No former governor-general of India entered on his office--at all times the most arduous under the British crown--under such unfavourable auspices, and with such a complicated accumulation of difficulties to combat, as Lord Ellenborough; few, if any, of his predecessors have had their actions, their motives, and even their words, exposed to such an unsparing measure of malicious animadversion and wilful misconstruction; yet none have passed so triumphantly through the ordeal of experience. Many of his measures may now be judged of by their fruits; and those of the Calcutta press who were loudest in their cavils, compelled to admit the success which has attended them, are reduced to aim their censures at the alleged magniloquence of the governor-general's proclamations; which, it should always be remembered in England, are addressed to a population accustomed to consider the bombast of a Persian secretary as the _ne plus ultra_ of human composition, and which are not, therefore, to be judged by the European standard of taste. Much of the hostility directed against Lord Ellenborough, is, moreover, owing to his resolute emancipation of himself from the bureaucracy of secretaries and members of council, who had been accustomed to exercise control as "viceroys over" his predecessors, and who were dismayed at encountering a man whose previously acquired knowledge of the country which he came to govern, enabled him to dispense with the assistance and dictation of this red-tape camarilla. Loud were the complaints of these gentry at what they called the despotism of the new governor-general, on finding themselves excluded from that participation in state secrets in which they had long reveled, in a country where so much advantage may be derived from knowing beforehand what is coming at headquarters. But much of the success of Lord Ellenborough's government may be attributed to the secrecy with which his measures were thus conceived, and the promptitude with which his personal activity and decision enabled him to carry them into effect--success of which the merit is thus due to himself alone, and to the liberty of action which he obtained by shaking off at once the etiquettes which had hitherto trammeled the Indian government. In July 1842 we ventured to pronounce, that "on the course of Lord Ellenborough's government will mainly depend the question of the future stability, or gradual decline, of our Anglo-Indian empire; and if, at the conclusion of his viceroyalty, he has only so far succeeded as to restore our foreign and domestic relations to the same state in which they stood ten years since, he will merit to be handed down to posterity by the side of Clive and Hastings." The task has been nobly undertaken and gallantly carried through; and though time alone can show how far the present improved aspect of Indian affairs may be destined to permanency, Lord Ellenborough is at least justly entitled to the merit