In July 1885, the two brothers had taken the last of many happy journeys together, proceeding to Cornwall and the Scilly Isles.  A few months later, on 13th January 1886, the end came suddenly to the elder, from the effects of an accident at his own door.[71]

It may be doubted if Yule ever really got over the shock of this loss, though he went on with his work as usual, and served that year as a Royal Commissioner on the occasion of the Indian and Colonial Exhibition of 1886.

From 1878, when an accidental chill laid the foundations of an exhausting, though happily quite painless, malady, Yule’s strength had gradually failed, although for several years longer his general health and energies still appeared unimpaired to a casual observer.  The condition of public affairs also, in some degree, affected his health injuriously.  The general trend of political events from 1880 to 1886 caused him deep anxiety and distress, and his righteous wrath at what he considered the betrayal of his country’s honour in the cases of Frere, of Gordon, and of Ireland, found strong, and, in a noble sense, passionate expression in both prose and verse.  He was never in any sense a party man, but he often called himself “one of Mr. Gladstone’s converts,” i.e. one whom Gladstonian methods had compelled to break with liberal tradition and prepossessions.

Nothing better expresses Yule’s feeling in the period referred to than the following letter, written in reference to the R. E. Gordon Memorial,[72] but of much wider application:  “Will you allow me an inch or two of space to say to my brother officers, ’Have nothing to do with the proposed Gordon Memorial.’

“That glorious memory is in no danger of perishing and needs no memorial.  Sackcloth and silence are what it suggests to those who have guided the action of England; and Englishmen must bear the responsibility for that action and share its shame.  It is too early for atoning memorials; nor is it possible for those who take part in them to dissociate themselves from a repulsive hypocrisy.

“Let every one who would fain bestow something in honour of the great victim, do, in silence, some act of help to our soldiers or their families, or to others who are poor and suffering.

“In later days our survivors or successors may look back with softened sorrow and pride to the part which men of our corps have played in these passing events, and Charles Gordon far in the front of all; and then they may set up our little tablets, or what not—­not to preserve the memory of our heroes, but to maintain the integrity of our own record of the illustrious dead.”

Happily Yule lived to see the beginning of better times for his country.  One of the first indications of that national awakening was the right spirit in which the public, for the most part, received Lord Wolseley’s stirring appeal at the close of 1888, and Yule was so much struck by the parallelism between Lord Wolseley’s warning and some words of his own contained in the pseudo-Polo fragment (see above, end of Preface), that he sent Lord Wolseley the very last copy of the 1875 edition of Marco Polo, with a vigorous expression of his sentiments.