“It was well known for some years before Captain Buckle, driven homewards by the pressure of ill-health, resigned the important regimental office which he had held so creditably to himself and so advantageously to his corps, that he had long been collecting materials for a Memoir of the Bengal Artillery, and had been engaged, in brief intervals of leisure, in their arrangement and reproduction in the form of an elaborate work of military history. In the immediate circle of his own private friends it was known, moreover, how deep was the interest that he took in the progress of this work; how laboriously he pursued his investigations into the past history of his regiment; and what gratification it afforded him, in the midst of much that was necessarily dull and thankless, to exhume, out of a mass of long-buried records, or a heap of printed volumes with the damp of years upon them, some neglected historical fact, some forgotten statistics, or some illustrative anecdote which had never reached the ears of the present generation. It was emphatically a labour of love. It was the recreation, after hours of office drudgery, of the last few years of his sojourn in India,—of the last few years of his life. His health had been for some time perceptibly failing; and for many months before he finally determined to turn his back upon Dum-Dum, he had suffered under one of the most distressing and most fatal disorders of the country. Like many others, who have been buoyed up by such delusive hopes, he thought that he could weather it out a little longer. Intervals of seeming convalescence gave him new confidence and courage; and he was disinclined to anticipate the date at which he had originally designed to visit Great Britain. But the hot weather of 1846 tried him severely; his disorder was aggravated; and at last he reluctantly determined to strike his tent, and to seek renewed health beneath the milder sun of his native country. He embarked on board the steamer leaving Calcutta in September; and it was hoped that the sea-breeze would check the progress of his malady; but as the vessel steamed down the bay, he grew worse and worse, and on the 19th of that month, off the island of Ceylon, he rendered back his soul to his Maker. “It was, we believe, one of his last expressions of earthly solicitude, that the manuscript of the Memoir of the Bengal Artillery, on which he had been so long and anxiously employed, should be given over to his executor, an old brother officer and most esteemed friend, to be dealt with as might seem best to him. It was the known wish of the deceased, that the work should be published: indeed, the thought of laying before the world a fitting memoir of the distinguished regiment to which he was attached, had often, in hours of sickness and weariness, been a solace and a stimulant to him. It is an ambition worthy of any soldier, to be the historian of his corps.”[1]