Admirers of Lord Ormont enjoyed a perusal of a letter addressed by him to the burgess’s journal; and so did his detractors.  The printing of it was an act of editorial ruthlessness.  The noble soldier had no mould in his intellectual or educational foundry for the casting of sentences; and the editor’s leading type to the letter, without further notice of the writer—­who was given a prominent place or scaffolding for the execution of himself publicly, if it pleased him to do that thing—­tickled the critical mind.  Lord Ormont wrote intemperately.

His Titanic hurling of blocks against critics did no harm to an enemy skilled in the use of trimmer weapons, notably the fine one of letting big missiles rebound.  He wrote from India, with Indian heat—­“curry and capsicums,” it was remarked.  He dared to claim the countenance of the Commander-in-chief of the Army of India for an act disapproved by the India House.  Other letters might be on their way, curryer than the preceding, his friends feared; and might also be malevolently printed, similarly commissioning the reverberation of them to belabour his name before the public.  Admirers were still prepared to admire; but aldermen not at the feast, squire-archs not in the saddle or at the bottle, some few of the juvenile and female fervent, were becoming susceptible to a frosty critical tone in the public pronunciation of Lord Ormont’s name since the printing of his letter and the letters it called forth.  None of them doubted that his case was good.  The doubt concerned the effect on it of his manner of pleading it.  And if he damaged his case, he compromised his admirers.  Why, the case of a man who has cleverly won a bold stroke for his country must be good, as long as he holds his tongue.  A grateful country will right him in the end:  he has only to wait, and not so very long.  “This I did:  now examine it.”  Nothing more needed to be said by him, if that.

True, he has a temper.  It is owned that he is a hero.  We take him with his qualities, impetuosity being one, and not unsuited to his arm of the service, as he has shown.  If his temper is high, it is an element of a character proved heroical.  So has the sun his blotches, and we believe that they go to nourish the luminary, rather than that they are a disease of the photosphere.

Lord Ormont’s apologists had to contend with anecdotes and dicta now pouring in from offended Britons, for illustration of an impetuosity fit to make another Charley XII. of Sweden—­a gratuitous Coriolanus haughtiness as well, new among a people accustomed socially to bow the head to their nobles, and not, of late, expecting a kick for their pains.  Newspapers wrote of him that, “a martinet to subordinates, he was known for the most unruly of lieutenants.”  They alluded to current sayings, as that he “habitually took counsel of his horse on the field when a movement was entrusted to his discretion.”  Numerous were the journalistic sentences running under an air of eulogy of the lordly warrior purposely to be tripped, and producing their damnable effect, despite the obvious artifice.  The writer of the letter from Bombay, signed Ormont, was a born subject for the antithetical craftsmen’s tricky springes.