anxious upon the subject of promotion.

He was

already keenly interested in the details of his profession, and, young though he was, he took a serious view of his duties. Happy and hopeful as usual-" le plus gai" in his regiment, as he tells his mother, falling naturally into French after his long residence abroadhe had set himself to become a good soldier, and expected to succeed.

"I am very busy," he wrote, "and have a great deal to do with my company, which, as the captain does not mind it much, is not a very good one, and I have taken it into my head that I can make it better. You will think me very conceited, but I depend greatly upon Captain Giles's instructions. I think by the time I have served a campaign or two with him I shall be a pretty good officer."

In the meantime he would have liked to have got a company of his own. He had already held for more than a month the position of lieutenant in his Majesty's army, was turned seventeen, and yet, so far as could be seen, there was no immediate prospect of his obtaining the promotion to which his brother, upon his behalf, ought to have had every right. Dilatory, however, as he considered the authorities. in this respect, he was not so unwilling as he might otherwise have been to condone their neglect, owing to the apprehension lest promotion should interfere with his chance-a far more serious matter-of being speedily dispatched to the seat of war. One consideration, and one only, damped the exhilaration with.

which he looked forward to the prospect of active service the inevitable separation from his mother. Love for her was the only force that even for a moment came into competition with his spirit of adventure, and the two conflicting sentiments find expression in his letters.

"How happy I should be to see her!" he wrote, yet how happy I shall be to sail!" And again, "Dear, dear mother," he wrote from Youghall in answer to a letter the tenor of which it is easy to conjecture, since to the Duchess the impending separation can have had no compensations, "I cannot express how much your letter affected me. The only thing that could put me into spirits was the report that the transports were come into Cove."

It was inevitable, however, that at seventeen and with a nature such as that of Lord Edward, the love of adventure should win the day. Even the delight of seeing his mother, he declared, would be enhanced by being preceded by an American campaign; and early in the year 1781 he exchanged into the 19th Regiment, then expecting shortly to be ordered abroad. Leaving England in March, he landed in the month of June at Charleston, to take his share, in strange contradiction to the latter part of his career, in the war which England was carrying on against the independence of her American colonies.

CHAPTER III

1781-1783

The American War-Opinions concerning it-Lord Edward
at Charleston-Active Service-Dangerous Escapade-
Wounded at Eutaw Springs-Tony-Early Popularity-
St. Lucia-Back in Ireland.

THE

'HE end of the last century was a time when opinion moved rapidly. In the year 1798 the Duke of Norfolk, in proposing Mr. Fox's health at a great dinner of the Whig Club, mentioned in connection with his name that of another great man, Washington. "That man," he said, "established the liberties of his countrymen. I leave it to you, gentlemen, to make the application."

It is true that, in consequence of this speech, together with a toast which followed it, variously reported as "Our Sovereign-the People," or "The People—our Sovereign," the Duke was dismissed from the Lord Lieutenancy of the West Riding of Yorkshire; but that such a speech should have been received with applause at an immense representative meeting is none the less a significant sign of the times.

In the very month that the Duke's speech was made, the cousin of Fox, Lord Edward FitzGerald,

lay dying of the wounds he had received in the cause of what he loyally believed to be the "liberties of his countrymen." Seventeen years earlier he had been wounded in another struggle, when fighting under the British flag in vindication of the rights of England over her colonies. At that later hour the comparison of the two objects for which his blood had been shed would seem to have been present with him ; and when a visitor, some military official of the Government with whom he had been acquainted in Charleston, reminded him of those old days, he replied-was it with a sense of a debt wiped out?-that it had been in a different cause that he had been wounded then; since at that time he had been fighting against liberty, now for it.

But whatever may have been the case in after-lifeand his was not a nature to be troubled by morbid remorse for a wrong ignorantly done-it is certain that no scruples as to the justice of the quarrel in which he was to be engaged were likely to disturb the conscience of the eighteen-year-old boy, or to interfere with his satisfaction in finding himself at last at the seat of war.

It was true that his cousin Charles James Fox was not only, with the rest of his party, bitterly opposed to the struggle, but that, with the irresponsibility of a statesman who considered himself at the time virtually and indefinitely excluded from all participation in practical politics, he was in the habit of using language which has been described as that of a passion

ate partisan of the insurgents.

"If America should

be at our feet," he wrote after some British victory, "which God forbid!" His uncle the Duke of Richmond, too, had expressed his opinion-thus indicating his view of the men by whom the war was carried on-that Parliament in its present temper would be prepared to establish a despotism in England itself; and neither in society nor in the House did the Whig party make any secret of the goodwill they bore to the cause of the revolted colonies, some of the more extreme among them going so far as to make the reverses suffered by the British forces matter of open rejoicing.

But to hold a theoretical opinion is one thing, to allow it to influence practical action quite another, and it is to be questioned whether the views entertained by his party and accepted by himself as to the injustice of the war would have had a more deterrent effect upon the average country gentleman in the choice of the army as a profession for one son than would have been exercised by the prevailing scepticism of the eighteenth century upon his intention of educating the other with a view to the family living. The one was a matter of theory, the other of practice, and it is astonishing to what an extent it is possible to keep the two in all honesty apart.

Lord Edward's temperament, too, was essentially that of a soldier; to obey without question or hesitation was a soldier's duty; and especially when