rence in any degree as I have often seen him, and as I trust a careful study of his voluminous correspondence, and the help given freely to me in conversation by his relations, his friends, and his opponents, have revealed him to me, I shall not have written in vain. With greater Skill, with much greater knowledge, his biography might undoubtedly have been written by one and by another who, unlike myself, had known him throughout his life, and who have perhaps a knowledge of India only less than John Lawrence himself; but I venture to think that it could scarcely have been written by anyone with a keener sense of responsibility or with a more genuine enthusiasm.
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