’But the truth is that the knowledge of external nature and the sciences, which that knowledge requires or includes, are not the great or the frequent business of the human mind.  Whether we provide for action or conversation, whether we wish to be useful or pleasing, the first requisite is the religious and moral knowledge of right and wrong; the next is an acquaintance with the history of mankind, and with those examples which may be said to embody truth, and prove by events the reasonableness of opinions.[16] Prudence and justice are virtues and excellences of all times, and of all places—­we are perpetually moralists; but we are geometricians only by chance.  Our intercourse with intellectual nature is necessary; our speculations upon matter are voluntary and at leisure.  Physiological learning is of such rare emergence, that one may know another half his life, without being able to estimate his skill in hydrostatics or astromony; but his moral and prudential character immediately appears.  Those authors, therefore, are to be read at schools that supply most axioms of prudence, most principles of moral truth, and most materials for conversation; and these purposes are best served by poets, orators, and historians’ (Life of Milton).

Notes: 

1.  In India officers have much better opportunities in time of peace to learn how to handle troops than in England, from having them more concentrated in large stations, with fine open plains to exercise upon.  During the whole of the cold season, from the beginning of November to the end of February, the troops are at large stations exercised in brigades, and the artillery, cavalry, and infantry together. [W.  H. S.] The normal garrison of Meerut in recent years has consisted of one British cavalry regiment, one battalion of British infantry, one native cavalry regiment, and one battalion of native infantry, with two batteries of horse and two of field artillery.  The cantonment was established in 1806, from which date the town grew rapidly in size and population.  The civil staff has been largely increased since Sleeman’s time by the addition of numerous officers belonging to irrigation and other departmental services which did not exist in his day.  The offices of District Magistrate and Collector have been united as a single person for many years.

2.  The cantonments suffered severely from typhoid fever for several years in the latter part of the nineteenth century.

3.  Few Anglo-Indians will dispute the truth of this dictum.

4.  The late Earl of Liverpool, then Mr. Jenkinson, married this old lady’s daughter.  He was always very attentive to her, and she used with feelings of great pride and pleasure to display the contents of the boxes of millinery which he used every year to send out to her. [W.  H. 8.] The author came out to India in 1809.  Mr. Charles Jenkinson was created Baron Hawkesbury in 1786, and Earl of Liverpool in 1796.  His first wife, who died in 1770, was Amelia, daughter of Mr. William Watts, Governor of Fort William, and of the lady described by the author.  Their only son succeeded to the earldom in 1808, and died in 1828.  The peerage became extinct on the death of the third earl in 1851. (Burke’s Peerage.) It was revived in 1905.