Had Tylney-Long-Wellesley-Pole (for such was the polysyllabic name he bore after his marriage) been only a spendthrift and a gambler, his case might not have seemed remarkable.  But he showed himself in every way a heartless scoundrel as regarded his wife and his children, who had to seek legal protection against him.  About a year after the sale of her splendid home his wife died, and the event is thus spoken of in a leading journal of the time:  “The premature death of an amiable and accomplished lady born to large possessions, and against whom the voice of calumny never so much as breathed a slander, calls, we think, for a passing comment, as illustrating and furnishing, we trust, a lasting and useful lesson to the heartlessness of too many men of the present day.  With a fortune that made her a prize for princes, this amiable woman gave her hand and heart to the man of her choice, and with them all that unbounded wealth could bestow.  What her fate has been all the world knows:  what it ought to have been the world is equally well aware.  To her, riches have been worse than poverty; and her life seems to have been scarified and her heart broken through the very means that should have cherished and maintained her in the happiness and splendor which her fortune and disposition were alike qualified to produce.  Let her fate be a warning to all of her sex who, blessed with affluence, think the buzzing throng which surrounds them have hearts, when in fact they have none; and if there be such a feeling as remorse accessible in the quarter where it is most called for, let the world witness, by a future life of contrition, something like atonement for the past.”

So far, however, as the world could discover, the atonement never came.  Lord Mornington, as he became, actually found another woman to marry him:  he ill-used her, and having sunk into narrow circumstances, neglected to provide her with the barest necessaries, so that the applications of the countess of Mornington to the London police magistrates for assistance became of frequent occurrence.  It may seem strange that the Wellesley family should not have stepped in to prevent such a scandal.  Probably they thought that the woman who in the teeth of his evil reputation had chosen to marry him should take the consequences.  He died in 1857.  His son, whose life his father’s conduct had sadly embittered, did not long survive him, and bequeathed the remnant of his estates, including Draycot, a large mansion (which had been strictly entailed) in Wiltshire, to his cousin, Lord Cowley, then ambassador at Paris.  His title passed to the duke of Wellington.

THE FATE OF DANGAN CASTLE.

Lord Cowley, on being created an earl, selected for his second title that of Viscount Dangan, thus perpetuating the memory of the old seat of the Wellesleys in Ireland.  It is a somewhat remarkable circumstance that although no family in the United Kingdom has within the last century acquired such fame and honors as the Wellesleys, they have long since ceased to own a rood of ground in the country whence they derived the affluence and rank which were to the famous sons of Garrett, earl of Mornington, the first stepping-stones to fame.