of his succession to the title of his father, the Earl of Mornington, in 1781, for a few years. In 1784 he was sworn in a member of the Privy Council; in 1786 he was appointed one of the Lords of the Treasury. He sat in the English House of Commons, for several boroughs, from the year 1784, and distinguished himself particularly at the time of the regency question by his advocacy of the English view of it, and at the period of the French Revolution by his denunciation of its excesses. He married, in 1794, his first wife, the daughter of M. Pierre Roland, by whom he had previously several illegitimate children. A separation took place soon after the marriage, and the marchioness died in 1816, leaving no legitimate issue. In 1795 he was appointed a member of the Board of Control, and subsequently chief governor of India.

In 1797 he was created Baron Wellesley, in the peerage of Great Britain, and in 1799, Marquess Wellesley, in the peerage of Ireland, on account of his great services in the office of Governor General of India. In 1805, after a career of unparalleled successes, signal civil and military triumphs, and services of the highest importance, thwarted, and distrusted, and interfered with in his great and comprehensive schemes and governmental measures by the Court of Directors, he resigned his office and returned to England when he had attained the forty-fifth year of his age.

In the latter part of 1809 he was appointed embassador to Spain. He landed at Cadiz the day the battle of Talavera was fought, but remained only a short time in Spain, and on his return home was appointed Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. His known opinions in favor of Catholic emancipation did not leave him long in office, and for fifteen years he continued in opposition to government.

In December, 1821, the Marquess of Wellesley was appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. From 1807 up to that period, Ireland was governed for the interests, and in the interests solely, of Orangeism, nominally by the Duke of Richmond, but virtually by the attorney general, Saurin, and an English chancellor, Lord Manners, who was wholly under the control of the former.

The Marquess of Wellesley, in 1822, struck a blow at the Orange ascendency regime from which it never recovered. From 1807 up to that period Ireland had been governed by William Saurin, of Huguenot descent, a black-letter lawyer of eminence, of much astuteness in his profession, but of a narrow mind, illiberal and unenlightened, a partisan of Orangeism without disguise or any affectation of impartiality in his high office -an open adherent of that system, deriving all his power from its fanaticism, and exercising all his influence for its objects, under the cloak of zeal for the interests of religion. All the administrative power of the state was placed by him and the chancellor, the governors of the chief governor, in the hands of Orangemen. The Duke of Richmond, who had been appointed viceroy in 1807, and held his office till 1813, had delegated his authority to the chancellor, Lord Manners, and by Lord Manners the chief power and control of the government, civil, military, and religious, had been transferred to Saurin.

Such was the power in Ireland which the Marquess of Wellesley found more difficulty in dealing with than that of Tippoo Saib in India. And yet, at the period of his arrival in that country as governor general, the sovereignty of India had to be disputed with three native powers, and sultans of vast resources. But the struggle of one power alone, of Orangeism in Ireland, with Saurin for its legal sultan, cost the illustrious statesman more trouble than all the strife of his government in India, and his wars with the princes of the Mahrattas and Nizam. He broke the stubborn neck of Orange influence and insolence, however, though at an infinite cost of trouble, vexation, and disquiet. And this attainment, perhaps, after all, is the greatest achievement of the illustrious marquess.

Lady Blessington had reason to know that such was the opinion of the marquess; among her papers she has left a very remarkable piece of evidence of the fact, of unquestionable authenticity, in the following statement of the marquess to her in March, 1840.

"Bushe is one of the first men produced by our country. When I went to Ireland in 1821, I found him depressed by an old Or

angeman named Saurin, then attorney general by title, but who had been really lord lieutenant for fifteen years. I removed Saurin, and appointed Bushe lord chief justice.

"Saurin set up a newspaper to defame me- The Evening Mail' ---which (notwithstanding the support of Lord Manners and the Orangemen) has not yet ruined or slain me."

Of one of the principal opponents of the marquess in his Irish government, a few words may not be misplaced here.

Thomas Manners Sutton, first Lord Manners, a younger son of Lord George Manners Sutton, third son of the third Duke of Rutland, who was born in 1756, and died in 1842, in his 87th year, was Lord Chancellor of Ireland from the death of Mr. Fox till the retirement of Lord Liverpool. For twenty years he enjoyed greater patronage and emoluments than ever fell to the lot of any legal functionary in Ireland. His patron, Spencer Perceval, who was attorney general in 1802, when Colonel Despard was prosecuted successfully for high treason, discovered in the peculiar talents of the then solicitor general, Lord Manners, the qualities which fitted him, in his opinion, for the high office of lord chancellor in Ireland.

The whole Orange party and ascendency throughout the country received the new lord chancellor with acclamation. The great Indian general, Sir Arthur Wellesley, the late Duke of Wellington, who at the same time was appointed chief secretary, was not less favorably received by the same party: poor deluded innocents! no prophetic vision of theirs peering into futurity, and the part that chief secretary was to play in 1829.

Manners was an ornamental chancellor of a grim countenance, somewhat ghastly, painfully suggestive of the aspect that a resuscitated mummy might be expected to assume in the act of reviving, and was remarkable for courtesy on the bench. He bowed oftener to the bar, bent his gaunt form lower, spoke in milder accents, stood more perpendicularly at the close of a long sitting, and smiled with greater labor than any keeper of the seals in Ireland had ever done before. He imparted great dignity, and gave a gentlemanly character to the exercise of his vast patronage, for all the purposes of party and intrigue, and

the jobbery interests, which were protected and promoted by his subordinate in legal office. But his decisions in Chancery were found entitled to little respect in Westminster Hall; and of his administration of justice, it can be said with truth, it gave very general satisfaction to the Orangemen of Ireland. William Saurin, who was made attorney general in 1809, and who retained his office for sixteen of the years that Lord Manners was chancellor, the uncompromising adversary of Catholic claims, and most virulent of all the opponents of them, was at once taken to the private councils of the chancellor, Lord Manners, on his arrival, and became his " guide, philosopher, and friend." Daily the business of the government of Ireland was done by the two legal functionaries of kindred spirits-" Arcades ambos," as they regularly walked down every morning from Stephen's Green to the Four Courts, and returned to their homes, after a visit to the castle every evening, with arms linked, and solemn steps and bended brows, settling affairs of state, and arranging the things that were to be done by the facile, convivial, and pleasure-loving chief governor and viceroy, the Duke of Richmond, who thus allowed himself " to be led by the nose as tenderly as asses are."

The well-known partiality of this dignified judge for the attorney general, had the effect to be expected from it on the solicitors of the Court of Chancery, Mr. Saurin having "the ear of the court," and a supposed influence over the lord chancellor out of court. Mr. Saurin, who was known to be a man of some intellectual power, and the Lord Chancellor Manners one of very little strength of mind, and capable of being influenced by one of a very different calibre of understanding, briefs poured in on the favored attorney general, and men of the highest standing in their profession were cast into the shade in the court of the exceedingly courteous Lord Chancellor Manners.

In January, 1822, the Marquess Wellesley being viceroy, the attorney generalship of William Saurin came to an end. But his power, as the confidential adviser of the lord chancellor, and the acknowledged head and legal guide of the Orange ascendency faction, continued to be exercised and pitted against the gov

ernment of the Marquess Wellesley for a period of six years, namely, from 1822 to 1828, when the Liverpool ministry broke up, and Lord Manners was succeeded by Sir Anthony Hart.

The conqueror of Tippoo Saib and the Nizam having resolutely encountered the hostile power of Irish Orangeism, that had been previously deemed indomitable in Ireland, and having succeeded largely in his warfare with that system, though not to the full extent of his desires, after an administration of justice and wisdom of six years' duration, was recalled in 1828, when his brother, the Duke of Wellington, took the office of first lord of the treasury.

The marquess married a second time, in 1825, the eldest daughter of Richard Caton, Esq., of Maryland, in America, and widow of Robert Patterson, Esq., a Roman Catholic lady, by which marriage there was no issue.

During the whole of the Duke of Wellington's administration, the marquess remained in retirement.

In 1833, Lord Grey being prime minister, the marquess, in his 74th year, once more took on him the office of lord lieutenant of Ireland, and retained office for the period of one year. He returned to England when Peel came into office, in December, 1834.

In 1835, he accepted the office of lord chamberlain, for the sake, it is said, of its emoluments; and with that humiliating step his public life may be said to have closed.

An elegant volume of his Latin poems, entitled "Primitiæ et Reliquiæ," many of them written after he became an octogenarian, were privately printed a short time before his death; and, perhaps, but for the care of one whom he loved like a father, and watched over with all the affectionate interest of a true and faithful friend-Mr. Alfred Montgomery-these remarkable poems never would have seen the light of day.

"Some of these had been recently written, and they exhibit in an astonishing degree his unimpaired vigor of intellect, and his unaltered elegance of taste. One poem in this volume justly attracted universal admiration."*

* Memoirs of Eminent Etonians; with Notices of the Early History of Eton College. By Edward S. Creasy, M.A. Bentley.