texture of his mind was light and airy. He was
inordinately vain and self-conscious; and, as has been seen, he was
devoid of political knowledge and experience. The whole course of his
previous life had been of a character to render him unfit for such
greatness as was now thrust upon him. A considerable part of it had been
spent in travel and adventure, and very little of it in study. He had
left school at an early age, since which time he had encountered
innumerable moving accidents by flood and field in various parts of the
world. He had received a certain amount of training at the Military
Academy at Woolwich, and had obtained a commission in the Royal
Engineers in his nineteenth year. He had seen some active service in
Spain towards the close of the Peninsular War; had been present at
Quatre Bras and Waterloo, and had fought at Fleurus under the Prussian
General Ziethan, where he had had his horse shot under him. After the
restoration of peace he had for some time been engaged in making a
trigonometrical survey of the island of Lampedoza, in the Mediterranean.
Thence he had embarked in a Greek vessel for Tripoli; had been nearly
wrecked through the skipper's intemperance, and had finally been put
ashore at Malta. He had also been Byron-smitten, and had followed in the
wake of the author of "Childe Harold" to the Levant; had contemplated
"the Niobe of nations" among the ruins of Rome; had witnessed the dance
of the dervishes amid the fallen temples of Athens; and had "felt his
patriotism gain force upon the plain of Marathon."[202] He had twice
visited South America as the agent of a company formed for the working
of certain gold and silver mines, and known as the Rio de la Plata
Mining Association. During one of these expeditions he had ridden on
horseback from the port of Buenos Aires across the pampas to the silver
mines of Upsallata, near the foot of the Andes, whence, without any
companion whatever, he had galloped back to Buenos Aires--a distance of
nearly a thousand miles--in the brief space of eight days. Then he had
retraced his course across the pampas, and, collecting a party of miners
at Mendoza, had conducted them over the Andes to Santiago, the capital
of Chili. After "prospecting" the country in various directions, he had
ridden back across the Andes and the pampas to Buenos Aires, having
traversed six thousand miles on horseback in an inconceivably short
time. His "Rough Notes" contains a graphic accou