Page:The Marquess of Dalhousie.djvu/60

52 to Saint Andrew's Kirk, so weak that he had to be carried up the staircase to the gallery in a chair, and worshipped after the graver Scottish manner of his fathers.

The scene on the bank of the Húgli, when he embarked for England, was a memorable and pathetic one. 'The attempted cheers of the well-dressed crowd that saw him totter on his crutches towards the river side faded away into a silence more eloquent than the loudest hurrahs.'

'I am sure,' writes an eye-witness, 'that no one who was present on the Maidan [the great plain] of Calcutta on the evening when Lord Dalhousie embarked; who saw the whole population moved as one man with a deep sense of regret and admiration, and observed the emotion of the departing statesman under the manifestation of that feeling, would consider him as one incapable of either exciting, or feeling, sympathy. Many who witnessed that triumphant departure had a melancholy foreboding that the curtain was falling on the last act of a great public career; that neither plaudits in India, nor well-merited honours at home, could avail to prolong a life almost exhausted in the public service. Others, more sanguine, hoped that he would recover his wasted strength, and enter on a new course of honour and success, as bright and