The death of Lord Metcalfe excited one universal feeling--that his country had lost a statesman whom she regarded with the highest admiration, and the warmest gratitude. The _Times_, and the other public journals, in expressing that feeling, could only give a general and abridged memoir of this great and good man. Every part of his public life--and that life commencing at an unusually early period--stamps him with the reputation of a statesman endowed in an eminent degree with all the qualities which would enable him to discharge the most arduous and responsible duties. Every part of it presents an example, and abounds in materials, from which public men may derive lessons of the most practical wisdom, and the soundest rules for their political conduct. His whole life should be portrayed by a faithful biographer, who had an intimate acquaintance with all the peculiar circumstances which constituted the critical, arduous, and responsible character of the trusts committed to him, and which called for the most active exercise of the great qualities which he possessed. That part of it which was passed in administering the government of Jamaica, is alone selected for comment in the following pages. It is a part, short indeed as to its space, but of sufficient duration to have justly entitled him, if he had distinguished himself by no other public service, to rank amongst the most eminent of those, who have regarded their high intellectual and moral endowments as bestowed for the purpose of enabling them to confer the greatest and most enduring benefits on their country, and who have actively and successfully devoted those qualities to that noble purpose. No just estimate of the nature, extent, and value of that service, and of those endowments, can be formed, without recalling the peculiar difficulties with which Lord Metcalfe had to contend, and which he so successfully surmounted, in administering the government of Jamaica.