THE DUKE'S SENSE OF DUTY.

Lyttelton Times, Volume III, Issue 107, 22 January 1853, Page 10

THE DUKE'S SENSE OF DUTY.

(Morning Chronicle.)

Tbe leading and pervading idea of ". the Duke's" mind was the sense of duty. In the common meaning- of the word, the "Duke was iiot a man of prejudice. He might have a distinct and very impregnable personal sense of what was right and reasonable, but he always accepted facts and a changed position and worked in deference to them. He might think the bargain a had one, and lie might say so in language idiomatic and intelligible to a fault; l»ui he always made tbe best of the bargain. He was just as likely to have served under Richard Cobden, had the Queen's service demanded, it, as he did serve with the worthless indigenous generals of Spain. He asked, and with no little bitterness, the famous question Him- was the Queen's Government to lie curried on ? and yet he knew it to be right, and honest, and loyal, to help to carry it on, and to keep in office the very men whose principles had, as he considered, made all government an

impossibility., And shallow talkers think this is an evidence of inconsistency ; or they point to it as a proof of the Duke of Wellington's selfish desire to appropriate power. The nobler, and we believe the truer view, the reconciling and the mellowing estimate, is to believe that, in all such cases, Arthur Wellesley saw but plain, intelligible duty. If the University of Oxford deemed him likely to be a good and useful Chancellor he accepted the office, because it was, or because he thought it was, his duty. So with his Premiership—so with his various offices and commands, subordinate or paramount. He would have defended London against the Chartists, or have taken the Affghan command, or have mustered the Kentish Fencibles, or have bored through the drudge and foppery of the Trinity Board, or have presided at an uncongenial Oxford Enccenia—or, if nobody else had been ready, he would have sailed in the channel fleet, or have become a Poor law Guardian—all on the same simple, if unenquiring, principle of duty. He fought the Spanish campaigns, not because he had confidence in Downing-street, or in his commissariat, or in his recruits or allies, but because it was his definite personal work. He went to the Chapel Royal in the grey morning, because he knew it to be right; and he was present at every levee—and was ever the earliest and foremost at every ceremonial and pageant, at drawing-room, and at opera and weddings— because it was expected of him, and he thought it his duty not to disappoint legitimate expectation. In others his apparent love monstrari digito would have easily degenerated into the common-place passion for distinction ; but in the Duke of Wellington it was sustained by a high and elevating principle. The Duke was above vulgar vanity. One who recognises duty in minute particulars, and who answers at calls, however trifling or onerous, on that truehearted, self-devoting sense of duty, must obviously make himself prominent, and fill the public eye. And never did he fill it too largely. Never was that stately presence, even when overcast by the shadow of toil and anxiety, seen in public, but it was cheered as that of our common friend, and councillor, and defender. Can those who witnessed it ever forget his ovation at the opening of the Great Exhibition? And it is no small praise to recollect that, to flattery as to misunderstanding, his iron character was alike invulnerable.

Such solidity and singleness of aim in the Duke of Wellington were eminently happy in securing popular appreciation. If the Duke did not win the lower and the common feeling of love, he commanded the very highest universal respect and reverence. The character we have attempted to analyse, so rigorous and large in its own appreciation of personal calls for exertion and work, was not likely to be other than imperious and exact in demanding duty from others. A worker will admit no standard of excellence but work. He can sympathise with but a single order of character— but that the most generous. A disciplinarian does not attract the mere affections. The Duke was too inflexible, too severe, too exacting, to be, in the vulgar sense, popular. The conqueror of Napoleon could afford to move in a somewhat solitary sphere. And, as years did their inevitable work, and gnarled what was always angular in the Duke of Wellington's mental and moral conformation, the British public had the good sense and the good feeling to go below the surface, and to view that great inner heart of the true man beating and animated with patriotism, and, beneath the ice of char racter, to detect the fires oPgenuine and selfsacrificing principle.