on that sweet landscape. Miss Etherage is a great heiress now, for Sedley, as for sake of clearness I call him still, refused a dot with his wife, and that handsome inheritance, will all belong to Charity, who is as emphatic, obstinate, and kind-hearted as ever. The admiral has never gone down the mill-road since his introduction to the Honorable Kiffyn Fulke Verney at the foot of the hill. He rolls in his chair safely along the level up-lands, and amuses himself with occasional inspections of Ware through his telescope; and tells little Agnes, when he sees her, what she was doing on a certain day, and asks who the party with the phaeton and grays, who called on Thursday at two o'clock, were, and similar questions; and likes to hear the news, and they say is growing_more_curious as years increase. He and Charity have revived their acquaintance with écarté and piquet, and play for an hour or so very snugly in the winter evenings. Miss Charity is a little cross when she loses, and won't let old Etherage play more than his allotted number of games; and locks up the cards; and is growing wife-like with the admiral; but is quite devoted to him, and will make him live, I think, six years longer than anyone else could.

Sedley wrote a very kind letter to the Hon. Kiffyn Fulke Verney, to set his mind at ease about mesne rates, and any other claims whatsoever that might arise against him, in consequence of his temporary tenure of the title and estates, and received from Vichy a very affronted reply, begging him to take whatever course he might be advised, as he distinctly objected to being placed under any kind of personal obligation, and trusted that he would not seek to place such a construction upon a compulsory respect for the equities of the situation, and the decencies enforced by public opinion; and he declared his readiness to make any sacrifice to pay him whatever his strict legal rights entitled him to the moment he had made up his mind to exact them.

The Hon. Kiffyn Fulke Verney is, of course, quite removed from his sphere of usefulness and distinction -parliamentary life—and spends his time upon the Continent, and is remarkably reserved and impertinent,

and regarded with very general respect and hatred.

Sedley has been very kind, for Cleve's sake, to old Sir Booth Fanshawe, with whom he is the only person on earth who has an influ

ence.

He wrote to the baronet, who was then in Paris, disclosing the secret of Cleve's marriage. The old man burst into one of his frenzies, and wrote forthwith a frantic letter direct to his mortal enemy, the Hon. Kiffyn Fulke Verney, railing at Cleve, railing at him, and calling upon him, in a tone of preposterous menace, to punish his nephew ! Had he been left to himself, I dare say he would have made Cleve feel his resentment. But thus bullied he said "Upon my life I'll do no such thing. I'm in the habit of thinking before I take steps, about it—with Booth Fanshawe's permission, I'll act according to my own judgment, and I dare say the girl has got some money, and if it were not good for Cleve in some way that old person would not be so angry." And so it ended for the present.

The new Lord Verney went over expressly to see him, and in the same conversation, in which he arranged some law business in the friendliest way, and entirely to Sir Booth Fanshawe's satisfaction, he discussed the question of Cleve's marriage. At first the baronet was incensed; but when the hurly-burly was done he came to see, with our friend Tom, whose peerage gave his opinion weight on the subject of marriages and family relations, that the alliance was not so bad, on the contrary, that it had some very strong points to recommend it.

The Rev. Isaac Dixie has not got on in the Church, and is somehow no favourite at Ware. The Hon. Miss Caroline Oldys is still unmarried, and very bitter on the Verneys, uncle and nephew; people don't understand why, though the reader may. Perhaps she thinks that the Hon. Kiffyn Fulke Verney ought to have tried again, and was too ready to accept a first refusal. Her hatred of Cleve I need not explain.

With respect to Mr. Larkin, I cite an old Dutch proverb, which says, "Those who swim deep and climb high seldom die in their beds." In

its fair figurative sense it applies satisfactorily to the case of that profound and aspiring gentleman who, as some of my readers are aware, fell at last from a high round of the ladder of his ambition, and was drowned in the sea beneath. Nonot drowned; that were too painless, and implies extinction. He fell, rather, upon that black flooring of rock that rims the water, and was smashed, but not killed.

It was, as they will remember, after his introduction to the management of the affairs of the Wylder, Brandon, and Lake families, and on the eve, to all appearance, of the splendid consummation of his subtle and audacious schemes, that in a moment the whole scaffolding of his villainy gave way, and he fell headlong-thenceforth, helpless, sprawling, back broken, living on from year to year, and eating metaphoric dust, like the great old reptile who is as yet mangled but not killed.

Happy fly the years at Ware. Many fair children have blessed the union of pretty Agnes Etherage and the kindly heir of the Verneys. Cleve does not come himself; he goes little to any gay country houses. A kind of lassitude or melancholy is settling and deepening upon him. To one passage of his life he looks back with a quickly averted glance, and an unchanging horror-the time when he was saved from a great crime, as it were, by the turning of a die. "Those three dreadful

weeks," he says within himself, "when I was mad!" But his handsome son is constantly at Ware, where he is beloved by its master and mistress like one of their own children. One day Lord Verney ran across to Malory in his yacht, this boy with him. It was an accidental tetê-à-tetê, and he talked to the boy a great deal of his " poor mamma" as they sauntered through the sunny woods of Malory; and he brought him to the refectory, and pointed out to him from the window, the spot where he had seen her, with her trowel in her hand, as the morning sun threw the shadow of the spreading foliage over her, and he described her beauty to him, and he walked down with him to Cardyllian, the yacht was appointed to meet them at the pier, and brought him into the church, to the pew where he was placed, and showed him the seat where she and Anne Sheckleton sat on the Sunday when he saw her first, and looked for a while silently into that void shadow, for it is pleasant and yet sad to calĺ up sometimes those old scenes and images that have made us feel, when we were younger, and somehow good Lady Verney did not care to hear her husband upon this theme.

So for the present the story of the Verneys of Malory told. Years hence, when we shall not be here to read it, the same scenes and family may have a new story to tell; for time with his shuttle and the threads of fate, is ever weaving new romance.

THE opinion that the days of Indian heroism passed away with the old Company is natural in the race of Indian officers spending an honourable evening of life at home after long and severe service in the East. The "former times were better than these" is the sentiment of their years and condition. Others, however, being free from special traditions and influences, will hold that even if in some respects the change from the Company to the Crown has been no improvement, the material of British heroes, whether in the military or civil service, is as good as it ever was, and that events rather than any system produced the great men of Indian story. Should for the next generation English rule in Hindustan create no grand occasions, the highest possible attainment for the nation's servants will be the topmost pinnacle of a successful officialism, but it will not follow that the same men would not prove the equals of their predecessors did the exigency require similar effort and sacrifice. But thus much may, without hesitation, be said, that no future episodes of Indian government can produce, as none that are conceivable will demand, larger powers or a nobler patriotism than were the characteristics of the men who, during the thirty years ending with the suppression of the Mutiny, governed the Indian provinces of Great Britain. The biography of those illustrious soldiers and administrators is a national boast, and that it should be truthfully and attractively written is of the highest moment. The records themselves often possess more than the charm of romance, and will fire the mind and guide the judgment of youth, and tend to prolong the line of distinguished officers who, more than any other servants of the Crown, owed their position to their merits. India is a wider field than forty or fifty years ago. The direc

tion of the roads to eminence is changed since the definitive abandonment of the policy of territorial extension, but it is impossible that in the government of so difficult a dependency the places of highest responsibility should not fall to the ablest men to an extent hardly less great than in more stirring times. Political and personal considerations will always have their influence; nevertheless, an Indian career is still a noble one, and because it is so, the Lives of its Worthies are the proper study of a large proportion of our ambitious youth. The task of inditing these, in a form separate from the general history of the country-in that of convenient illustrative biography-has been wisely and lovingly discharged by Mr. Kaye. The two volumes now published by him are a valuable and most interesting contribution to the literature of British India, and largely add to the obligations under which all "Indians" have been laid by his Histories.

These sketches are not very elaborate or very critical Biographies. They are short, diversified, and popular, without being slight or deficient. The peculiar fitness in Mr. Kaye to perform the duty arose not only from his actual Indian knowledge, but from the circumstance that the private letters and papers of several of the heroes passed away were intrusted to him. And from these he makes such pleasing and judicious selections, that those most familiar with Indian history will read his pages with even higher pleasure than those less so. The same clear and masculine style which marked his Sepoy War increases the attractions of the work. And here it may be remarked that the publisher, Mr. Strahan, in conceiving the idea of a series of Lives of Indian Officers in his magazine, Good Words, where first these sketches appeared in a less complete form, rightly judged that in

1867.

cutta. Men and women of rank and influence in London had been so long accustomed to get rid of troublesome petitioners for place and patronage by sending them out to India with a letter of recommendation in their pockets, that the evil habit was not to be readily abandoned. It was the creditable characteristic of Cornwallis's administration, that despite these intrusions he held to his virtuous purpose, and refused to perpetrate the enormities expected from him even by the Company itself. His customary answer to importunate requests that he would provide for protegès, was a threat of resignation of his post of Governor-General. During his two Indian administrations he cleared away a vast amount of abuses which had impeded good government, and not only laid the basis of future more honourable administration, but by raising the morality of Englishmen in India, through the the force of example as much as of will, imparted to Indian administration a vital principle. Lord Cornwallis also, if without genius of of the highest order, guided by strict concientiousness, and laboriously striving to master every subject for himself, saw the danger of an extension of English responsibilities in India, and was more concerned to govern well than to carry on intrigues against independent princes with a view to conquest or influence. Mr. Kaye's estimate of his aims and powers is appreciative and discriminating, and the chapter which contains it is certainly not the least valuable in his volumes.

The lives of Malcolm and Mountstuart Elphinstone of the latter particularly-show with what statesmanlike caution and care our Indian Empire was built up; with what patience difficult problems were approached; how scrupulously interference with the superstitions of the natives was avoided. Elphinstone was the creator of the State system of Education in India, which was laid on foundations deep and broad. He devoted his energies likewise to the effecting of legislative and judicial reforms, and proved remarkably that a man of the nicest literary taste and the most refined reading, may be a statesman of practical mind, capable of applying himself to the hardest

problems of government. How interesting is the portrait the subjoined passages afford of the great governor of Bombay, whose eight years' rule was one of beneficence, strict morality, and solid reforms.

"His habits, whether in the Presidency or in the Mofussil, were the same. He rose at daybreak, and mounting one of a large stud he always had, rode for an hour and a half, principally at a hand gallop. He had a public breakfast every morning, and never left the room as long as one man desirous of speaking to him remained, but after that he was invisible to all but his suite. After luncheon he took a short

Latin.

sièsta, and in the afternoon read Greek or After an eight o'clock dinner, at ten he rose from the table, and, reading for half an hour in his own room, went to bed. Although surrounded by young men he never suffered the slightest indecorum, and if any one after dinner indulged in a double entendre, he would not say anything, but, pushing back his chair, broke up the party. We always had in the camp a Shikaree, whose business it was to inquire for hog, and whenever he brought in intelligence of game, Mr. Elphinstone would proclaim a holiday, and go hunting for one or perhaps two days, and he was fond of a chase at any time. In the midst of many striking excellences, that which placed him far above all the great men I have heard of was his forgetfulness of self and thoughtfulness for others." [This is the testimony of Mr. Warden, one of Elphinstone's secretaries.]

Another peep into his life is afforded by a record in his journal under date 1811 :

Euripides.

August 14. I spent a long time in reading new Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews, and have since read, with greater admiration than ever, Bacon's Essays. I have also been reading the 'Hecuba' of It is, as far as I have read, a noble production, rising at every step in dignity and interest. I have scarcely ever seen a finer turn than that when, after Hecuba has exhausted her eloquence in begging for Polyxena's life without success, and she tells her daughter to make a last effort herself to seize Ulysses' hand, and supplicate his mercy, Ulysses turns away, and hides his hand in his garment, but Polyxena, in a speech full of the sublimest sentiments, tells him not to be afraid, for she is not going to ask for a life which she disdains."

And so on, through a long and interesting criticism showing much thought and appreciation. The journal resumes,―