support of the very Ministers now declared to be incapable of suffering such a measure; and I have expressed my astonishment that any class of men could submit to receive support upon such grounds, without at once declaring that the blame and the praise were alike falsely bestowed; but I was not on these occasions aware of the extreme to which this falsehood was carried, as regarded Lord Wellesley's administration, and I was not till now informed of the extraordinary self-command which my illustrious friend had shown in suffering all such imputations without any attempt to protect himself from their force.* A very useful lesson of caution is taught by this passage in Lord Wellesley's life. How often do we see vehement and unceasing attacks made upon a minister or a statesman, perhaps not in the public service, for something which he does not choose to defend or explain, resting his claims to the confidence of his country upon his past exertions and his known. character! Yet these assaults are unremittingly made upon him, and the people believe that so much noise could not be stirred up without something to authorize it. Sometimes the objects of the calumny are silent from disdain, sometimes from knowing that the base propagators of it will only return to their slander the more eagerly after their conviction of falsehood; but sometimes also the silence may be owing to official reserve. We here see in Lord Wellesley's case a most remarkable example of that reserve. All the while that the disseminators of slander were proclaiming him as abandoning the Catholics-him who had been the first to move, and within a hair's-breath to * Equal abstinence and dignity did he show in never allowing the laudatory opinions expressed of him in 1834 to be cited as an answer to the statement industriously whispered about rather than openly promulgated, by way of extenuating the refusal to re-appoint him in May, 1835. It was said that he no longer had the vigour of mind required for the difficulties of the Administration; but Lord Melbourne declared, a few months before, that no one was so fit to grapple with those difficulties. obtain, their emancipation in the Lords, the stronghold of their enemies-all the while that they were exalting his successors at his expense, by daily repeating the false assertion that they for the first time conceived the just and politic plan of removing every obstruction arising from religion to a full enjoyment of the public patronage all the while that they were placing the Melbourne Ministry upon a pinnacle, as having first adopted this liberal system of government-there lay in the Government repositories the original (in Lord Wellesley's the copy) of a despatch, explaining, recommending, enforcing the necessity of that course, and stating his desire to carry the plan into immediate execution, when the return of the King's messenger should bring the permission, which he solicited so earnestly, of his official superiors. If that permission was delayed for three months, until the Ministry was changed, and Lord Wellesley followed them into retirement, he at least was not to be blamed for the mischance; yet for eight years did he remain silent under those charges for eight years did the Ministry maintain the same silence under the support which those charges brought them-nay, with the parliamentary majorities which those charges daily afforded them; and now, for the first time, that document sees the light, in which was recorded an irrefragable proof that the charges were not merely false, but the very reverse of the truth-that the support thus given rested upon a foundation positively opposite to the fact. The excellence of Lord Wellesley's speeches has been mentioned. The taste which he had formed from study of the great Greek exemplars kept him above all tinsel and vulgar ornaments, and made him jealously hold fast by the purity of our language; but it had not taught him the virtue of conciseness; and he who knew the Пɛpi Erɛpavov by heart, and always admitted its unmeasurable superiority to the Second Philippic and the Pro Milone, yet formed his own style altogether upon the Roman model. That style, indeed, was considerably diffuse; and the same want of compression, the same redundancy of words, accompanied, however, by substantial though not always needful sense, was observable, though much less observable, in his poetical pieces, which generally possessed very high excellence. It is singular to mark the extraordinary contrast which his thoughts and his expressions presented in this respect. There was nothing superfluous or roundabout in his reasoning-nothing dilatory or feeble in the conceptions which produced his plans. He saw his object at once, and with intuitive sagacity; he saw it in its true colours and real dimensions; he at one glance espied the path, and the shortest path, that led to it; he in an instant took that path, and reached his end. The only prolixity that he ever fell into was in explaining or defending the proceedings thus concisely and rapidly taken. To this some addition was not unnaturally made by the dignity which the habits of vice-regal state made natural to him, and the complimentary style which, if a very little tinctured with Oriental taste, was very much more the result of a kindly and generous nature. I have felt precluded from indulging in general description by the intimacy of my intercourse with this great statesman and his family; and I have accordingly kept my promise to the reader of letting the narrative of his actions draw his portrait; but it would be unjust to omit all mention of that lofty nature which removed him above every thought of personal interest, and made him so careless of all sordid considerations, that I verily believe he spent several fortunes without ever having lost a farthing at play, or ever having indulged in any other expensive vice. His original embarrassments, and from these he never was relieved, arose entirely from generously paying his father's debts.* He was exceedingly fond of glory, and loved dearly the fame that should follow such great deeds as his; but he had no kind of envy, no jealousy of other men's greatness; and a better proof can hardly be given of his magnanimity than the extreme warmth of the praise which he lavished profusely on all the great commanders whom he employed. He earnestly pressed, but it is strange to say, vainly pressed, even their promotion to the peerage sixteen years before it took place, without ever harbouring a thought of the tendency which their elevation might have to eclipse his own fame in vulgar eyes. Nothing could be more gentle and affectionate than his whole disposition; and during his latter years, next to his books, nothing so refreshed his mind as the intercourse with those friends in whose society and converse he delighted.—It is impossible for me to revise this paper and not have present to my mind, and again submitted to my admiration, the brilliant and successful administration of another most valued friend. Need I name him whose fame is inscribed on the latest page of Eastern history-Lord Ellenborough? The reader of the foregoing pages will at once recognize the congenial spirit of these two great governors. *The Corporation of Dublin unanimously voted him their freedom in token of the admiration which this conduct had excited. 257 LORD HOLLAND. It is a very mournful reflection for me that, much as I might have expected the sacred duty to devolve upon me of paying a just tribute to Lord Wellesley's memory, I should also be called to commemorate the excellence of one whom I might far less have looked to survive, and whose loss made all his friends feel that the value of their own lives was now greatly impaired. It may be doubted if any man in any age ever had so few enemies, so many attached friends, as Lord Holland; and no man certainly could better deserve the universal affection of which he was the object. His succession to the peerage at a very early age, on his father's death, prevented him from ever sitting in the House of Commons, and thus passing through the best school of English statesmen. His own severe illness, while yet at Eton, gave his uncle, Mr. Fox, a double alarm; for he was not only on the point of losing a nephew whom he loved as if he had been his only child, but ran the imminent risk of being taken from the House of Commons in the zenith of his fame as a debater and a party chief. He was then in the North of Italy; and the messenger from Devonshire House, commissioned to summon him home on account of the King's illness, met him at Bologna. Mr. Fox had received intelligence of Lord Holland's dangerous illness; and the alarm occasioned by the appearance of the courier was speedily changed into despair by a few words which he dropped, intimating that "he must be lead by this time." Great was Mr. Fox's relief and VOL. IV. ន |