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Continent. He was buoyant with a well-grounded confidence; and there was something contagious in his fearless generosity and justice. The Irish people soon came to understand him, and almost to adore him. He was denounced of course by the alarmists and the cowards; by the Castle hacks and the furious antiCatholic bigots. Chesterfield let them denounce as long and as loudly as seemed good to them. He never troubled himself about their wild alarms and clamour.

their savage

Probably no Irishman who ever lived was a more bitter and uncompromising enemy of English rule in Ireland than John Mitchel, the rebel of 1848. His opinion, therefore, is worth having as to the character of Chesterfield's rule in Dublin Castle. In his History of Ireland,' a book which might well be more often read in this country than it is, Mitchel says of Chesterfield, 'Having satisfied himself that there was no insurrectionary movement in the country, and none likely to be, he was not to be moved from his tolerant courses by any complaints or remonstrances. Far from yielding to the feigned alarm of those who solicited him to raise new regiments, he sent four battalions of the soldiers then in Ireland to reinforce the Duke of Cumberland. He discouraged jobs, kept down expenses. . . . . When some savage Ascendency Protestant would come to him with tales of alarm, he usually turned the conversation into a tone of light badinage, which perplexed and baffled the man. One came to seriously put his lordship on his guard by acquainting

him with the fact that his own coachman was in "Is it possible?" cried take care the fellow shall courtier burst into his

the habit of going to mass. Chesterfield-" Then I will not drive me there."

A

apartment one morning, while he was sipping his chocolate in bed, with the startling intelligence that the Papists were rising in Connaught. "Ah," he said, looking at his watch-"'tis nine o'clock-time for them to rise." There was evidently no dealing with such a viceroy as this who showed such insensibility to the perils of Protestantism and the evil designs of the dangerous Papists. Indeed he was seen to distinguish by his peculiar admiration a Papist beauty, Miss Ambrose, whom he declared to be the only "dangerous Papist " he had met in Ireland.' Chesterfield himself has left an exposition. of his policy which we may well believe to be genuine. 'I came determined,' he wrote many years after, 'to proscribe no set of persons whatever, and determined to be governed by none. Had the Papists made any attempt to put themselves above the law, I should have taken good care to have quelled them again. It was said that my lenity to the Papists had wrought no alteration either in their religious or their political sentiments. I did not expect that it would; but surely that was no reason for cruelty towards them.'

It is true that Lord Chesterfield's conduct in Ireland has been found fault with by no less devoted a friend of Ireland than Burke. In his letter to a peer of Ireland on the Penal Laws against the Irish Catholics, Burke says, This man, while he

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was duping the credulity of Papists with fine words in private, and commending their good behaviour during a rebellion in Great Britain-as it well deserved to be commended and rewarded-was capable of urging penal laws against them in a speech from the Throne, and of stimulating with provocatives the wearied and half-exhausted bigotry of the then Parliament of Ireland.' But Burke was a man whose public virtue was too high and unbending to permit him to make allowance for the political arts and crafts of a Chesterfield. It is quite true that Chesterfield recommended in his speech that the Irish Parliament should inquire into the working of the Penal Laws in order to find out if they needed any improvement. But this was a mere piece of stage-play to amuse and to beguile the stupidity and the bigotry of the Irish Parliament of those days. It was not a stroke of policy which a man like Burke would have condescended to or could have approved; but it must have greatly delighted the cynical humour of such a man as Chesterfield. At all events it is certain that during his administration Chesterfield succeeded in winning the confidence and the admiration of the Catholics of Ireland-that is to say, of five sixths of the population of the country. He was very soon recalled; perhaps the King did not quite like his growing popularity in Ireland; and when he left Dublin he was escorted to the ship's side by an enthusiastic concourse of people who pressed around him to the last and prayed of him to return soon to Ireland. Chesterfield did not return to Ireland.

He was made one of the Secretaries of State, and the Dublin Castle Administration went on its old familiar way. But there is even still among the Irish people a lingering tradition of the rule of Lord Chesterfield, and of the new system which he tried for a while to establish in the government of their island..

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

PRIMUS IN INDIS.

BEFORE the Jacobite rising had been put down or the Pelhams absolutely set up, England, without knowing it, had sent forth a new conqueror, and might already have hailed the first promises of sway over one of the most magnificent empires of the earth. The name of the new conqueror was Robert Clive; the name of the magnificent empire was India.

At that time the influence of England over India was small to insignificance-a scrap of Bengal, the island and town of Bombay, Madras, and a fort or two. The average Englishman's knowledge of India was small even to non-existence. The few Englishmen who ever looked with eyes of intelligent information upon that great tract of territory, leafshaped, and labelled India on the maps, knew that the English possessions therein were few and paltry. Three quite distinct sections called presidencies, each independent of the two others, and all governed by a supreme authority whose offices were in Leadenhall Street in London, represented the meagre nucleus of what was yet to be the vast Anglo-Indian Empire. The first of these three presidencies was the Bombay

VOL. II.

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