His end was calm, peaceful, and resigned; as his life had been just, exemplary, and benevolent. Throughout he had been sincerely religious, and most regular in his attendance at divine worship. Even on Sundays, when the weather was such that the crew could not assemble on deck, he was in the habit of retiring to his cabin, and reading the service for the day. His piety was utterly without pretense; his acts of charity were frequent; and his ear was never shut against a representation of real distress. He was strictly scrupulous in his respect for inferiors, and particularly anxious for the interests of those over whom he had authority. His disposition was most repugnant to the exercise of severity; and though no man was better qualified by nature to enforce proper discipline, his humanity and refined sentiment rendered him averse to doing so by extreme means. He looked up to his Creator with devotion and gratitude, and he regarded the lowly with kindness and generosity.
On their arrival in England, the bones of this brave and worthy admiral were consigned to the dust in St. Paul’s Cathedral, hard by the spot where the ashes of Nelson repose. A monument has since been erected to his memory by a grateful public; and his services well deserved such a recognition from a free people. He lived, in deed and in truth, not for himself, but for his country; and he knew no fear but the fear of God. He had, indeed, nobly done his duty to the last, sacrificing all personal considerations, with patriotic disinterestedness. Domestic enjoyment, quiet, health, life itself, were in his eyes nothing compared with the preservation of our shores and liberties from the great, skillful, and mighty foe, who planned earnestly and labored anxiously for their conquest and destruction.
[LORD TEIGNMOUTH.]
This estimable and religious man was not endowed with any of the splendid intellect of Pitt, nor with any portion of the brilliant genius of Burke; yet his abilities were such, and so sufficiently recognized, that the former, when in the pride of place and power, thought prudent to nominate him for a trust hardly less important than his own, though without family influence or connections; and the latter, when denouncing the administration of affairs in the East, to protest against the appointment with feelings of which contempt assuredly formed not one of the ingredients. Indeed, his career, so remarkably successful and extraordinary, presents a pleasing and inciting example of a person ungifted with any marvelous capacity raising himself to become the peaceful and spotless ruler of millions of human beings.
The family from which he derived descent was of considerable antiquity in the county of Derby; and in former days several of its members had been returned to the House of Commons. Being connected, as times changed, with India by a matrimonial alliance, one of the race became a captain in the Company’s marine; and his son, while in the enjoyment of a lucrative situation as supercargo, married, for the second time, the daughter of an officer belonging to the same service, and had two sons; of whom John Shore, destined to fill one of the most splendid places on the face of the earth, was born in London, on the 5th of October, 1751. He was subsequently removed into Essex, where his parents usually resided; and there the infancy of the future Governor-general of India, was passed, much like that of other boys of his age and condition.
These were the good old-fashioned days, when parents were not nervously apprehensive of any fatal effects from dressing their sons in garments befitting their sex, and allowing them that degree of liberty consistent with a proper attention to order. Accordingly, at a very early age, Shore availed himself of the license afforded him, and contrived, by hook or by crook, to find his way to the roof of a very high barn, the most elevated part of which he bestrode with an utter and lucky unconsciousness of the extreme danger to which he was exposed. Fortunately he was rescued from this perilous resting-place without any mishap; and, probably with a view of keeping him out of such mischief in future, he was mounted every morning on one of the coach-horses, before his father’s serving-man, and in this fashion rode to a school in the vicinity; to be initiated into learning at this rustic establishment, and into the ways of the world as understood by the juveniles who attended it. He was in good time removed to a seminary at Tottenham; and about the same date he lost his much-respected father: but the surviving parent was a woman of highly estimable character, polished manners, and with such an annual income as enabled her to give her two sons a liberal education.
Shortly after the melancholy event alluded to, John Shore was destined to the service of the East India Company, while he was yet a little boy, with a spare frame, but sinewy, and such as fitted him to take part in, and enjoy puerile sports and pastimes. This arrangement was brought about by an old friend of the family, who was perhaps glad to secure for the Company the prospective services of so thorough-bred an aspirant as the son of a supercargo and the grandson of a captain in their marine, unquestionably, might claim to be. The offer of a writership was thus made, and, as a matter of course, promptly accepted. This affair being satisfactorily settled, Shore was removed to a school at Hertford, where he delighted in being admitted to an excellent library to improve his mind and extend his information. He, moreover, gratified a natural taste for poetical compositions by rising early in the morning to feast his spirit on Pope’s “Homer;” and he perused books of travel till his imagination had been taken captive with the idea of such adventure, that he longed, with as much enthusiasm as he was capable of, to go on some expedition of discovery. Such a desire would, in all probability, be rather heightened than otherwise by the prospect of ere long sunning himself beneath an Eastern sky; and apparently his general interest in such matters did not soon expire, from the anxiety he afterward manifested to possess some account of Sir Joseph Banks’s voyage round the world, which otherwise would have been of little moment to a youth exercising judicial functions in India at the age of twenty, or thereabouts. While at Hertford, Shore had what he considered a miraculous escape from drowning, and which he ever afterward ascribed to a special interposition of Providence in his behalf. Along with a young companion, he had gone to bathe in a river in the neighborhood of the school; and, in their haste and carelessness, they had mistaken a deep pool for the place where they usually immersed themselves. They were just on the point of plunging in when a voice called on them to wait, and, at the moment, an equestrian appeared at their side, quite as suddenly and opportunely as the two strange horsemen did at Lake Regillus. He demanded if they could swim, and on being answered in the negative, threatened them with a sharp castigation unless they walked off immediately. Thus menaced, and considering that they were at the moment liable to be lashed with peculiar facility and effect, the gentle youths clutched up their raiment, and, in fear and trembling, fled from the spot.