We believe that the majority of the empire are honest and true, but we know that faction is active and unscrupulous; we believe that there is in the country a genuine regard for the constitution, but we know that there are men within the circumference of England, whose nature is as foul as that of the blackest revolutionist of France in 1793; whose craving for possession is treacherous and tigerish, whose means are intrinsic and unadulterated mischief, whose element is public disturbance, and whose feverish hope of possession is in general overthrow. Against those we can have no defence but in the vigour, the caution, and the sincerity of the national administration.
The Marquess Wellesley, on the formation of Lord Grey's cabinet in 1830, accepted the office of Lord Steward. He had begun his political life as a high Tory, and the friend and follower of Pitt.—In 1793, he had fought boldly against the Reform question. This was at the period when he retained the generosity of youth, and the classic impressions of his university; but he had now been trained to courts, and he became a reformer, with a white rod in his aged hand! In 1833, he was re-appointed to the government of Ireland; he returned full of the same innocent conceptions which had once fashioned Ireland into a political Arcadia. But he was soon and similarly reduced to the level of realities. He found confusion worse confounded, and was compelled to exert all his power to suppress "agitation," and exert it in vain; a Coercion Bill alone pioneered his way, a quarrel in which the Irish Secretary was involved with the Agitator, produced the resignation of the secretary, Littleton, though the Marquess's son-in-law.—Lord Grey, like Saturn, rebelled against by his own progeny and overthrown by the impulse of Reform, resigned, (July 9, 1834.) The Whig government fell within the year, and the Marquess left Ireland. In England he condescended to accept the office of Lord Chamberlain; but, within a month, retired altogether from public life. It was full time: he was now seventy-five.
The East India Company, in 1837, voted him £20,000, and in 1841 honourably proposed to place his statue in the India House. His remaining years were unchequered. He died in Kingston House, Brompton, on the 26th of September 1842, in his eighty-third year.
The Marquess Wellesley, on the whole view of his qualifications, was an accomplished man; and, on a glance at his career, will be seen to have been singularly favoured by fortune. Coming forward at a period of great public interest, surrounded by the most eminent public men of the last hundred years, and early associated with Pitt, the greatest of them all; he enjoyed the highest advantages of example, intellectual exercise, and public excitement, until he was placed in the government of India. There, the career of every governor has exactly that portion of difficulties which gives an administrator a claim on public applause; with that assurance of success which stimulates the feeblest to exertion. All our Indian wars have finished by the overthrow of the enemy, the possession of territory, and the increase of British power—with the single exception of the Affghan war, an expedition wholly beyond the natural limits of our policy, and as rashly undertaken as it was rashly carried on. The Marquess returned to Europe loaded with honours, conspicuous in the public eye, and in the vigour of life. No man had a fairer prospect of assuming the very highest position in the national councils. He had the taste and sumptuousness which would have made him popular with the first rank of nobility, the literature which gratified the learned and intelligent, the practical experience of public life which qualified him for the conduct of cabinets and councils, and the gallantry and spirit which made him a favourite with general society. He had, above all, a tower of strength in the talents of his illustrious brother. Those two men might have naturally guided the councils of an empire. That a man so gifted, so public, and so ambitious of eminent distinction, should ever have been the subordinate of the Liverpools, the Cannings, or the Greys, would be wholly incomprehensible, but for one reason.
In the commencement of his career, he rashly involved himself in the Catholic question. It was a showy topic for a young orator; it was an easy exhibition of cheap patriotism; it gave an opportunity for boundless metaphor—and it meant nothing. But, no politician has ever sinned with Popery but under a penalty—the question hung about his neck through every hour of his political existence. It encumbered his English popularity, it alienated the royal favour, it flung him into the rear rank of politicians. It made his English ambition fruitless and secondary; and his Irish government unstable and unpopular. It disqualified him for the noblest use of a statesman's powers, the power of pronouncing an unfettered opinion; and it suffered a man to degenerate into the antiquated appendage to a court, who might have been the tutelar genius of an empire.
Memoirs and Correspondence of the Most Noble Richard Marquess Wellesley. By Robert B. Pearce, Esq. 3 vols. London: Bentley.
LETTER TO EUSEBIUS.
My Dear Eusebius,—I have received yours from the hands of the bearer, and such hands! Why write to consult me about railroads, of all things? I know nothing about them, but that they all seem to tend to some Pandemonium or another; and when I see of a dark night their monster-engines, with eyes of flame and tongues of fire, licking up the blackness under them, and snuffing up, as it were, the airs from Hades, I could almost fancy the stoker a Mercury, conducting his hermetically sealed convicts down those terrible passages that lead direct to the abominable ferry. I said, "I know nothing of them;" but now I verily believe you mean to twit me with my former experiment in railway knowledge, and have no intention to purchase shares in the La Mancha Company (and I doubt if there be any such) to countenance your Quixotic pleasantry. I did speculate once, it is true, in one—London and Falmouth Scheme—with very large promises. I was then living at W——, when one day, just before I was going to sit down to dinner, a chaise stops at my door, out steps a very "smart man," and is ushered into my library. When I went into the room, he was examining, quite in a connoisseur attitude, Eusebius, a picture; he was very fond of pictures, he said; had a small but choice collection of his own, and I won't say that he did not speak of the Correggiosity of Correggio. I was upon the point of interrupting him, with the intimation that I did not mean to purchase any, when, having thus ingratiated himself with me by this reference to my taste, he suddenly turns round upon me with the most business-like air, draws from under his cloak an imposingly official portfolio, takes out his scrip, presenting me with a demand for fifty pounds, the deposit of so many shares, looking positively certain that in a few seconds the money would be in his pocket. People say, Eusebius, that the five minutes before a dinner is the worst time in the world to touch the heart, or to get any thing out of a man's pocket for affection; but I do not know if it be not the best time for an attack, if there be a speculation on foot which promises much to his interest, for at that time he is naturally greedy. Had Belisarius, with his dying boy in his arms, himself appeared at my gate, as seen in the French print, crying, "Date obolum Belsario," I should have pronounced him at once an impostor, and given him nothing, and, indeed, not pronounced wrongly, for the whole story is a fiction. But at this peculiar moment of hunger and of avarice, I confess I was too ready, and gave a check for the amount. I had no sooner, however, satisfied myself with what Homer calls εδητνος ηδε ποτητος, and we moderns, meat and potatoes—than I began to suspect the soundness of the scheme, or the company, who had gone to the expense of a chaise for eight miles merely to collect this subscription of mine; and I was curious the next day to trace the doings of this smart gentleman, when I found he had dined at the inn at B—— on turtle, ducks, and green peas, and had recruited the weariness of his day's journey with exhilarating champagne. I knew my fate at once, and from that day to this have heard nothing of the London and Falmouth project. Now, Eusebius, as you publish my letters, if this should catch the eye of any of the directors of that company still possessing any atom of conscience, I beg to remind them that I am still minus fifty pounds; and as all claim seems to be quite out of the question, excepting on their "known and boundless generosity," I beg to wind up this little narrative of the transaction in the usual words of the beggar's petition, "The smallest donation will be thankfully received."