In campaign, Lord Howe adopted the tried expedients of forest warfare, associating with himself its most practised exponents; and on the morning of his death, in one of those petty skirmishes which have cut short the career of so many promising soldiers, he discussed the question of Ticonderoga and its approaches, lying on a bearskin beside the colonial ranger, John Stark, to whose energy, nineteen years later, was due the serious check that precipitated the ruin of Burgoyne’s expedition.  Endeared as he was to American soldiers by the ties of mutual labors and mutual perils gladly shared, and to all classes by genial bearing and social accomplishments, his untimely end was followed throughout the Northern colonies by a spontaneous outburst of sorrow, elicited not only by the anticipated failure of the enterprise that hung upon his life, but also by a sense of personal regret and loss.  Massachusetts perpetuated the memory of her grief by a tablet in Westminster Abbey, which hands down to our day “the affection her officers and soldiers bore to his command.”

Captain Richard Howe of the Royal Navy, afterwards Admiral and Earl, succeeded him in the Irish viscounty which had been bestowed upon their grandfather by William III.  Of a temperament colder, at least in external manifestation, than that of his brother, the new Lord Howe was distinguished by the same fairness of mind, and by an equanimity to which perturbation and impulsive injustice were alike unknown.  There seems to have been in his bearing something of that stern, impassive gravity that marked Washington, and imposed a constraint upon bystanders; but whatever apparent harshness there was in the face only concealed a genuine warmth of heart, which at times broke with an illumining smile through the mask that covered it, and was always ready to respond to the appeals of benevolence.  If, as an officer, he had a fault conspicuously characteristic, it was a reluctance to severity, a tendency to push indulgence to undue extremes, into which may perhaps have entered not merely leniency of disposition, but the weakness of loving popularity.  To be called by the seamen, as Howe was, the “sailor’s friend,” is in the experience of navies a suspicious encomium, involving more of flattery to a man’s foibles than of credit to his discretion and his judgment.  But at the time when the quarrel between Great Britain and her colonies was fast becoming imbittered, the same kindliness, coupled with a calm reasonableness of temper, ruled his feelings and guided his action.  Although by political creed a moderate Tory, he had none of the wrong-headedness of the party zealot; and the growing alienation between those whom he, like his brother, regarded as of one family, caused only distress and an earnest desire to avert coming evils.  Influenced by these sentiments, he sought the acquaintance of Franklin, then in London as a commissioner from the colonies; and the interviews between them, while