Page:The Earl of Auckland.djvu/221

Rh reaction of public feeling caused by the Kábul catastrophe, for which he was only in part to blame. Among his many friends was Lord Metcalfe, who returned from Canada in the last days of 1845, dying of the cancer which killed him in the following September. On the 12th of January, 1846, Lord Auckland took the chair at a meeting held in the Oriental Club by a number of eminent Anglo-Indiana, eager to sign the address of admiring sympathy which the chairman duly presented to their common friend in his own room .'

When Lord John Russell came into office during the same year, Lord Auckland took his seat in the Cabinet as First Lord of the Admiralty. There 'his conduct of affairs,' says Greville, 'his diligence, his urbanity, his fairness and impartiality, have been the theme of loud and general praise.' He lived to see the beginning of the Second Sikh War which turned the Punjab into a British-Indian province, and brought our north-western frontier to the mouth of the Kháibar Pass. In the last days of 1848 he went down to The Grange, Lord Ashburton's seat in Hampshire. At that time he appears to have been in perfect health. On the 30th of December he went out shooting with a party of friends, and was struck down with a fit of apoplexy on his way home. On the morning of New Year's Day, 1849, he breathed his last. He was buried five days later in the family vault at Beckenham; 'leaving behind him' — says Greville —