A few weeks after Colonel Wellesley landed in Calcutta, his brilliant brother, the Earl of Mornington took his seat on the Viceregal throne. No happier combination could well have been possible. The elder brother was a scholar, a statesman, and a broad-minded man of affairs. The younger was, even then, the same man who won Vittoria, Talavera, and Waterloo. The two acted in perfect unison. There was none of that bungling timidity and incompetency in high places which confused the counsels and crippled the activity of Robert Clive and Warren Hastings, and the result was, as might have been expected, a succession of triumphs won, be it noted, not only by consummate generalship, but also by incessant vigilance and hard work resulting in perfect organisation. These triumphs culminated, as every one knows, in the crushing of the Mahratta power--the last serious obstacle to the universality of British rule in India--on the memorial field of Assaye. It was a magnificent combination of courage, calculation, and generalship. With a force of five thousand men and eighteen guns and with only two thousand European troops in his army, Wellesley defeated and utterly cut up an army of over forty thousand men and an artillery force of a hundred guns, and these, too, were the finest native fighting troops in the Peninsula. In less than three hours after the first assault the five thousand had conquered the forty thousand and captured a hundred and two guns and all the stores and ammunition, and it should always be remembered that Assaye was a very different business to Plassey. It was a battle, not a rout, a tragedy rather than a farce. Of the two thousand Europeans over four hundred were killed and wounded, and of the three thousand natives, who fought magnificently as they have ever since done in company with British troops, there were no less than sixteen hundred killed and wounded. As for Wellesley himself, he was wherever he was wanted, and that was usually in the thick of the fight. But there is another fact which gives us a glimpse of the great general who was the master spirit of the Peninsular Campaign. His men fought the battle of Assaye at the end of a twenty-four mile march, and no military force that is not commanded by a military genius could do that. There were other actions after Assaye, but it was there that the final blow was really struck. Holkar, it is true, had seemed to turn the tide for the time, but in the December of 1804 General Lake finally crumpled him up. In March, 1805, the Colonel of the 33rd, now Sir Arthur Wellesley, sailed from Madras in the frigate _Tridant_. We may pause to note that in the following July he wrote from the Island of St. Helena to tell his brother that his health, which had been very bad, was now restored.