e that I have borne it well. I
feel as if I had no other wish than to see my country again and die. Let
me assure you that banishment is no light matter. No person can judge of
it who has not experienced it. A complete revolution in all the habits
of life; an estrangement from almost every old friend and acquaintance;
fifteen thousand miles of ocean between the exile and everything that
he cares for; all this is, to me at least, very trying. There is no
temptation of wealth, or power, which would induce me to go through it
again. But many people do not feel as I do. Indeed, the servants of the
Company rarely have such a feeling; and it is natural that they should
not have it, for they are sent out while still schoolboys, and when they
know little of the world. The moment of emigration is to them also the
moment of emancipation; and the pleasures of liberty and affluence to a
great degree compensate them for the loss of their home. In a few years
they become orientalised, and, by the time that they are of my age, they
would generally prefer India, as a residence, to England. But it is a
very different matter when a man is transplanted at thirty-three."

Making, as always, the best of everything, he was quite ready to allow
that he might have been placed in a still less agreeable situation. In
the following extract from a letter to his friend, Mrs. Drummond, there
is much which will come home to those who are old enough to remember how
vastly the Dublin of 1837 differed, for the worse, from the Dublin of
1875, "It now seems likely that you may remain in Ireland for years.
I cannot conceive what has induced you to submit to such an exile.
I declare, for my own part, that, little as I love Calcutta, I would
rather stay here than be settled in the Phoenix Park. The last residence
which I would choose would be a place with all the plagues, and none of
the attractions, of a capital; a provincial city on fire with factions
political and religious, peopled by raving Orangemen and raving
Repealers, and distracted by a contest between Protestantism as
fanatical as that of Knot and Catholicism as fanatical as that of
Bonner. We have our share of the miseries of life in this country.
We are annually baked four months, boiled four more, and allowed the
remaining four to become cool if we can. At this moment, the sun is
blazing like a furnace. The earth, soaked with oceans of rain, is
steaming like a wet blanket. Vegetation is rotting