days should upon this principle have included Ovid's Art of Love' as well as Wheaton on International Law.' A smart repartee of Mr. Coutts is given thus:

'Messrs. Coutts were during many years bankers to George III., George IV., and almost all the Royal Family. The Duke of York, dining in company with Mr. Coutts, gave the health of the latter, as my banker for upwards of thirty years." "I beg your Royal Highness's pardon," said Mr. Coutts, "it is your Royal Highness who has done me the honour to keep my money for thirty years.'

The better version makes the Duke say, my banker, who has kept my money for thirty years; to which the rejoinder was,'I beg your Royal Highness's pardon, it is your Royal Highness who has kept my money all the time.'

Secretaries to the Treasury appear sometimes to have been as little scrupulous in their particular line as Lord Malmesbury was in his. An intimate friend of the Premier applied to Sir George Rose for some petty office for a constituent, but said a civil answer would suffice; upon which Rose instantly dashed off and handed him a letter in these words :

"MY DEAR SIR,-Immediately upon receiving your most pressing application I went to the Premier, and I vow I never saw a man so distressed as he was at having just previously promised the place for which you had made such urgent application. Believe me, &c., GEORGE ROSE."

In one or two instances Mr. Ross has been seduced into a hardly allowable digression, as in telling us, apropos of an allusion to Lord Carhampton :

'Lord Carhampton spent the latter years of his life at his beautiful residence, Painshill in Surrey. This is probably the only place in England where, within the memory of man, wine in considerable quantities has been made from grapes growing in an open vineyard. The Editor has tasted this wine, which was of really good quality, and of the colour of pale sherry.'

It is a long and a bold leap from Lord Cornwallis to the homemade wine of Painshill; but if we were to insist invariably on a strict, logical connection between the anecdotes of an annotator and his text, we should deprive some of the pleasantest books in the language of their principal attraction. The notes to Mr. Croker's edition of Boswell's Johnson' would lose incalculably by the curtailment of their discursiveness; and in Sir Walter Scott's miscellaneous writings, the reminiscences into which he wanders, often far away from the main thread of his argument or narrative, are their purple patches and their gems. We are, therefore, seldom disposed to quarrel B 2 for

for his digressions with an editor whose memory is stored with curious matter; and if Mr. Ross should be accused of drawing rather too liberally on Debrett and Burke, let us at the same time avow our gratitude to him for placing immediately within reach everything we can wish to know touching all the personages to whom we are introduced in these volumes. He has also connected and prefaced the principal epochs of Lord Cornwallis's public services by historical summaries, which enable us to track his Lordship's course and appreciate his views of passing events without the smallest trouble in research or reference. We shall imitate Mr. Ross's example in this respect, and give a brief biographical notice of the Marquis.

The pedigree of the Cornwallis family is easily carried back to the fourteenth century, and there are traces of its existence amongst the landed gentry at a much earlier date. The ninth possessor of their Suffolk estates, Sir Thomas, was made a Privy Councillor and Treasurer of the Household, as a reward for assisting to suppress Wyatt's insurrection in 1553. He had once been Treasurer of Calais, and was suspected of having betrayed his post. One of the lampoons of the period runs thus:

'Sir Thomas Cornwallis, what got ye for Calais ?
Brome Hall, Brome Hall, as large as a palace.'

His grandson was created a baronet in 1627, and raised to the peerage for his loyalty, by the title of Baron Cornwallis, in 1661. The fifth baron was made Earl Cornwallis and Viscount Brome, June 30th, 1753. His eldest son, the subject of these pages, was born December 31st, 1738, and was sent to Eton at an early age, which cannot be precisely ascertained. The most memorable incident in his Eton career was a blow in the eye, received whilst playing at hockey, which produced a slight but permanent obliquity of vision.* Sydney Smith's positive averment that the Archbishop of Canterbury knocked him down with a chessboard when they were at Westminster School together, may be open to a doubt; but there seems none whatever that the damage to the future Governor-General and LordLieutenant's eye was inflicted by an embryo prelate the Honourable Shute Barrington, afterwards Bishop of Durham, whom Mr. Ross rewards by a note.

On leaving Eton, Lord Brome entered the army as ensign in

*The injured eye is said to have contracted a perpetually-oscillating motion. It was one of Curran's favourite anecdotes, that, when Lord Cornwallis was about to leave Ireland, a Roman Catholic bishop, at the head of the clergy of his diocese, produced a general titter by beginning an address thus: 'Your Excellency has always kept a steady eye upon the interests of Ireland.'

the

the 1st Foot (now Grenadier) Guards. The date of his commission is December 8, 1756. So deficient was English military education then popularly esteemed, that young men of rank and fortune, who meant to make the army their profession, were wont to qualify themselves in some foreign academy, and then serve a campaign or two in any war that happened to be stirring. Lord Cornwallis having applied to the Duke of Cumberland, the Captain-General, for permission to Lord Brome to follow this course, received an answer which Mr. Ross has printed, he says, punctatim :—

'MY LORD CORNWALLIS

Dunkerran, July ye 1st 1757.

I had not time before to answer your letter concerning Lord Broome I have no doubt but the King will immediately permit him to go abroad which is if properly attended to very usefull to our young country men tho' I must do Ld. Broome the justice to say he has less of our home education than most young men if you will desire the. Secretary of Warr to get His Majesty's licence it will be done immediately.

I remain your very affectionate friend

WILLIAM'

The Prussian officer who, on the permission being obtained, accompanied Lord Brome to the Military Academy of Turin in the capacity of preceptor, was not, to judge from one of his letters, much more advanced in syntax and orthography than the Royal Duke. But he was a man of sense and observation, and the indifferent French in which his advice was conveyed did not detract from its soundness, as when he warns Lord Cornwallis 'qu'il seroit à souhetter que Millord fut placé la campagne Prochaine ailleurs qu'aupres de Millord Gremby, par ce que c'est une bonne maison ou l'on boit trop, et plus que dans toutte autre au seû et au veû de toutte L'armee et il est a craindre qu'on ne prenne un peu trop cette bonne Habitude.' This is an incidental justification of Junius, when he compares Lord Granby to a 'drunken landlord who deals out his promises as liberally as his liquor, and will suffer no man to leave him either sorrowful or sober.' Lord Brome was notwithstanding appointed aide-de-camp to Lord Granby a few months afterwards, and was present at the various actions, including Minden, in which his chief was engaged, but came to England on being promoted to a captaincy in the 85th Foot. On receiving the command, as Lieutenant-Colonel, of the 12th, he returned to Germany, and distinguished himself with his regiment on several occasions, especially in the action near Kirch Donkern, in which the French, under the Prince de Soubise and the Maréchal de Broglie, sustained a severe defeat. Subsequently to the cam

paign of 1762, his active services in the field were suspended for many years; but his attachment and attention to his profession never flagged, and his promotion proceeded at the rate that might have been anticipated from his merits and his rank. He was made aide-de-camp to the King in 1765, colonel of the 33rd regiment in 1766, major-general in Sept. 1775. During his absence in Germany he had become a member of the House of Commons, having been elected for the family borough of Rye, in January, 1760, directly after coming of age. He succeeded to the earldom June 23, 1762, and took his seat in the November of that year. Being constantly absent on regimental duties, although full colonel, he did not take an active part in politics. He usually voted with Lord Shelburne (the first Marquis of Lansdowne) and Lord Temple; and on questions of American taxation he steadily opposed the Court, which, we agree with Mr. Ross, it is difficult to reconcile with the fact of his being permitted to retain the office of Vice-Treasurer of Ireland, besides being made Constable of the Tower in 1770.

Lord Chatham compelled Lord Pitt to resign his commission rather than serve against our American brethren, as he long persevered in calling them. Lord Effingham (a lieutenantgeneral), and a few others of inferior grade, acted on the same principle. Lord Cornwallis, justly conceiving that 'military men had nothing to do in that capacity with the grounds or policy of the particular service on which they were ordered, manifested neither hesitation nor reluctance when appointed to the command of a division of the British force destined for the subjugation of the colonies, although family combined with public motives to render absence on such a duty more than ordinarily painful. Lady Cornwallis appears to have led a life of solitude and habitual depression whenever he was away. The bereavement, so frequently repeated and renewed, proved eventually too much for her spirits and strength. He embarked for America, with the local rank of Lieutenant-General, in February, 1776, but on hearing of her incurable despondency, came back in January, 1778. He set sail again on the 21st of the following April, when Lord Carlisle, who was going out as Commissioner, wrote to George Selwyn: 'Poor Lord Cornwallis is going to experience perhaps something like what I have felt, for he has brought with him his wife and children, and we embark to-morrow, if the wind serves. My heart bleeds for them.'

After this separation, Lady Cornwallis declared to her confidential attendant that she was dying of a broken heart, and Mr. Ross says that grief so preyed upon her health as to cause her death in February, 1779. Lord Cornwallis threw up his command

command on hearing of her danger, and arrived a few weeks before her death, which, when the first burst of sorrow was over, enabled him to devote his undivided energies to his command. It is subsequently to his third arrival at the seat of war, therefore, that his military movements may be taken as an unimpeachable test of his military capacity, and they gradually rise in interest and importance till they become the turning point of the struggle. This was still dubious when he landed at New York in August, 1780. It is plain from American authorities, particularly from the printed correspondence of Washington, that the resources of the United States were in an exhausted condition, that their commissariat was wretched, that their troops were ill clothed, ill fed, and ill paid, and that there was everywhere discernible a want of energy and a decay of the public spirit with which they started. On the other hand, mere inert resistance over so vast a field was in itself a formidable obstacle to the British commanders, whose forces were utterly inadequate to the operations in which they were engaged; and the arrival of a powerful French fleet at a critical moment did much to determine the wavering balance. We do not mean that it was any longer, if ever, practicable to subjugate the insurgent colonies, but the reservation of a nominal sovereignty, which would have saved the honour of the British arms, was still, and for some time afterwards, upon the cards.

Earl Stanhope, speaking of the Commander-in-Chief and the second in command, says, 'Of the two, Clinton was probably the abler, Cornwallis the more enterprising chief.' Assuming this estimate to be correct, they ought to have worked well together; but unluckily, with every outward semblance of deference and consideration for each other, they never cordially agreed on any combined plan of operations. Lord Cornwallis was probably right in proposing to run some risk, in the hope of striking a decisive blow which would bring the enemy to terms; but Sir Henry. Clinton may be excused if he was unwilling to part with too large a portion of his force for a distant expedition. Where he erred was in not making up his mind one way or the other, either to restrain Lord Cornwallis's ardour, or to give him a more effective and timely support. The result is well known. His Lordship's first campaign, comprising the autumn and winter months of 1786, was successful. He gained what the English Secretary of War describes as 'the very glorious and complete victory' over the rebels under General Gates at Camden, and he was commended for the highly judicious steps he took in improving it. The campaign of 1781 began inauspiciously through the impetuosity of Colonel Tarleton, a cavalry officer of more dash and

gallantry