The Edinburgh Review (Volume 200) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Art. H.?THE DIARY OF SIR JOHN MOORE. The Diary of Sir John Moore. Edited by Major-General Sir J. F. Mauricb, K.C.B. 2 vols. 8vo. London: Arnold. 1904. John Moore must surely be deemed among the most unfortunate men whom history mentions. A soldier, devoted to his profession, and?as is frequently alleged? needing but opportunity to show himself the peer of the most distinguished, he fell, in the flower of his age, in what can only be described as a successful rearguard action, leaving to his friends the memory of possibilities never realised; and now, to the greater number of even educated readers, he is but a name, remembered only by the spirited verses which give such an extreme perversion of the facts of his burial. Brotherly love, unchecked by exact knowledge, guided the pen in writing a biography which had not the happiness to catch the public taste, and has been long since forgotten. The prejudiced efforts of Sir William Napier, a friend and 'follower, ' to magnify and exalt the story of his last campaign?the only one in which he held independent command?have been far from meeting with general approval; while later writers, in a more critical spirit, have judged it much less favourably. Now, close on a hundred years after his death, comes the most deadly blow of all, in the publication of his Diary, which, if it was to be accepted in the letter of the text, and still more in the comments of the editor, would be sufficient in itself to destroy whatever reputation the soldier might be thought to have. We do not think it does this, because we do not think that the diarist's sentences are, in all cases, to be so taken; but this the editor has failed to understand; and by emphasising angry phrases in which Moore vented the petulance or relieved the annoyance of the moment, h...