The close of his career as Postmaster-General was highly characteristic. For some reason it was convenient to the Government that he should retain his office until the very day of his departure for the East. Doubtless it was expected that this retention would be little more than nominal, or that, at most, he would attend to none but the most pressing business, leaving to his successor all such affairs as admitted of delay. When I found that he continued to transact business just as usual, while I knew that he must be encumbered with every kind of preparation, official, personal and domestic, I earnestly pressed that course upon him, but in vain; he would leave no arrears, and every question, great or small, which he had been accustomed to decide, was submitted to him as usual, to the last hour of his remaining in the country. Nor was decision even then made heedlessly or hurriedly, but, as before, after full understanding. This was, however, the easier to him because of his remarkable quickness of apprehension, which enabled him to seize one's conceptions almost more rapidly than they could be set forth; and I may add that with this happy quality he combined the invaluable power of perceiving, as it were by intuition, how ideas supplied for a special case might be made applicable to general purposes. Of his eminent services in India it is not for me to speak, but, as an instance of attention to matters of detail, I may mention what I afterwards learnt from Lord Elgin, that at the period of his greatest labour and anxiety, viz., in the very height of the mutiny, he wrote long minutes with his own hand. I had always remarked his very strict attention to the precise wording of the papers he was called upon to sign, and indeed often thought it overstrained; but I believe he had at once an earnest desire that his exact meaning should be made clear, and a most delicate perception of the difference produced by the slightest variation of terms. In common with the whole world, I regarded his premature death as a severe national calamity. He was earnest and energetic in the moral reform of the Post Office, and, had his life been longer spared, might perhaps have been the moral reformer of India.[216] DUKE OF ARGYLL.