A GREAT PRO-CONSUL.

Auckland Star, Volume XXV, Issue 145, 19 June 1894, Page 8

A GREAT PRO-CONSUL.

Under the heading " A Great Pro-consul " the "Review of Reviews" cays: "The Life and Times of Sir George Grey " has been issued in London, and has called forth a tropical shower ot reviews, almost all of them highly favourable, both to the subject and the author of the biography. Sir George Grey's remoteness from London has almost the effect of remoteness in time on the imagination of London critics, and when his figure is thus set in historical perspective its greatness of scale becomes apparent. All the reviewers agree that Sir Geo. Grey, in the natural order of deserved promotion, should have gone from the Cape to Canada and from Canada to India is Governer-General. He would thus have taken his place in the gallery of great pro-consuls which stretches from Wellesley and Cornwallis to Laurence and Dufferin ; and Sir George Grey's would not have been the least in that procession of great names, His second appointment to New Zealand altered the complexion of Sir George Grey's life. The reviews all admit, too, that, Sir George Grey, at the time of the Mutiny, helped to save India, by the swift resolve and the all-compelling energy with which, Dn his own responsibility, he diverted the troops on their road to China, and deBpatched them, with e^ery man and rifle to be collected at the Cape, to Calcutta. A weaker man would have shrunk from that bold act, and so added months to the horror and bloodshed of the Mutiny. "The two volumes of Mr Rees, says MrGraut Allen in the • Daily News ' are more than ft history of a man, they are in great part the history ■of an empire ? Sir George Grey's biography is no doubt an importaut contribution to Australasian literature."