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

not be acquainted with the constitutional question then at issue. It was this: Mr Fox held that, upon any incapacity arising in the sovereign, the regency would then settle (ipso facto of that incapacity, and, therefore, in defiance of Parliament) upon the Prince of Wales; overlooking altogether the case in which there should be no Prince of Wales, and the case in which such a prince might be as incapable, from youth, of exercising the powers attached to the office, as his father from disease. Mr Pitt denied that a Prince of Wales simply as such, and apart from any moral fitness which he might have manifested, had more of legal title to the office of regent than any lamplighter or scavenger. It was the province of Parliament exclusively to legislate for the particular case. The practical decision of the question was not called for, through the accident of the king's sudden recovery: but in Ireland, from the independence asserted by the two houses of the British councils, the question grew still more complex. The LordLieutenant refused to transmit their address,* and Lord Mornington supported him powerfully in his refusal.

Ten years after this hot collision of parties, Lord Mornington was appointed Governor-General of India; and now first he entered upon a stage worthy of his powers. I cannot myself agree with his biographer, Mr Pearce, that "the wisdom of his policy is now universally recognised;" because the same false views of our Indian position, which at that time caused his splendid services to be slighted in many quarters, still preponderates. All administrations alike have been intensely ignorant of Indian

* Which adopted neither view; for, by offering the regency of Ireland to the Prince of Wales, they negatived Mr Fox's view, who held it to be the prince's by inherent right, whether offered or not; and, on the other hand, thev still more openly opposed Mr Pitt.

politics; and for the natural reason, that the business of home politics leaves them no disposable energies for affairs so distant, and with which each man's chance of any durable connection is so exceedingly small. What Lord Mornington did was this: he looked our prospects in the face. Two great enemies were then looming upon the horizon-viz., Mysore and the Mahrattas-both brutally ignorant of our real resources, and both deluded by our imperfect use of such resources as, even in a previous war, we had possessed. That one of these enemies who first came into play was Tippoo, the Sultan of Mysore: him, by the crushing energy of his arrangements, Lord Mornington was able utterly to destroy; and to distribute his dominions with equity and moderation; yet so as to prevent any new coalition arising in that quarter against the British power. There is a portrait of Tippoo, of this very tiger, more than tiger-hearted, in the second volume of Mr Pearce's work, which expresses sufficiently the unparalleled ferocity of his nature; and it is guaranteed, by its origin, as authentic. Tippoo, from the personal interest investing him, has more fixed the attention of Europe than a much more formidable enemy: that enemy was the Mahratta confederacy, chiefly concentrated in the persons of the Peishwah, of Scindia (usually pronounced Sindy), of Holkar, and the Rajah of Berar. Had these four princes. been less profoundly ignorant, had they been less inveterately treacherous, they would have cost us the only* dreadful struggle which in India we have stood. As it

* "The only dreadful struggle:"-This was written thirteen years ago, when the Sikh empire of Lahore was only beginning to be dangerous; and the Lion of Lahore, Runjeet Sing (the Romulus of the Sikhs), was but dimly appreciated by our own officers, when presented to him on their march to and from Affghanistan. Sing means lion.