Reviews of Books

Abstract

WE congratulate Mr. Holmes on the early appearance of a second edition of his work He has attained a well-deserved success. The subject, in spite of its ' horrors ' and other repulsive aspects, cannot but have an undying interest-indeed, a strange fascination. But the exhaustive narratives of Mr. Kaye and Colonel Malleson, however valuable, and to the specialist indispensable, are certainly rather formidable to the general reader. Mr. Holmes has confined himself to a single, though a portly and well-packed volume. He has been industrious in accumulating materials of very diverse kinds and value ; he has sifted his evidence with much discrimination, and in an independent and truth-loving spirit; he has told his complicated story clearly, forcibly, and with due regard to the relative importance of its several parts ; and his tone throughout, though earnest and at times enthusiastic, is manly, and happily free from what Carlyle would call ' shrieking.' His battle pieces are sometimes very animated; his local sketches, though composed from books, vivid and picturesque. He has also drawn, with muoh froedom and sharpness, the characters of the chief actors, civil and military, in the great drama,* at least on the English side. Opinions of course will differ, even among the best informed, as to the justice of these very confidently expressed estimates. But Mr. Holmes' judgment appears to us generally sound, and his good faith always beyond question ; though it might have been better to relegate the whole Taylor v. Halliday controversy to the appendix. These personalities seem rather out of place-at least too profuse-in the text of the narrative. Phrases occur which are open to objection; thus, ' dusky warriors were to be seen loafing about' (p. 220). No one knows better than Mr. Holmes that it is possible to be graphic without being slangy. On the other hand, when, perorating at the end of a chapter, he soars into the style soutenu, why disfigure an impressive passage by an inaccurate word ? ' The tramp of his legions, and the thunder of his artillery were sending forth a message of doom to rebels and mutineers' (p. 486). The great Mr. Wordy, it is true, much affected ' the legions of Napoleon ;' but such flowers of rhetoric are best left to him. Again, when our author says that Mr. Forjett ' had been born and bred in India,' he misses a notable circumstance in his antecedents. Mr. Forjett was an Eurasian, and possessed the special aptitudes of both races, as he had previously shown, by tracking with native ingenuity, and repressing with European energy, a system of nocturnal violence prevalent in the then unlighted streets and roads of Bombay. It may be questioned whether Mr. Holmes is not too lenient to the perpetrators of unjust and cruel deeds in the suppression of the Mutiny. We do not mean that he shirks the facts, though he does not mention that Neill is said to have compelled Brahmins to wipe up the at Harvard Library on June 26, 2015 http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from

Scholars, Clerics and Gentlemen: Oxford University in the 16th century

“…There is a predictable plea from Christopher Brooke as editor of the equivalent Cambridge history to remember the need for comparison (Brooke, 1987). There is some anxiety about the apparent conflict of interpretation between Penry Williams and Jennifer Loach on the dominance of godly Protestantism in Elizabethan Oxford (Owen, 1988;Sharpe, 1988). Loach is extremely cautious, indeed negative, about the general impact of forward Protestantism on Oxford.…”