Page:Duty and Inclination 2.pdf/16

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
14
DUTY AND INCLINATION.

in purpose come more openly forward, by making at once an attack upon the Fort, which to have reduced within their grasp would have gained them a decided advantage, and furnished resources innumerable? But more artfully devised and coolly calculated seemed their plans, than to attack by open force a place so apparently strong and inaccessible.

However long this insurrection among the Irish had been brooding in secret, yet it was undoubtedly from the defeat of General De Brooke, or rather from the fatal neglect of orders and presumptuous rashness of Major Harrold, that it first acquired extension and confirmation; its final suppression and total extinction remained for the more fortunate General Haughton, who, with the troops committed to his orders, having to contend with an enemy so powerful, yet so undisciplined and so wildly impetuous, neither yielding to constraint nor control, the measures he resorted to could alone prove effectual.

Having received their directions, inspired with an ardour fierce as those they fought against, several regiments of well-ordered cavalry precipitately thronged upon the rebels while assembled in concourse from their many secret haunts in the town of R——. The horse, obedient to its rider,