his Somersetshire descent; for the family of Lord Egmont, the head of all Percivals, ever was, and ever will be, in Somersetshire. But how was he killed? The time when -viz., 1303-the place where, are known; but the manner how is not exactly stated. It was in skirmish with rascally Irish "kernes," fellows that (when presented at the font of Christ for baptism) had their right arms covered up from the baptismal waters, in order that, still remaining consecrated to the devil, those arms might inflict a devilish blow. Such a blow, with such an unbaptised arm, the Irish villain struck; and there was an end of Wellerand de Wellesleigh. Strange that history should make an end of a man before she had made a beginning of him. These, however, are the facts; which, in writing a romance about Sir Wellerand and Sir Percival, I shall have great pleasure in falsifying. But how, says the too curious reader, did the De Wellesleighs find themselves amongst Irish kernes? Had these scamps the presumption to invade Somersetshire? Did they dare to intrude into Wells? Not at all: but the pugnacious De Wellesleighs had dared to intrude into Ireland. Some say in the train of Henry II. Some say but no matter: there they were; and there they stuck like limpets. They soon engrafted themselves into the County of Kildare, from which, by means of a fortunate marriage, they leaped into the County of Meath; and in that county, as if to refute the pretended mutability of human things, they have roosted ever since. There was once a famous copy of verses floating about Europe, which asserted that, whilst other princes were destined to fight for thrones, Austria-the handsome house of Hapsburg-should obtain thrones by marriage:

"Pugnabunt alii: tu, felix Austria, nube." *

"Nube:"-One must wink at blunders where royalties are concerned;

So of the Wellesleighs. Sir Wellerand took quite the wrong way: not cudgelling, but courting, was the correct line of policy in Kildare. Two great estates, by two separate marriages, the De Wellesleighs obtained in Kildare; and by a third marriage, in a third generation, they obtained, in the County of Meath, an estate known by the name of Castle Dengan (otherwise Dangan), with lordships as plentiful as blackberries. Castle Dangan came to them in the year of our Lord 1411-i. e., four years before Agincourt; which memorable battle was fought exactly four hundred years before Waterloo-ergo in 1415. And in Castle Dangan did Field-Marshal the Man of Waterloo draw his first breath, shed his first tears, and perpetrate his earliest trespasses. That is what one might call a pretty long spell for one family. Four hundred and thirtyfive years* has Castle Dangan furnished a nursery for the Wellesley piccaninnies. Amongst the lordships attached to Castle Dangan was Mornington, which, more than three centuries afterwards, supplied an earldom for the grandfather of Waterloo. Any further memorabilia of the Castle Dangan family are not recorded, except that in 1485 (which surely was the year of Bosworth Field?) they began to omit the de, and to write themselves Wellesley tout court. From indolence, I presume; for a certain Lady Di. le Fleming, whom once I knew, a Howard by birth, who had condescended so far as to marry a simple baronet (Sir Michael le Fleming), told me, when a widow, as her rea

else, between you and me, reader, nube is not the right word, unless when the Austrian throne-winner happened to be a princess. Nube could not be applied to a man, as an old dusty pentameter will assist the reader in remembering:

"Uxorem duco; nubit at illa mihi."

"Four hundred and thirty-five"-but now (1858), on republication of this paper, hard upon four hundred and forty-seven years.

son for omitting the le, that it caused her too much additional trouble. She was a very good and kind-hearted woman; yet still, as a daughter of the Howards (the great feudal house of Suffolk), she regarded any possible heraldic pretensions of an obscure baronet's family as visible only through powerful microscopes.

So far the evidence seems in favour of Wellesley, and against Wesley. But, on the other hand, during the last three centuries the Wellesleys themselves wrote the name Wesley. They, however, were only the maternal ancestors of the present Wellesleys. Garret Wellesley, the last male heir of the direct line, in the year 1745, left his whole estate to one of the Cowleys, a Staffordshire family, who had emigrated to Ireland in Queen Elizabeth's time, but who were, however, descended from the Wellesleys. This Cowley or Colley, taking, in 1745, the name of Wesley, received from George II. the title of Earl Mornington; and Colley's grandson, the Marquess Wellesley of our age, was recorded in the Irish peerage as Wesley, Earl of Mornington; was uniformly so described up to the end of the eighteenth century; and even Arthur of Waterloo, whom most of us Europeans know pretty well, on going to India a little before his brother (say early in 1799), was thus introduced by Lord Cornwallis to Sir John Shore (Lord Teignmouth, at that time the Governor-General), "Dear sir, I beg leave to introduce to you Colonel Wesley, who is a lieutenant-colonel of my regiment. He is a sensible man, and a good officer." Posterity (for we are posterity in respect of Lord Cornwallis) have been very much of his opinion. Colonel Wesley really was a sensible man; and the sensible man, soon after his arrival in Bengal, under the instigation of his brother, resumed the old name of Wellesley. In reality, the name of Wesley was merely the

abbreviation of indolence, as Chumley for Cholmondeley Pomfret for Pontefract, Cicester for Cirencester; or, in Scotland, Marchbanks for Majoribanks, Shatorow, as commonly pronounced, for the Duke of Hamilton's French title of Chatelherault. I remember well from my days of childhood a niece of John Wesley, the Proto-Methodist, who always spoke of the second Lord Mornington (author of the wellknown glees) as a cousin, and as intimately connected with her brother, the great foudroyant performer on the organ. Southey, in his Life of John Wesley, the pious founder of Methodism, tells us that Charles Wesley, the brother of John, and father of the great organist, had the offer from Garret Wellesley of those same estates which eventually were left to Richard Cowley. This argues a recognition of near consanguinity. Why the offer was declined, is not distinctly explained. Certainly it requires explanation, being a problem of very difficult solution to us sublunary men. But, if it had been accepted, Southey thinks that then we should have had no storming of Seringapatam, no Waterloo, and no Arminian Methodists. All that is not quite clear. Tippoo was booked for a desperate British vengeance by his own desperate enmity to our name, though no Lord Wellesley had been GovernorGeneral in the penultimate year of the last century. Napoleon, by the same fury of hatred to us, was booked for the same fate, though the scene of it might not have been Waterloo. And, as to John Wesley, why should he not have made the same schism with the English Church, because his brother Charles had become unexpectedly ́rich?

The Marquess Wellesley was of the same standing, as to age, or nearly so, as Mr Pitt; though he outlived Pitt by almost forty years. Born in 1760, three or four months before the accession of George III., he was sent to Eton,

at the age of eleven; and from Eton, in his eighteenth year, he was sent to Christ Church, Oxford, where he matriculated as a nobleman. He then bore the courtesy title of Viscount Wellesley; but, in 1781, when he had reached his twenty-first year, he was summoned away from Oxford by the death of his father, the second Earl of Mornington. It is interesting, at this moment, to look back on the family group of children collected at Dangan Castle. The young Earl of Mornington, future Marquess Wellesley, was within a month of his majority; his younger brothers and sisters were these: William Wellesley Pole (since dead, under the title of Lord Maryborough), then aged eighteen; Anne, since married to Henry, son of Lord Southampton, then aged thirteen; Arthur, aged twelve; Gerald Valerian, now in the church, aged ten; Mary Elizabeth (since Lady Culling Smith), aged nine; Henry, since Lord Cowley, and British ambassador to Spain, France, &c., aged eight. The new Lord Mornington showed his conscientious nature, by assuming his father's debts, and by superintending the education of his brothers. He had distinguished himself at Oxford as a scholar; but he returned thither no more, and took no degree. As Earl of Mornington, he sat in the Irish House of Lords; but not being a British peer, he was able to sit also in the English House of Commons; and of this opening for a more national career, he availed himself at the age of twenty-four. Except that he favoured the claims of the Irish Catholics, his policy was pretty uniformly that of Mr Pitt. He supported that minister throughout the contests on the French Revolution; and a little earlier, on the Regency question. This came forward in 1788, on occasion of the first insanity which attacked George III. The reader, who is likely to have been born since that era-at least I hope so-will perhaps