enfranchise Roman Catholics. It was characteristic of the
young man that, when once a career had been chosen for him, he devoted
himself to it with a cold, persistent zeal that accomplished as much
for him as the most passionate enthusiasm would have done for another.
He set before himself the principle that having undertaken a profession
he had better try to understand it, and understand it he did with a
determined thoroughness {343} that was rare indeed, if not unknown,
among the young officers of his day. We are told that soon after he
got his first commission he had one of the privates of the
Seventy-third weighed, first in his ordinary military clothes, and then
in heavy marching order, in order to ascertain what was expected of a
soldier on service. This kind of thoroughness, at once comprehensive
and minute, distinguished the conduct of his whole career. One of the
maxims that regulated his life was always to do the day's business in
the day. Long years later he and a friend were driving together along
a coaching road, and amusing themselves by guessing what kind of
country lay behind each hill they approached. When the friend
commented upon the surprising accuracy of his companion's guesses the
man who had been Arthur Wellesley answered: "Why, all my life I have
been trying to guess what lay on the other side of the hill;" a
stimulating piece of wisdom, to which he himself supplied the no less
stimulating comment: "All the business of war, and, indeed, all the
business of life, is to endeavor to find out what you don't know from
what you do." The youth who took soldiering in this iron spirit must
have been more than a puzzle to many of his contemporaries, whose
simple military creed it was that when an officer was not actually
fighting he might best employ his time in drinking and gambling. Young
Wellesley fell in love with Catherine Pakenham, Lord Longford's
daughter, and she with him; but the means of neither permitted marriage
then, and they did not marry until long years later. When the war with
France was forced upon a reluctant minister, Wellesley went to the
Continent under Lord Moira and saw some fighting. But his serious
career began when he was sent to India with the Thirty-third Regiment
in 1797.

It was in India that the young soldier was to learn those lessons in
the art of war which were afterwards to prove so priceless to England,
and to gain a fame which might well have seemed great eno