THE PATHETIC SIR GEORGE.

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume VII, Issue 1087, 5 August 1880, Page 2

THE PATHETIC SIR GEORGE.

Says the Otago Daily Times : — The memorable silence scene in the House last week, in which Sir George Grey so conspicuously figured, was probably suggested to the author and chief performer of an ancedote related of the Marquis of Wellesley in the current number of the " Quarterly Review." The story is given in an article entitled '*' The Proconsul and the Demagogue." To us on this side of the world this collocation of terms naturally suggests Sir George Grey. The reference, however, is not to Sir George, but Lord Wellesley and Daniel O'Connell of whose widely-contrasted careers the writer gives a gossiping sketch, seasoned with political anecdote and table-talk, in a manner which we have learned to associate with the " Quarterly's " biographical artioles. Lord Wellesley, having been Governor-General of India, had for a time, like Sir George Grey, " breathed the rarefied atmosphere, of kingship," and returning to Europe, he missed, as was natural, the Oriental deference to whiuh he had been accustomed. His sense of persona}, dignity, fostered by years of absolute rule was wounded at every turn. Society, from club waiters to Cabinet Ministers seemed to be in a conspiracy to affront him. Royalties and vice-royalties when out of employment can hardly escape experience of this sort, but the sensitiveness of Lord Wellesley seems to have been excessive. At Falmouth, where he landed, he went to bed in a. fit of the sulks, which lasted for days, because the hotelkeeper and his people paid him only the same respect which they would have shown to " any other marquis on his travels." Fortunately the victim of these humiliations^ did ;not revenge himself upon society byMtaking up the trade of demagogue," 1 That role was sufficiently filled by O'Oonnell. Moreovor, the special temptations in that direction which have beset our own Proconsul were absent. Lord Wellesley became a member of the Government, retaining in the company of Cabinet Ministers something of the luxuteur associated with his former Eastern grandeur. On one occasion, whilst he was explaining something in the Cabinet, the Lord Privy Seal — Lord West-

moreland — leaned back in his chair in true American fashion, with his dirty boots resting on the Cocmcil table. Lord Wellesly paused and said, " When the Lord Privy Seal is in a decent attitude I will proceed with my statement." What followed this intimation— whether Lord Privy Seal's boots disappeared beneath the table, upon which, assuredly, they ought never to have been exhibited, or whether the indecorous attitude ,was continued in Lord Wellesley's despite — '■ is not recorded. But that Sir George Grey had read this little story, and that it suggested his dramatic indignation at _ihe Premierls proof -correcting ;-*?e>~h& i*o very little doubt. """ proconsular sympathies would go entirely with the ex-Governor-general ; the Cabinet-Coun-cil scene would naturally linger in his memory ; and, without any purpose of plagiarising, he has attempted to snub Mr. Hall in the grand manner of LordWellesley smibbing Lord Westmoreland. A.s a provocation, the proof-reading of the onts offender hardly take rank with the dirty boots of the other ; but Sir George has thought the proconsular rebuke equally applicable to both cases, like the footman who imagined that the joke of lapsus lingua might be transferred to the slipping of a leg of mutton. We are sorry to deprive Sir George Grey's silent martyrdom of the only merit it seemed to possess — the poor merit of originality in its inception, whatever it may have been in its f performance — but it seems pretty clear that he has merely adapted to the Colonial boards an idea borrowed from a brother chip, who, like" himself, was suffering from the morbid sensitiveness of a dignitary in reduced circumstances.