He was a man of action as distinguished from a man of letters. He did not write a book nor contribute to periodical literature. Among his predecessors and successors in high office amidst the imperial affairs of India, some have been men either of letters or of literary culture; as for instance, Warren Hastings, Wellesley, Teignmouth, Mountstuart Elphinstone, Lytton. Though neither unlettered nor uncultured, he had no literary training nor did he possess that which would nowadays be called culture. Again, some of his predecessors and successors had acquired a considerable position either in political and parliamentary life at home or in imperial affairs abroad, as for example Amherst, Ellenborough, Hardinge, Dalhousie, Canning, Elgin, Mayo, Northbrook. But he derived his position solely from experience of India, knowledge of her people, and services rendered within her limits. The son of a poor and hardy veteran officer, he was essentially a self-made and a self-taught man. It is therefore interesting to learn how he came to make and teach himself thus grandly, and what was the process of the making and the teaching. For he had no wondrous gifts of intellect or imagination and few external graces. He never enjoyed the advantages of high education, of family connection, of contact with political life, of guidance from the lights of the age. He had to raise himself by his own up-heaving force, and to propel himself by his own motive power. Before him many great men have been singled out for greatness by every observer from their youth onwards. But he as a young man was never deemed remarkable, and almost up to his middle life he was not expected by his best friends to acquire greatness. Then the hour of difficulty came, and was followed by other hours harder and harder still; and he was found more and more to be the man for them all. From a good magistrate of a comparatively old district he became the administrator of a newly-annexed territory. Thence he rose to be Resident at a Native Court in time of trouble, and virtual governor of an arduous province. While thus occupied he was overtaken by the desperate tempest of the Mutinies, and he rode on the crest of every wave. Thence he was promoted in natural order to the supreme command in India. Thus he rose not by assumed antecedents nor by collateral advantages, but by proved merit in action. Doing lesser things very well he was tried in greater things, and he did them with equal efficiency. Tested in the furnace of fiery danger he showed the purest metal. Lastly, when elevated to the highest office he was still successful.