Whatever may be the truth as to details, it is certain that no man ever looked death in the face so long and so serenely as Gordon. For him life was but duty--duty to God and duty to man. We may fitly apply to him the noble lines which Tennyson offered to the memory of another steadfast soul--
He, that ever following her commands,
On with toil of heart and knees and hands,
Thro' the long gorge to the far light has won
His path upward, and prevail'd,
Shall find the toppling crags of Duty scaled
Are close upon the shining table-lands
To which our God Himself is moon and sun.
NOTE TO THE SECOND EDITION
Shortly before the publication of this work, Lord Edmund Fitzmaurice published his Life of Earl Granville, some of the details of which tend somewhat to modify the account of the relations subsisting between the Earl and General Gordon. See too the issue of the Times of December 10, 1905 (Weekly Edition), for a correction of some of the statements, made in the Life of Earl Granville, by Lord Cromer (Sir Evelyn Baring).]
FOOTNOTES:
[377] See the Report of the Intelligence Department of the War Office, printed in The Journals of Major-General C.G. Gordon at Khartum, Appendix to Bk. iv.
[378] See Gordon's letter of April 1880, quoted in the Introduction to The Journals of Major-General C.G. Gordon at Khartum (1885), p. xvii.
[379] Gordon's Journals, pp. 347-351; also Parl. Papers, Egypt, No. 12 (1884), pp. 85 and 127-131 for another account. See, too, Sir F.R. Wingate's Mahdism, chaps. i.-iii., for the rise of the Mahdi and his triumph over Hicks.
[380] J. Morley, Life of Gladstone, vol. iii. p. 146; Sir A. Lyall, Life of Lord Dufferin, vol. ii. chap. ii.
[381] Morley, Life of Gladstone, vol. iii. p. 147.