This person, hitherto unmentioned, was Richard Colley Wesley, or Wellesley, born in Ireland in 1760, eldest son of the first Earl of Mornington, whose younger son Arthur was born in 1769. Another brother, Henry, born in 1773, rose to high rank in diplomacy under the later title of Lord Cowley. In 1809 these three brothers were all actively employed in the public service; but the foremost of the three was the eldest, the Marquess Wellesley, whose reputation still overshadowed that of Arthur, then just called to the peerage Sept. 4, 1809, as Viscount Wellington of Talavera, in reward of his recent battle with Marshal Victor. An Irish family neither wealthy nor very distinguished, the Wellesleys owed their success to their abilities. The second Lord Mornington, Marquess Wellesley, sprang into fame as a favorite of William Pitt, who showed his power by pushing young men like Richard Wesley and George Canning into positions of immense responsibility. Perhaps the favor shown to the former may in part have had its source in some resemblance of character which caused Pitt to feel a reflection of himself, for Mornington was a scholar and an orator. His Latin verses were an ornament of Eton scholarship; his oratory was classic like his verses; and his manners suited the scholarship of his poetry and the Latinity of his orations. Lord Mountmorris, one of his antagonists in the Irish Parliament of 1783, ridiculed his rhetoric: “If formidable spectres portending the downfall of the Constitution were to appear in this House, I admit that the noble Lord is frightened with becoming dignity. The ancient Roscius or the modern Garrick could not stand with a better grace at the appearance of a spectre.” The orator whose air of dignity Lord Mountmorris thought so studied was then twenty-three years old, and apparently never changed his manner. In the British Parliament, thirteen years afterward, Sheridan described him as presenting the same figure that Mountmorris laughed at. “Exactly two years ago,” said Sheridan in 1796, “I remember to have seen the noble Lord with the same sonorous voice, the same placid countenance, in the same attitude, leaning gracefully upon the table, and giving an account from shreds and patches of Brissot that the French republic would last but a few months longer.” The aristocratic affectations, if they were affectations, of Lord Mornington were conspicuous; but no man could safely laugh at one of the Wellesleys. In 1797 Mr. Pitt suddenly sent this ornament of the peerage to India as governor-general, and the world learned that since the time of Clive no surer or bolder hand had guided the empire of England in the East.