From The National Review. active, was less exclusively barbaric, athletic, and frivolous than now; though, IF you had wished to reconcile a red indeed, a few members of it may be Republican to the existence of a hereditary credited with a certain interest in such nobility, you could not have done better political tidings as the daily newspaper than introduce him to Lord Albemarle. may supply. Young Keppel's master at He was one of the most charming ex- Westminster, however, had recommended amples of a gentleman of the old school his father to renounce the project of makit has been my good fortune to meet-"a ing him a lawyer, and advised the choice good old English gentleman, all of the of a more active profession. This was ancient time." In person he was slight, after sundry floggings for neglect of and of medium height, with fine features, lessons, from which the intercession of blue eyes, and a winning smile. His his playmate, Princess Charlotte, had manners were dignified, unaffected, and quite failed to save him, and after the courteous, without the smallest approach episode which caused his removal from to stiffness, pomposity, or self-assertion. the school, it having been discovered that His politeness was that of a good heart, the boy was in the habit of climbing over though the outward guise of it may have a wall and down a lamp-post or rope owed something to inherited high-breed-ladder in order to go to the play at night, ing, and native charm; with him it was leaving a dummy in bed to represent him. no mere veneer of politeness assumed by After this his family made him a soldier. some Chesterfield or Horace Walpole, so But in later life he combined a taste for superficial that it easily turns to vulgar reading in many different literatures with insolence in the presence of those counted the usual pursuits of an English couninferior, and on very slight provocation. try gentleman, and indeed became quite Scratch the gentleman, and you too often an accomplished linguist, with marked find the cad. But Lord Albemarle was a delight in, and aptitude for, learning man also of scrupulous honor and integ. languages. Although he never made rity; his was a very chivalrous nature- pretensions to accurate scholarship, phias all would understand clearly, if it were lology was a favorite study. In English, proper for me to tell a characteristic anec- the poets he cared for were Shakespeare dote relating to his life at court. He was and Byron. He read Italian, which he tenderly considerate of the feelings of learned when quartered in the Ionian others; and though in early manhood he Islands as a youth, German (he was parhad been proud and impetuous, displaying ticularly fond of Schiller), French, Persian some of that irritability of temper which | (he knew enough of it to enter into a long often accompanies a sensitive and very conversation with the shah when the affectionate heart, in later life this toned latter visited England), and Hindustani. itself down to a gentle serenity. He was Till nearly ninety, his eyesight remaining fastidious, and easily pleased, or ruffled, good, and his faculties unimpaired, he by the manner of others towards him; read books in most of those languages. witty and humorous too; in his best days he had been the prince of good fellows, and of boon companions, accustomed to "set the table in a roar" by his amusing stories, in which, I believe, there was never a spice of malice all bubbled over from a spring of innocent mirth within. In later manhood he combined culture and a certain love of literature rather remarkably with the tastes and pursuits of a man of action; thus recalling in some measure the Elizabethan age, Keppel accompanied William of Orange when our upper class, though quite as to this country in the year 1688, and was Lord Albemarle was born June 13, 1799, and died February 21, 1891; so that at the time of his death he was in his ninety-second year. He came of a distinguished Dutch noble family; and an interesting account of some historic incidents, in which his forefathers took part, especially of famous battles, is contained in the first volume of Lord Albemarle's "Fifty Years" - as also of their later exploits in England. Arnold Joost-Van created Earl of Albemarle for his services. | the forest, "Ah! he too must go!" Such (The title is derived from the town of was his feeling (as of personal attachment) Aumale in France, the same which gives one to the Bourbon Duke; and our own Monk of the Restoration had been Duke of Albemarle.) This gallant, talented, and handsome Keppel stood high in the favor of William. to all the ancient trees on the estate. He had been familiar with them from boyhood; under their roof of greenery he had played with brother and sister, and in manhood he affectionately regarded them at all seasons of the year. Yet hard and conscientiously as he toiled, even sacrificing through long periods cherished inclinations and projects to secure an end, which to him appeared worthy of all effort and I had not the privilege and pleasure of knowing the late lord till he was between eighty and ninety, when I met him at the house of my cousin, Mr. Ernest Noel, who had married his daughter, Lady renunciation, he was destined to suffer Augusta Keppel. He was then living deep disappointment, unforeseen circumwith them, either at his own house in stance baffling him at last; and QuidenPortman Square (where he died) or during ham was sold. But one is glad to know some months of the year at their country that eventually the fates relented; and residence, Lydhurst, near Hayward's much to the old man's satisfaction, the Heath, in Sussex. His memory when I estate was bought by Lord Egerton for his first met him, was still fresh as that of a daughter, who had married Lord Albeboy; and to hear him talk of past times marle's eldest grandson, the present Lord to hear him, for example, recount eagerly, Bury, so that the family place came again and with boyish freshness, his recollec- to the Keppels. For the rest, Lord tions of the battle of Waterloo- was a Albemarle in his Norfolk home was a most interesting experience. He seemed keen sportsman, a bold rider, and an exto remember the incidents of yesterday cellent landlord, cultivating very friendly and of middle age as well as he remem- relations with his tenantry, so that his bered those of youth, and such a con- memory is dearly cherished by them to tinuously illuminated memory is rare. this day. A farmer lately told his Nearly up to the last he took a keen inter-daughter he had never heard a single est in politics, although he ceased to take person speak an ill word about him; and an active part in them when, succeeding that is much to say. to the title, he devoted himself to the. duties of a country gentleman, and to the management of his estate in Norfolk. This had been left to him much encumbered by his father; so he devoted years of patient assiduity and self-denying exertion to clearing it as far as possible of debt, and handing it down unembarrassed to his successor. For though "a Whig of the sixth generation," as he used to say, indeed a convinced Liberal, he yet retained a kind of feudal feeling concerning old family properties, and the desirableness of their remaining in the hands of their original possessors. One of his daughter's earliest recollections of her father, is of his taking her through the beautiful woods of their old home, Quidenham, and marking for the axe one noble tree after another, now and again exclaiming, sometimes with tears in his eyes, as he paused before a venerable patriarch of When Lord Albemarle was an old man, living in Portman Square, it became a custom for his friends to visit him on the anniversary of Waterloo - among them the Prince of Wales, the Duke of Cambridge, Mr. Gladstone, and Robert Browning- he being one of the very few surviving officers who could remember that great day; one, moreover, who had gained the good-will and respect of all who knew him. This visit of friends to Lord Albemarle grew and grew till it assumed quite the proportions and appear. ance of a levée. His unassuming, gracious manner on these occasions, so gratifying to himself, will long be remembered. The account he has given in his autobiography of his Waterloo recollections is very graphic, although he did not begin to write that book till he was seventy. But his memory had remained, as I have already observed, wonderfully accurate. So What a vivid word-picture he has drawn in his autobiography! "We were now ordered to lie down. Our square, hardly large enough to hold us when standing upright, was too small for us in a recumbent position. Our men lay packed to gether like herrings in a barrel. Not finding a vacant spot, I seated myself on a drum. Behind me was the colonel's charger, which, with his head pressed against mine, was mumbling my epaulette, while I patted his cheek. Suddenly my drum capsized, and I was thrown prostrate, with the feeling of a blow on the right cheek. I put my hand to my head, thinking half my face was shot away; but the skin was not even abraded. A piece of shell had struck the horse on the nose exactly between my hand and my head, and killed him instantly. The blow I received was from the embossed crown on the horse's bit." clear was the account he gave in his old Lord Albemarle always thought, has been age of his memorable experience, that his given to the Guards for their part in the daughter and her husband, visiting the victory. He was often urged, among spot by themselves, were able at once to others by Lord Wolseley, to write down recognize the exact locality on the hillside his views on these matters, but with his where he had described himself as sleep- characteristic kindliness he forebore, fearing soundly, wearied out with the longing to give pain to some of his old friends. march, on the eve of the battle, the floods Waterloo, however, he maintained was of rain having turned the slope where he essentially a soldiers', rather than a genlay into a very mountain torrent. eral's, victory; the steadiness and dogged determination of our troops had been then, as so often before and afterwards, beyond praise. Yet, of course, confidence in their general could not fail to count for much. Then, a circumstance greatly in our favor was Napoleon's delay in giving the signal for action. Lord Albemarle always wondered at this, as others have done, and was not satisfied with the emperor's own explanation, given at St. Helena, that the rain had prevented him bringing his guns into position. He found the solution of the mystery in the "Memoirs of the Count de Segúr," by which it appears that for several years Napoleon had been the victim of a painful malady, which, during its paroxysms, prostrated the energies alike of his mind and body. And, as regards Waterloo, his general of division and chief of the staff relate that while the battle was raging they saw him seated at a table placed on the field, his head, overcome by sleep, sinking down upon the map before his heavy eyes. General Gudin, who had been the emperor's page of honor, told Lord Bury (the present Lord Albemarle) that, whereas Napoleon had ordered his horses to be ready at seven in the morning, it was nearly noon before he descended the ladder that led to the sleeping-room and rode away. Before this the grand ecuyer had come down to the assembled staff, and told them that the emperor was in his room, and seated in a pondering attitude, which forbade question or interruption. This is curious when one remembers how some portion of those later disasters to the French army that culminated in Sedan may also fairly be attributed to the painful illness from which the third Napoleon suffered. But Gudin told Lord Bury a pretty anecdote about Napoleon, the substance of which, in the midst of so much Napoleonic disillusion wrought by In General Colville's order it was recorded that "the very young battalion of the 14th "— Lord Albemarle's, in which almost all the officers and men were mere boys; so much so that had not their colonel protested, they would have been sent to garrison Antwerp, and missed the battle "displayed a gallantry and steadiness becoming veteran troops." In his memoirs Lord Albemarle then tells us of the march on Paris, which he entered barefooted and in rags; as also of his adventures by the way. But he does not tell us there his opinion of the strategy of Wellington at Waterloo, which, though fully admitting that the duke was a great general, he considered very far from admirable. There may, therefore, have been a good deal, after all, in Napoleon's assertion that, by all the rules of war, Waterloo was won by him. Too much credit, moreover, Lanfrey and other writers, may well be placed to his credit-along with that other incident of his life at St. Helena when he said to the governor's wife, irate because one carrying a heavy load did not make way for them while walking, "Madame, respect the burden!". Gudin was helping him to mount, and did it awkwardly. "Petit imbécile," exclaimed the emperor, "va-t-en à tous les diables!" and rode off, leaving the unlucky page, overwhelmed with confusion, to mount and ride sadly in the rear. But they had rid den only a few hundred yards when Gudin saw the staff open right and left, and the emperor came riding back. "Mon enfant," said he, putting his hand kindly on the lad's shoulder, "quand vous aidez un homme de ma taille à monter, il faut le faire doucement!" The recollection of his kindness at such a moment in thinking of a boy's feelings brought tears into the old general's eyes as he told the story. As to Sir Hudson Lowe's alleged ill-treatment of his illustrious prisoner, Lord Albemarle said he believed that, though the extent of it may have been exaggerated, there was truth in the charges made; for in the Ionian Islands he heard officers who had served under Lowe speak of him as a man of churlish manners and an irritable, overbearing temper, while he added that Cruikshank's sketch of Ralph Nickleby in Dickens's novel forcibly recalled Sir Hudson to his mind-the large head and small body, the beetle brow, the shaggy, projecting eyebrows, the forbidding scowl on the countenance. It appears that the troops had a very cold reception on their return from Belgium. The victors of Waterloo were not greeted with cheers, as were the soldiers who landed from the Crimea in our own day. "If we had been convicts," says Lord Albemarle, "disembarking from a hulk, we could hardly have met with less consideration. 'It's us as pays them chaps,' was the remark of a country bumpkin as our men came ashore on a bitter winter's day. The only persons who took any notice of us were the custom house officers; and they kept us for hours under arms in the cold, while they subjected us to a rigid search." In the evening the heroes were ordered to Dover Castle cold, dark, and dungeon-like. There was hardly any food to be had. On this bitter winter's night, the first of their return from campaigning, our Waterloo heroes lay on a bed of straw. Shortly afterwards George Keppel's regiment was directed to embark for Ireland, and they had already sent their baggage on board the Sea Horse transport when an order suddenly arrived for their disembarkation and the disbandment of the battalion. But the 59th sailed in the same vessel, and it was wrecked off Kinsale, three hundred and sixty-five of the passengers being drowned. Two other transports were lost at the same time; and there was then no Plimsoll to ask in Parliament how it was these rotten vessels, chartered by the gov ernment, had gone to the bottom, with six hundred warriors, just returned from saving their country in a hard fight, as illus. trious and as momentous in consequence as Thermopylæ. Next to what Lord Albemarle had to tell about Waterloo and the Princess Charlotte, perhaps his impressions of Wellington were of the highest interest. In 1825 he was appointed aide-de-camp to the Marquis Wellesley, then lord lieutenant of Ireland; which brought him into frequent contact with persons who had been acquainted both with "the Wellesley of Mysore, and the Wellesley of Assaye." What he says of both brothers in his autobiography is worth quoting, and enables one to accept as authentic an otherwise rather surprising portrait of the young Wellington in the Guelph Exhibition of 1890 that of a heavy, and very ordinary-looking young officer with a rubicund face, showing little promise in it, and offering so marked a contrast to a portrait of the young Napoleon, which hung near, pale, thoughtful, clear-cut, determined, instinct with genius. If from seeing the two pictures only a man had been obliged to choose a leader, he would surely have preferred to take service under the latter. But in later years, of course, the countenance of the Iron Duke became very striking. "The elder brother, as is well known, after carrying away all the honors of school and university, entered Parliament at an early age, and soon established a character for himself as orator and statesman. The abilities of Arthur, the younger brother, were of much slower development. The late Earl of Leitrim, who was with him at a small private school in the town of Portarlington, used to speak of him to me as a singularly dull, backward boy. Gleig, late chaplain-general, in his interesting life of the great captain, says that his mother, believing him to be the dunce of the family, not only treated him with indifference, but in some degree neglected his education. At Eton, his intellect was rated at a very low standard; his idleness in school hours not being redeemed in the eyes of his fellows by any proficiency in the playground. He was a 'dab' at no game, could neither handle a bat nor oar. As soon as he passed into the remove, it was determined to place him in the 'fool's profession,' as the army in those days was irreverently called. At the Military College at Angers he seemed to have a little more aptitude for studying the art of war than he had shown for the Humanities; but he was still a shy, awkward lad. It is a matter of notoriety that he was refused a collectorship of customs on the ground of incompetency for the duties; and I have reason to believe that there is now extant a letter from Lord Mornington (afterwards Lord Wellesley) to Lord Camden, declining a commission for his brother Arthur in the army, on the same grounds. When he became aide-de-camp to Lord Westmoreland, the lord lieuten ant of Ireland, his acquaintance with the usages of society was as limited as could well be possessed by any lad who had passed through the ordeal of a public school. Moore, the poet, who visited Dublin shortly before me, and who lived in much the same society as myself, alludes in his journal to the character for frivolity which young Wellesley had ac quired while a member of the viceregal staff. An old lady, one of his contemporaries, told me that when any of the Dublin belles received an invitation to a picnic they stipulated as a condition of its acceptance that that mischievous boy, Arthur Wellesley, should not be of the party.' It was the fashion of the period for gentlemen to wear, instead of a neckcloth, a piece of rich lace, which was passed through a loop in the shirt collar. To twitch the lace out of its loop was a favorite pastime of the inchoate Iron Duke.' The disastrous campaign of the Duke of York appears to have had a sobering effect upon his character. From that time forth he put away childish things, and betook himself in good earnest to the active duties of his profession. command, on the other hand, the instruction which that governor-general imparted to his younger brother proved of infinite service to him in his career. Two military qualities for which the Duke of Wellington became afterwards so distinguished Lord Wellesley possessed in an eminent degree-the faculty of arranging the transport, and that of the victualling of troops. There is one enterprise of Lord Wellesley's to which his biographers have hardly done justice - I mean the expedition which he despatched from India to aid a European army in driving the French out of Egypt." Some ladies of the duke's acquaintance were at Brussels in 1841; and after much entreaty they obtained his reluctant consent to accompany them to the field of Waterloo, where he had not been since the day of the action. They dined with him on their return. During the evening he scarcely uttered a word, by his deepdrawn sighs showing how sad a picture was brought to his mind by re-visiting the scene of his great victory. We next hear of him in connection with the personal appeal for promotion made to him by Lord Albemarle, then the Hon. George Keppel, when the application of a friend in his behalf had failed. "Sir," said he, in his most chilling accents, "you will be pleased to send in a memorial of your claims for promotion, and you will receive an answer through the usual channel." In the memorial Keppel made the most of his "scanty services" (as he terms them), and threw in a book he had just published about his overland journey from India by Bussorah, and Bagdad, up the Tigris, through Babylonia, and Persia, to Russia, and so home. The route he took had rarely been travelled by Europeans. It had been an adventurous journey, showing spirit and enterprise in the traveller. Thus, the book was a great deal read at the time. I do not think, however, that the writer was so good a describer of places and adventures as he was graphic relater of bright, pointed anec. dotes, painter of characteristic portraits, shrewd and wise student of events. "It has often been asserted that if Lord Wellesley had not had the co-operation of so able an officer as his brother, The answer to young Keppel's applica his administration as governor-general tion came accordingly through the "usual would have been attended with less bril- channel," the Horse Guards, and it proved liant results; but I have been taught to to be the announcement of his promotion. believe that the benefits which the broth-The friend who had made the unsuccessful ers derived from each other were tolerably reciprocal. If, on the one hand, the victories of the Sepoy general over the Mahrattas reflected lustre on the governor-general who appointed him to the application thanked the duke, who, however, only answered, "You have nothing to thank me for it was the young fellow's book that got him his step." Lord Albemarle told Mrs. Beecher Stowe, when |