"He has made several great expeditions under the Royal Geographical Society and the Foreign Office, most of them at the risk of his life. His languages, knowledge, and experience upon every subject, or any single act of his life, of which he has concentrated so many into forty-four and a half years, would have raised any other man to the top of the ladder of honour and fortune. "We may sum up his career by their principal heads. "Nineteen years in the Bombay Army, the first ten in active service, principally in the Sindh Survey on Sir Charles Napier's staff. In the Crimea, Chief of the Staff to General Beatson, and the chief organizer of the Irregular Cavalry. "Several remarkable and dangerous expeditions in unknown lands. He is the discoverer and opener of the Lake Regions of Central Africa, and perhaps the Senior Explorer of England. "He has been nearly twenty-six years in the Consular service in the four quarters of the globe (always in bad climates--Africa, Asia, South America, and Europe), doing good service everywhere. It would be impossible to enumerate _all_ that Captain Burton has done in the last forty-four years; but we cannot pass over his knowledge of twenty-nine languages, European and Oriental--not counting dialects--and now that Mezzofante is dead, we may call him the Senior Linguist. Nor can we omit the fact that he has written about fifty standard works, a list of which will appear at the end of this Memoir. (See Appendix A.) "He is a man incapable of an untruth or of truckling to what finds favour. His wife tells us in her 'Inner Life of Syria' that 'humbug stands abashed before him,' that he lives sixty years before his time, and that, 'born of Low Church and bigoted parents, as soon as he could reason he began to cast off prejudice and follow a natural law.' Grace aiding the reason of man--upright, honourable, manly, and gentlemanly, but _professing_ no direct form of belief, except in one Almighty Being, God--the belief that says, 'I do that because it is _right_--not for hell nor heaven, nor for religion, but because it is right--a natural law of Divine grace, which such men unconsciously ignore as Divine intelligence: yet such it is.'