Page:The Earl of Mayo.djvu/78

70 a shady spot in a quiet little churchyard on his Kildare estates, and begged that, if he never returned, he might be brought home and laid there. '13th October,' says the brief entry in his Journal — 'Left Palmerstown amid tears and wailing, much leave-taking and great sorrow.'

On Wednesday, the 11th November, 1868, Lord Mayo looked for his last time on the Dover cliffs, and reached Paris the same night. The delicious repose of the voyage to India lay before him; his time was still his own, and he resolved to see everything on the way that could shed light on his new duties. Among other matters, the neglected state of the Indian Records had been pressed upon him at the India Office, and in a then recently published work. With the richest and most lifelike materials for making known the facts of their rule, the English in India still lie at the mercy of every European defamer. Their history — that great story of tenderness to pre-existing rights, and of an ever-growing sense of responsibility to the people — is told as a mere romance of military prowess and government by the sword. When Chief Secretary for Ireland, Lord Mayo had introduced and passed the Act on which the whole Irish Record Department subsists. To that end he had personally studied the method adopted in England, and deputed his friend, Sir Bernard Burke, to report on the French system.

His attention being now directed to the neglected state of the Indian Records, and the necessity for some plan for conserving them and rendering them