He said: “I was wasting away daily, and latterly when at Madras, I found my strength failed which had before held out.” If his strength really had failed, it is quite probable that St. Helena would never have known its most distinguished resident. A short time after, Wellington returned to England--he was known just then as the “Sepoy General”--William Pitt remarked that he was at a loss which most to admire--his modesty or his talents, and he added that “he had never met with any military officer with whom it was so satisfactory to converse.” This was a saying both accurate and just, and it must be admitted that there is a very considerable difference between the dispatches which Nelson wrote and those which Wellington sent home after his greatest victories. It was during this brief stay at home that the one little romance of Wellington’s life had a happy “finis” written to it. In the days before he had given any public sign of the great genius that was in him, he had wooed Lady Catherine Pakenham, a daughter of Lord Longford. Not possibly without apparent reason, Lord and Lady Longford came to the conclusion that he was an altogether ineligible person, and refused their consent, and Arthur Wesley sailed away to the East, disconsolate but not despairing. It is pleasant to be able to look over his shoulder just before he returned, and read a letter in which Lady Catherine tells him that such beauty as she had has been ravaged by small-pox. It is pleasanter still to know that this information by no means cooled his ardour to get home, and that when he did come back a Major-General, the victor in many fights, and Sir Arthur Wellesley, my Lord and my Lady had reversed their decision, and the course of true love was allowed to run with perfectly satisfactory smoothness. Just before this he entered Parliament as member for Rye, on the invitation of Lord Grenville. One didn’t need much more than the invitation of a powerful minister to get into Parliament in those days. At Westminster he distinguished himself chiefly as the vindicator of his brother’s policy in India, and, more than this, he used his pen, which was not much addicted to flourishes, but nevertheless wrote good, strong, nervous English, to the same good purpose. There is one sentence in an open letter to his brother which exactly sums up the situation. “By your firmness and decision you have not only saved, but enlarged and secured the invaluable Empire entrusted to your government at a time when everything else was a wreck, and the existence even of Great Britain was problematic.” Those are weighty words indeed, coming as they do from the man who won the battle of Assaye and established, let us hope for ever, the British Empire in India.