Page:John Russell Colvin.djvu/17

Rh of the two Provinces on which, in 1857, broke the violence of the Mutinies. The one has found his biographer; on the other, public judgment has gone by default. His papers were dispersed. The day had not yet come when the full tale of the events with which he had been at one or other period of his life identified could be told. Other questions than those of India, other phases of Indian questions, pressed upon attention. There grew, with the years, round his name a legend of some want of vigour in meeting the great crisis of 1857. In past years, and in connexion with more distant events, he had been charged with too great vigour. The historian of the first Kábul war had asserted, and others had accepted the assertion, that when he was but thirty his strength of character; his force of will, and his powerful mind had established over Lord Auckland, whom he served as Private Secretary, too great an ascendency. The same chronicler, writing later of the Indian mutinies, found him wanting at fifty in the qualities of which at thirty an excess had been imputed to him. The shadow of these conflicting estimates rests upon his grave. Happily, the last word has not yet been said on the two great epochs with which his name is connected. Time, which has corrected much of the judgments, and cleared away more of the pretensions, with which in 1842 and again in 1857 the air was loaded, will yet allow that fair play to Mr. Colvin's memory which, like Sir Henry Lawrence, is all that he would have asked for. No memoir of him can