seemed stirred by the popular odium, he never seemed to prize the
popular praise, which he received; it was not for praise that he had
worked, but for simple duty; and his experience of the fickleness of
public favour might make him something scornful of it. To the honours
which his Sovereign delighted to shower on him--honours perhaps never
before bestowed on a subject by a monarch--he _was_ sensitive. The
Queen to him was the noblest personification of the country whose
good had ever been, not only the first, but the only object of his
public action: and with this patriotic loyalty there mingled
something of a personal feeling, more akin to romance in its paternal
tenderness than seemed consistent with the granite-hewn strength and
sternness of his general character. A thorough soldier, with a
soldier's contempt for fine-spun diplomacy, he had been led into many
a blunder when acting as a chief of party and of State; but his
absolute single-minded honesty had more than redeemed such errors;
"integrity and uprightness had preserved him," and through him the
land and its rulers, amid difficulties where the finest statecraft
might have made shipwreck of all.

He had his human failings; yet the moral grandeur of his whole career
cast such faults into the shade, and justified entirely the universal
grief at his not untimely death. The Queen deplored him as "our
immortal hero"--a servant of the Crown "devoted, loyal, and faithful"
beyond all example; the nation endeavoured by a funeral of
unprecedented sumptuousness to show its sense of loss; the poet
laureate devoted to his memory a majestic Ode, hardly surpassed by
any in the language for its stately, mournful music, and finely
faithful in its characterisation of the dead hero--

"The man of long-enduring blood,