Lord Mayo, whether as Irish Secretary or as Indian Viceroy, was himself the very type and embodiment of this loyalty to subordinates. He conscientiously judged his men by their actual work, silently putting aside the praise or dispraise of persons not competent to speak, and penetrating his officers with a belief that, so long as they merited his support, no outside influences or complications would ever lead to its being withdrawn. On a somewhat crucial occasion he quietly said: 'I once asked Mr. Disraeli whether newspaper abuse was injurious to a public man. He answered: "It may retard the advancement of a young man, starting in life and untried. But it is harmless after a man has become known; and if unjust, it is in the long-run beneficial."' In October he ran over to Ireland, and wandered in pathetic silence among the scenes of his boyhood. The day before he left these scenes for ever, he chose {70} a shady spot in a quiet little churchyard on his Kildare estates, and begged that, if he never returned, he might be brought home and laid there. '13th October,' says the brief entry in his Journal--'Left Palmerstown amid tears and wailing, much leave-taking and great sorrow.' On Wednesday, the 11th November, 1868, Lord Mayo looked for his last time on the Dover cliffs, and reached Paris the same night. The delicious repose of the voyage to India lay before him; his time was still his own, and he resolved to see everything on the way that could shed light on his new duties. Among other matters, the neglected state of the Indian Records had been pressed upon him at the India Office, and in a then recently published work. With the richest and most lifelike materials for making known the facts of their rule, the English in India still lie at the mercy of every European defamer. Their history--that great story of tenderness to pre-existing rights, and of an ever-growing sense of responsibility to the people--is told as a mere romance of military prowess and government by the sword. When Chief Secretary for Ireland, Lord Mayo had introduced and passed the Act on which the whole Irish Record Department subsists. To that end he had personally studied the method adopted in England, and deputed his friend, Sir Bernard Burke, to report on the French system.