From this time forward the story of Lord Elgin’s life is no longer a record of stirring incidents, of difficulties triumphantly overcome, or novel and entangled situations successfully mastered.  The career indeed is still arduous, and the toil unremitting, but the course is well-defined.  Compared with the varied conflicts and anxieties of the preceding period, there is something of the repose of declining day, after the heat and dust of a brilliant noon; something even, young as he was in years, of the gloom of approaching night.  It seems almost as if a shadow, cast by the coming end, rested upon his path.

[Sidenote:  Vice-royalty of India.]

He had not been more than a month at home when the Vice-royalty of India, about to be vacated by Lord Canning, was offered to him, in the Queen’s name, by Lord Palmerston.  The splendid offer of the most magnificent Governorship in the world was accepted, but not without something of a vague presentiment that he should never return from it.  This feeling was expressed with his usual frankness and simplicity, when in the course of an address delivered at Dunfermline, some months before his departure, after referring to former partings, uniformly followed by happy meetings, he said:—­

[Sidenote:  Forebodings.]

But, Gentlemen, I cannot conceal from myself, nor from you, the fact that the parting which is now about to take place is a far more serious matter than any of those which have preceded it; and that the vast amount of labour devolving upon the Governor-General of India, the insalubrity of the climate, and the advance of years, all tend to render the prospect of our again meeting more remote and uncertain.

Independently of any such forebodings, there were sorrows on which it is hardly necessary to dwell, but which were felt keenly by one so devoted to ’that peaceful home-life towards which he was always aspiring;’[1] the pain of tearing himself again from the children now growing up to need in an especial manner a father’s presence, and of leaving the mother of these children, for a time at least, to contend alone with cares and anxieties from which it would have been his greatest happiness to shield and protect her.  Something, too, there may have been of the depression which breathes in the poet’s complaint, ’the roll of mighty poets is made up’—­a feeling that the work of pacifying and settling India had been so thoroughly accomplished by Lord Dalhousie and Lord Canning, that the field no longer contained any laurels to be reaped by their successor.  ‘I succeed,’ he used to say, ’to a great man and a great war, with a humble task to be humbly discharged.’

[Sidenote:  Visit to Osborne.] [Sidenote:  Sails for India.]