Excerpt from Lives of Indian Officers, Vol. 1 of 2: Illustrative of the History of the Civil and Military Service of India I felt that I might accept the invitation and undertake the task, God willing, without danger of breaking down. The temptations, indeed, were very great - the greatest of all being the Opportunity of awakening, through a popular periodical counting its readers by hundreds of thousands, the interests of an immense multitude of intelligent people, Whom every writer on Indian subjects is painfully conscious of being unable to reach through the medium of bulky and high-priced books. Of the Lives, which I selected for illustration, the greater number had never been written before, and of those, which had been written before, I had unpublished records which enabled me to impart some little freshness to my memoirs. The sketches were published originally without any chrono logical arrangement. They appeared, in uninterrupted suc cession, during the year 1865. The great difficulty with which I had to contend was the necessary limitation of space. I was often compelled to curtail the memoirs after they were in print, and thereby to exclude much interesting illustrative matter. As, however, the republication of the Lives in a separate work had been determined upon, I had less regret in effecting these mutilations. The excised passages are now restored, and new additions made exceeding in extent the whole of the origin say, indeed, that the work has been almost entirely re-written, the chapters in the periodical having been little more than Sketches of the more finished portraits which are now produced after fifteen additional months of conscientious research. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.