Lord Canning was my father's next chief, and soon showed himself to be an earnest friend to postal reform. It was while he was Postmaster-General, and mainly owing to his exertions, that in 1854 fulfilment was at last made of the promise given by Lord John Russell's Government, to place the author of Penny Postage at the head of the great department which controlled the country's correspondence—a promise in consideration of which Rowland Hill, in 1846, had willingly sacrificed so much. When Lord Canning left the Post Office to become Governor-General of India, my father felt as if he had lost a lifelong friend; and he followed with deep interest his former chiefs career in the Far East. During the anxious time of struggle with the Mutiny, nothing pained my father more than the virulent abuse which was often levelled at the far-seeing statesman whose wise and temperate rule contributed so largely to preserve to his country possession of that “brightest jewel of the crown” at a season when most people in Britain lost their senses in a wild outburst of fury. Lord Canning's management of India won, from the first, his ex-lieutenant's warmest admiration. The judgment of posterity—often more discerning, because less heated, than contemporaneous opinion—has long since decided that “Clemency Canning” did rightly. The nickname was used as a reproach at the time, but the later title of “The Lord Durham of India” is meant as a genuine compliment, or, better still, appreciation.[223] The Duke of Argyll—he of the “silvern tongue”—succeeded Lord Canning, and showed the same aptitude for hard work which had distinguished his predecessors. His quickness of apprehension, promptitude in generalisation, and that facility in composition which made of his minutes models of literary style, were unusually great. When he left the Post Office he addressed to its Secretary a letter of regret at parting—an act of courtesy said to be rare. The letter was couched in the friendliest terms, and the regret was by no means one-sided. Lord Colchester, the Postmaster-General in Lord Derby's short-lived second Administration, was another excellent chief, painstaking, hard-working, high-minded, remarkably winning in manner, cherishing a positive detestation of every kind of job, and never hesitating to resist pressure on that score from whatever quarter it might come. His early death was a distinct loss to the party to which he belonged. For Lord Elgin, who, like Lord Canning, left the Post Office to become Governor-General of India, my father entertained the highest opinion alike as regarded his administrative powers, his calm and dispassionate judgment, and his transparent straightforwardness of character. “He is another Lord Canning,” the postal reformer used to say; and that was paying his new chief the greatest compliment possible.