icious--who regarded his
downfall as affording an opening in the direction of place and power.
Nothing could exceed the manliness of his bearing in the unequal
conflict in which every session he found himself engaged, unless it is
to be looked for in the inexhaustible amiability that characterized his
relations with the most implacable of his foes. It is, however, evident
that as his health began to fail from the long course of exhausting
labours which his office imposed upon him, he became more sensitive to
such provocations, and though he carefully concealed it from outward
view, an increasing irritability affected his whole nervous system.

The melancholy result, though unfortunately too easily explained,
excited reports as ingenious as malevolent, to account for its
suddenness, but like the injustice to his memory he has received from
rivals or successors, who sought to raise a reputation by advocating an
adverse policy, they had but a brief existence. As a statesman, as a
gentleman, as a man, the Marquis of Londonderry was the Bayard of
political chivalry, _sans peur et sans reproche_, and it reflects
no slight disgrace on this monument-rearing age, that neither in the
land of his nativity nor in that of his adoption has any memorial been
raised worthy of his fame.

The characters of few public men have been so unfairly treated; his
political opponents, numbering among them many writers of great ability
and influence, have allowed their judgments to be warped by party
animosity, and have descended to misrepresentation to an extent truly
pitiable. Thus his countrymen have received impressions of his policy
and administrative capacity during his long and arduous career, totally
at variance with the truth.[88] One writer of eminence has, however,
recently stepped forward to uphold his fame with emphatic earnestness,
and we make no apology for inserting here his estimate of this
distinguished and much-maligned statesman:

[88] His best advocate will be found in "The Castlereagh
Despatches," in twelve volumes, edited by his brother, the late
Marquis.

"His whole life was a continual struggle with the majority of his own
or foreign lands: he combated to subdue or to bless them. He began his
career by strenuous efforts to effect the Irish Union, and rescue his
native country from the incapable Legislature by which its energies had
so long been repressed. His mature strength was exerted in a long and