rself armed against his triumphs in the person of a great soldier.

[Sidenote: 1769-1852--Arthur Wellesley]

In the same year that saw the birth of Napoleon, and on a date as
little certain as that of the conqueror of Europe, a child was born to
Garret Wellesley, first Earl of Mornington, in Dublin. The child was a
son, the third that Anne Hill, Lord Dungannon's eldest daughter, had
borne to her music-loving husband; the child was christened Arthur.
Dates as various as May 1, May 6, and April 29, 1769, are given by
different authorities in that very year, and the place of birth is as
unsettled as the date, Dangan Castle in Meath, and Mornington House,
Merrion Street, {342} Dublin, being the alternatives offered. Very
little is known about the childhood and early youth of Arthur
Wellesley. His mother seems to have considered him stupid, and to have
disliked him for his stupidity. He went from school to school--first
at Chelsea, then at Eton, then at Brussels--without showing any special
gifts, except a taste for music, inherited no doubt from the father,
whose musical tastes had earned him the affection of George the Third.
An unamiable mother decided that he was "food for powder and nothing
more;" and when he was sixteen years old he was sent to the French
Academy at Angers, where he was able to learn all the engineering that
he wanted, at the very same time that the young Napoleon Bonaparte was
being trained for a soldier in the military college at Brienne. Of the
little that can be known of the first seventeen years of Arthur
Wellesley's life the clearest facts are that his childhood was not
happy, that he was believed by many to be a dull and backward boy, and
that he himself thought that if circumstances had not made him a
soldier he would probably have become distinguished in public life as a
financier.

[Sidenote--1786-97--Wellesley's military training]

Circumstance made him a soldier. Through the patronage of his eldest
brother, who became Earl of Mornington on his father's death, in 1781,
the young Arthur Wellesley entered the Army as an ensign in the
Seventy-third Foot. The same influence that had got him into the army
aided him to rise in it. When he was little more than of age he was
captain of the Eighteenth Light Dragoons, aide-de-camp to the
Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, and member of the Irish Parliament for his
brother's borough of Trim. In the Irish Parliament he supported Pitt's
measure to