"Well! Walking Stewart is dead! He will no more be seen niched in Westminster Bridge, or keeping his terms as one of the benchers of St. James's Park, or painting the pavement with moving but uplifted feet. In vain we looked for him 'at the hour when he was wont to walk.' The niche in the bridge is empty of its amiable statue, and as he is gone from this spot he has gone from all, for he was ever all in all! Three persons seemed departed in him. In him there seems to have been a triple death!" We are tempted "to consecrate a passage" to him, as John Buncle expresses it, from a tiny pamphlet entitled "The Life and Adventures of the celebrated Walking Stewart, including his travels in the East Indies, Turkey, Germany, and America," and the author, "a relative," has contrived to out-do his subject _in getting over the ground_, for he manages to close his work at the end of the sixteenth page. John Stewart, or Walking Stewart, was born of two Scotch parents, in 1749, in London, and was in due time sent to Harrow, and thence to the Charter House, where he established himself as a dunce--no bad promise in a boy, we think. He left school and was sent to India, where his character and energies unfolded themselves, as his biographer tells us, for his mind was unshackled by education. He resolved to amass 3,000_l._, and then to return to England. No bad resolve. To attain this, he quitted the Company's Service and entered that of Hyder Ally. He now turned soldier, and became a general. Hyder's generals were easily made and unmade. Stewart behaved well and bravely, and paid his regiment without drawbacks, which made him popular. Becoming wounded somehow, and having no great faith in Hyder's surgeons, he begged leave to join the English for medical advice. Hyder gave a Polonius kind of admission, quietly determining to cut the traveller and his journey as short as possible, for his own sake and that of the invalid. Stewart sniffed the intention of Ally, and taking an early opportunity of cutting his company before they could cut him, he popped into a river, literally swam for his life, reached the bank, ran before his hunters like an antelope, and arrived safely at the European forts. He got in breathless, and lived. How he was cured of his wounds is thus told by Colonel Wilks in his _Sketches of the South of India_:-- "An English gentleman commanded one of the corps, and was most severely wounded after a desperate resistance; others in the same unhappy situation met with friends, or persons of the same caste, to procure for them the rude aid offered by Indian surgery; the Englishman was destitute of this poor advantage; his wounds were washed with simple warm water, by an attendant boy, three or four times-a-day; and, under this novel system of surgery, they recovered with a rapidity not exceeded under the best hospital treatment."