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tunity he could with honour to retire from his position in Ireland, to come into Parliament, and to apply himself to what is considered the higher, though it certainly is not a more useful or honourable line of political life. I did so for the reasons I have given, and also because I was confident that in this, as in everything he had undertaken, his abilities and high character would soon place him in the most eminent position. He promised me he would do so; but I was obliged to agree with him, that unless some change took place in the Irish Government, he could not with honour to himself resign his office. My loss is great indeed, in the loss of such a friend; the loss of the country is great in the loss of such a public man; but yours, my dear madam, is so much beyond all, that I can find no words to express it. It is not the loss of a mother merely, it is not even the loss of a mother in losing such a son; but my intimacy with him led me to know the peculiar attachment between you and him. I know he was to you everything. Had he fallen in his military profession, you would have had the consolation of feeling, in common with other mothers who have had to lament their sons who have died fighting for their country, that he died doing his duty; but you would not have had the consolation of knowing that he had left behind him works which will be beneficial to his fellow-creatures for ages, perhaps, to come. He has died for his country, and it is his extraofficial labours which have been the cause of his death; and you must reflect with satisfaction that, whenever Ireland does attain to the state of wealth and prosperity she will ultimately come to, it will be owing to Drummond's Report on the Railway System; that if disturbance is checked in that country, it will be owing to the able arrangements he has made with respect to the con

stabulary force. It was under the extra labour imposed on him by these two great works that his health broke down. He died, therefore, for his country, and he died doing her as great good as any one man ever effected."*

Mr Drummond was buried at the cemetery of Mount Jerome, in Harold's Cross, on Tuesday morning, 21st April 1840. It was a private, and yet it partook of the nature of a public funeral. It was attended by the Lord Lieutenant and the Chief Secretary, the Duke of Leinster, and the leading members of the Irish nobility, the Archbishop of Dublin, the City Members, the Mayor, and other civic dignitaries, many of the judges and leaders of the bar,-by almost every person of importance in the state or city. The pall was borne by the Lord Chancellor, the Master of the Rolls, Judges Perrin and Ball, Baron Richards, and Major-General Sir John F. Burgoyne. For the rest, the whole populace joined in the mournful procession. "He had died for Ireland,” says Larcom; "the scientific soldier had become the philosophic statesman, and his funeral beseemed the latter. There was no military display, the pomp of martial woe was merged in the demonstration of popular regret. Appalled by the sudden blow, a general grief prevailed, and the city poured its thousands through the streets in one prolonged procession,-the private friend, the public colleague, and the high and noble of the land." The honours paid to his remains proved the price set upon his services, not by a sect or a party, but by the nation.

* Extract from letter, Lord Spencer to Mr Drummond's mother, dated April 26, 1840. The allusion to the Railway Report shows that Drummond's hopes of a permanent improvement of Irish society from the railway project were shared by others.

In 1843 a statue by Hogan was erected to his memory by public subscription, in the great hall of the building called the Royal Exchange, now the City Hall of the Dublin municipal corporation. Miss Martineau, who had not met Drummond after 1835, thus speaks of it:" I went to America and he went to Ireland, and we met no more. When I went to Ireland in 1852, one of my first objects in Dublin was to see the statue of my poor old friend in the Royal Exchange. It was a far more pathetic spectacle than I had imagined. It was the same face,-but I should hardly have known it without looking for it;-so worn, almost haggard, in comparison with what it had been! It justified his closing words, I die for Ireland.'"*

In 1865 his sister founded in the University of Edinburgh a Scholarship in Mathematics and Natural Philosophy, endowed with a sum of L.2500, to connect her brother's name for ever in his own place of education with studies in which he obtained, apart from his political career, substantial distinction among scientific

men.

What manner of man Drummond was may be judged from the feelings with which he inspired his friends. We have seen what some of them felt; there are others still living of whom it would not be too much to say that they actually worship his memory. They loved him as a man; they admired him for his talents; and they venerated him for his self-devotion. One to whom it should naturally have fallen to record the chief events in his life thus states his inability even now to write about him :-"I hardly feel myself an impartial

* Letter to Mr Robert Cox, dated June 17, 1865.

66

witness. My feelings towards him were those of the warmest attachment and devotion. He was the best friend I ever knew. What I should or could write would appear extravagant, and yet fall short of the truth." After the lapse of seven and twenty years," writes another of his coadjutors, "the wound which I received by the death of Drummond-sudden and unexpected as the announcement of it was when I received it is as fresh at this hour as if these years had not rolled over me. I knew him well; I loved him as a brother would love him; and I revered him as one of the best and truest as well as of the ablest of men."

In closing this narrative, I am the more sensible of its imperfections when I regard it in the light of sentiments thus expressed. The facts of Drummond's life, however, are before the reader as fully and fairly as I could place them. All may not receive from them the same impressions from me they have commanded for him profound respect and genuine admiration.

He was

a Scotsman of the best type, and his country may well be proud of him. In the earlier portion of his life were exhibited chiefly those practical qualities and talents which, more frequently than enthusiasm, are the distinctions of our countrymen; their influence in helping him on in the world is as clear as to many may be uninteresting. It is when he ceases to be a mere man of ability,-it is when he shows in himself wells of righteous indignation at evils unredressed, and the capacity of self-immolation, if necessary, to remedy them, it is when he becomes a missionary and apostolic person,-that the real interest in his life begins.

it

What he could have done-in science or in politics-it was fated should never be fully exhibited—

"Had he but lived

Yet very vain and fruitless is the wish!

Death holds up in his hand the lamp by which
We note the prostrate strength, and guess what all
At strain could reach."

On the threshold of a scientific career he was diverted
to political pursuits; on the eve of entering the more
prominent walks of public life he was cut off. Yet, as
his name will always be remembered in connection with
geodetical science at least, so will it ever be respected
in connection with the Government of Ireland,-I
would
say, indeed, with the art of Government. There
will yet, for a time, be various opinions of his actings
in Ireland and of the Administration in which he
served. But there must even now be few who will
deny that he and his coadjutors in the Melbourne
Ministry, as well as in the Irish Government, were
honestly engaged, between 1835 and 1840, in a serious
effort to effect a permanent amelioration in the condi-
tion of the Irish-an effort which, unhappily, has not
been followed up. When an impartial public verdict
shall have become possible, through the settlement
of questions which still sustain the rancour of political
and religious hostility, it will be admitted that there
have been few finer exhibitions of the art of ruling
applied to most difficult circumstances, in most critical
times, than the Administration of Ireland afforded in
those years.
And the more minutely the history of
the time is investigated, the more clearly, I believe,
will it appear that Drummond was the master-mind in
that Administration.

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