efficiency of the Services are of a different kind. I am afraid that there has grown up, in these latter days, a general dislike to Indian service, and that those who go out to the East are ever in a hurry to come home again. The "nepotism of the East India Company" had its uses. It was said to be a monstrous thing that the services of the East India Company were, to a great extent, hereditary services, and that whole families should be saddled upon India, generation after generation. We only discovered the good of this after we had lost it. That enthusiasm which is so often spoken of in these volumes as the essential element of success in India, was nourished greatly by these family traditions. The men who went out to India in those old days of the East India Company did not regard themselves merely as strangers and sojourners in the land. They looked to India as a Home, and to Indian service as a Career-words often repeated; but as their repetition is the best proof of their truth, I need not be ashamed of saying them again. It is in no small measure because I wish that others should go forth from our English homes on the same mission, and with the same aspirations, that I have written. these memoirs, and if I have induced even a few, contemplating these heroic examples, to endeavour to do likewise, I shall not have written in vain.

J. W. KAYE.

Norwood, May, 1867.

NOT ONCE OR TWICE IN OUR FAIR ISLAND-STORY

THE PATH OF DUTY WAS THE WAY TO GLORY:

HE THAT EVER FOLLOWING HER COMMANDS,

ON WITH TOIL OF HEART AND KNEES AND HANDS,

THROUGH THE LONG GORGE TO THE FAR LIGHT HAS WON

HIS PATH UPWARD AND PREVAILED,

SHALL FIND THE TOPPLING CRAGS OF DUTY SCALED,

ARE CLOSE UPON THE SHINING TABLE-LANDS

TO WHICH OUR God Himself is Moon and SUN.

Tennyson.

LIVES

OF

INDIAN OFFICERS.

LORD CORNWALLIS.

[BORN 1738.-DIED 1805.]

NoT of men of large estate, born to greatness, whom family 1738—1805. influence and political power elevated to high official position, without the toilsome and the patient ascent, has it been my purpose to write in these Memoirs, but of men who, by the unaided force of their own personal characters, made their way to the front, along the open road of a graduated public service. But there can be no fitter prologue to these illustrations of native worth and noble self-reliance than that which may be found in the life of the man who made the public service of India what it has been and is in this nineteenth century. By Lord Cornwallis, who was three times selected by the King's Government to fill the chief seat of the Indian Government, and who twice discharged its duties, the civil and military servants of the Company were raised from a band of adventurers, enriching themselves by obscure processes and doubtful gains, to a class of virtuous and zealous public functionaries, toiling ever for their country's good. There were, doubtless, brave and strong men before the coming of this Agamemnon; but official purity was almost unknown in those days, and rapidly to acquire wealth by dishonourable means was so uniformly the rule of the adventurer, that no one accounted it dishonour in others, or felt it to be dishonour in himself. Of the corruption, which then traversed the land, Lord Cornwallis sounded the death-knell. And from that time the great Com

1738-1805. pany of Merchants, which governed India, was served by a succession of soldiers and civilians unsurpassed in rectitude of life by any whose names are recorded in the great muster-roll of the world. Therefore, I say, there can be no fitter introduction to such a work as this than a brief account of the soldier-statesman who, by purifying the public service of India, has enabled the historian to write of men as good as they were great, and to illustrate their careers in detail with out any dishonest reserve or any painful admissions.

Family of
Cornwallis.

1

1

The family of Cornwallis is said to have been, as far as it can be traced backwards, originally of Irish stock; but its grandeur seems to have been derived, in the first instance, from the city of London. One Thomas Cornwallis settled himself in the great English capital, took successfully to trade, and in 1378 became one of the sheriffs of the City. Having amassed considerable wealth, he bought some broad lands in Suffolk, to which his son John, who represented the county in Parliament, added by the purchase of the estate of Brome. From that time the family rose steadily in importance, being always steadfast in their loyalty to the Throne. In 1599, William Cornwallis was knighted at Dublin for his services against the Irish rebels, and in 1627, Frederick Cornwallis, his son, was created a baronet by Charles the First. After the death of Sir William. Cornwallis, his widow married Sir Nathaniel Bacon, a half-brother of the philosopher, but only enjoyed a single year of this second stage of wedded life. The marriage, however, had one important result. Sir Nathaniel Bacon, who died in 1615, left the estate of Culford, near Bury, in Suffolk, to his widow, from whom it in due course descended to Sir Frederick Cornwallis, and became the principal seat of the family. Having thus become an important member of the landed aristocracy of the county, and being distinguished for his loyalty to the Stuarts, Sir Frederick Cornwallis, on the 20th of April, 1661, was created Baron Cornwallis of Eye. On the 30th of June, 1753, the fifth baron was raised to an earldom by the title of Earl Cornwallis and Viscount Brome.

He had married in 1722 a daughter of Lord Townshend;