stage-coach under the care of a brutal keeper.Such a madness, if any, was the madness of Walking Stewart: his health was perfect; his spirits as light and ebullient as the spirits of a bird in spring-time; and his mind unagitated by painful thoughts, and at peace with himself. Hence, if he was not an amusing companion, it was because the philosophic direction of his thoughts made him something more. Of anecdotes and matters of fact he was not communicative: of all that he had seen in the vast compass of his travels he rarely availed himself in conversation. I do not remember, at this moment, that he ever once alluded to his own travels in his intercourse with me, except for the purpose of weighing down, by a statement grounded on his own great personal experience, an opposite statement of many hasty and misjudging travellers which he thought injurious to human nature: the statement was this, that, in all his countless rencounters with uncivilised tribes, he had never met with any so ferocious and brutal as to attack an unarmed and defenceless man, who was able to make them understand that he threw himself upon their hospitality and forbearance.

On the whole, Walking Stewart was a sublime visionary. He had seen and suffered much amongst men; yet not too much, or so as to dull the genial tone of his sympathy with the sufferings of others. His mind was a mirror of the sentient universe-the whole mighty vision that had fleeted before his eyes in this world: the armies of Hyder Ali and his son Tippoo, with oriental and barbaric pageantry; the civic grandeur of England; the great deserts of Asia and America; the vast capitals of Europe; London, with its eternal agitations, the ceaseless ebb and flow of its "mighty heart;" Paris, shaken by the fierce torments of revolutionary convulsions; the silence of Lapland; and the solitary

forests of Canada; with the swarming life of the torrid zone; together with innumerable recollections of individual joy and sorrow that he had participated by sympathy -lay like a map beneath him, as if eternally co-present to his view, so that, in the contemplation of the prodigious whole, he had no leisure to separate the parts, or occupy his mind with details. Hence came the monotony which the frivolous and the desultory would have found in his conversation. I, however, who, by accidents of experience, am qualified to speak of him, must pronounce him to have been a man of great genius, and, with reference to his conversation, of great eloquence. That these were not better known and acknowledged was owing to two disadvantages-one grounded in his imperfect education, the other in the peculiar structure of his mind. The first was this: like the late Mr Shelley, he had a fine vague enthusiasm, and lofty aspirations, in connection with human nature generally and its hopes; and like him he strove to give steadiness, a uniform direction, and an intelligible purpose to these feelings, by fitting to them a scheme of philosophical opinions. But unfortunately the philosophic system of both was so far from supporting their own views, and the cravings of their own enthusiasm, that, as in some points it was baseless, incoherent, or unintelligible, so in others it tended to moral results from which, if they had foreseen them, they would have been themselves the first to shrink, as contradictory to the very purposes in which their system had originated. Hence, in maintaining their own system, they found themselves painfully entangled, at times, with tenets pernicious and degrading to human nature. These were the inevitable consequences of the Tewτov eudos* in their speculations; but were naturally TEWTOV Leudos:”—The first (or fundamental) falsehood.

charged upon them by those who looked carelessly into their books as opinions which, not merely for the sake of consistency, they thought themselves bound to endure, but to which they gave the full weight of their sanction and patronage as to so many moving principles in their system. The other disadvantage under which Walking Stewart laboured was this: he was a man of genius, but not a man of talents; at least his genius was out of all proportion to his talents, and wanted an organ, as it were, for manifesting itself, so that his most original thoughts were delivered in a crude state, imperfect, obscure, half-developed, and not producible to a popular audience. He was partially aware of this himself; and though he claims everywhere the faculty of profound intuition into human nature, yet, with equal candour, he accuses himself of asinine stupidity, dulness, and want of talent. He was a disproportioned intellect, and so far a monster: and he must be added to the long list of original-minded men who have been looked down upon with pity and contempt by commonplace men of talent, whose powers of mind, though a thousand times inferior, were yet more manageable, more self-interpreted, and ran in channels better suited to common uses and common understandings.

Biog

-)

THE MARQUESS WELLESLEY.*

It sounds like the tolling of funeral bells, as the annunciation is made of one death after another amongst those who supported our canopy of empire through the last most memorable generation. The eldest of the Wellesleys is gone; he is gathered to his fathers: and here we have his life circumstantially written.

Who, and of what origin, are the Wellesleys? There is an impression current amongst the public, or there was an impression, that the true name of the Wellesley family is Wesley. This is a case very much resembling some of those imagined by the old scholastic logicians, where it was impossible either to deny or to affirm: saying yes, or saying no, equally you told a falsehood. As if, being asked whether you killed your wife by strychnia, then to reply yes would be directly to own the crime; but, on the other hand, to reply no would be indirectly to own it—since it would be argued that you admitted the killing, by denying that you did it by strychnia. The case as to the Wellesleys is briefly this: The family was originally English; and in England, at the earliest era, there is no doubt at all that its name was De Wellesleigh, which was pronounced

* Suggested by Mr Pearce's "Memoirs and Correspondence."

in the eldest times just as it is now-viz., as a dissyllable' -the first syllable sounding exactly like the cathedral city Wells, in Somersetshire, and the second like lea (a field under some modification). It is plain enough, from various records, that the true historical genesis of the name was precisely through that composition of words which here, for the moment, I had imagined merely to illustrate its pronunciation. Lands in the diocese of Bath and Wells, running up almost to the gates of Bristol, constituted. the earliest possessions of the De Wellesleighs. They, seven centuries before Assaye and Waterloo, were "seised" of certain rich leas held under the Dean and Chapter of Wells. And from these Saxon elements of the name, some have supposed the Wellesleys a Saxon race. They could not possibly have better blood: but still the thing does not follow from the premisses. Neither does it follow from the de that they were Norman. The first De Wellesley known to history, the very tip-top man of the pedigree, is Avenant de Wellesleigh. About a hundred years nearer to our own times-viz., in 1239-came Michael de Wellesleigh, of whom the important fact is recorded, that he was the father of Wellerand de Wellesleigh. And what did young Mr Wellerand perform in this wicked world, that the proud muse of history should condescend to notice his rather singular name five hundred and fifty-five years† exactly after his decease? Reader, he was-"killed:" that is all; and in company with Sir Robert de Percival; which again argues

*"As a dissyllable:"-Just as the Annesley family, of which Lord Valentia is the present head, do not pronounce their name trisyllabically (as strangers often suppose)-viz., Ann-es-ley-but as if Anns (in the possessive case)-ley. In Scotland, this ancient English name is altogether transfigured into the Scottish name of Ainslie.

"Five hundred and fifty-five years:”—i. e., not in the year of original publication, thirteen years ago, but now, in the year of revisal and republication-viz., in 1858.