son. In 1849 Mr. Robert Bourke succeeded to the earldom, and afterwards took his seat in Parliament as a representative peer. But long before that time, Richard and the other elder children were out in life. It was the Hayes influence that moulded their characters and shaped their careers, and it was Hayes that they always thought of as their home.

¹ Of ten children born to them, one daughter died in infancy and one son in boyhood.

As the Hayes income did not permit of a public school education, the father set about the task of home-training with steadfastness of purpose. In his youth he had passed a couple of years at Oxford, but his own up-bringing had been mainly a domestic and evangelical one, characteristic of an Irish see-house sixty years ago. His marriage confirmed this cast of thought by closely associating him with the evangelical leaders of the time. The tutor and governess formed important figures in the life of that quiet household, in which few events took place to mark the march of time, save the father's periodical absence at assizes, or on county business. This monotone of boyhood, little broken by the usual external influences, gave a singular force to the family tie among the young group at Hayes.

The house became a well-known resort of the evangelical clergy, and figures somewhat prominently in the religious biography of that time. One clergyman has left behind a picture of his warm welcome on reaching Hayes belated—his postillions having lost their way and entangled the carriage in a wood—and how the nursery turned out a little battalion, which had retired for the night, but now streamed forth 'wrapped in shawls and cloaks' to greet the family friend. Nor does the narrative fail to notice 'the asylum established within the grounds for persecuted Protestants.'

The sobriety of tone at Hayes was brightened by the delight which the father took in the outdoor life of his children. Walking expeditions, long rides, cricket, swimming matches on the Boyne, and every form of robust companionship which endears Englishmen to each other—in all these the father and sons bore an equal part. The talent at Hayes came from the mother. But to the father they owed the ideal and standards in life which result from growing up as the dearest friends of a single-minded and tenderly considerate man.

'My father,' writes one of the sons, 'brought us all up with the idea that we should have to make our own way in the world. But at the same time, every one of us felt that what little he could do for us he would do to the last penny. His generosity used to break out unconsciously in a hundred details. During the Indian Mutiny, I gave a little lecture to the tenants and neighbours on what the army was then doing in the East. Unmeritorious as the performance undoubtedly was, I remember my father coming into my room early next morning, and saying, with tears in his eyes, that he felt proud of it, and that he was not a rich man, but begged me to accept a twenty-pound note.'

Of the mother, the same son writes. 'What strikes me most in looking back, was her earnest love for her children; an inexhaustible fund of common sense; a contempt for everything mean or wrong; and a firm belief that her daily prayers for us would be answered, and that we would be a blessing and comfort to her through life.

'She it was who really enabled my father to pull through the many difficulties of his married life, between 1820 and 1849. She was never idle—always writing, doing accounts, or working; had little time for reading, but constantly did her best to get us to take an interest in books. Her mission, she used to say, was work. She devoted much of her time to the cottages of the sick, to clothing clubs, and the hundred little charities which crowd round the wife of an Irish squire who tries to do his duty. I never knew any one who worked harder. Two days a week she gave up to standing at the door of her medicine-room, dispensing drugs, and, when necessary, warm clothes to the poor. And day after day, in bad seasons week after week, the dinner-bell rang before she got a drive or a walk. Often have I thought that poor Mayo inherited from her that conscientiousness in the discharge of minute duties which to me seemed one of the characteristics of his official life, both in England and in India.'

The mother stands out in this and other documents which have come into my hands, a figure of gentle refinement among the robust open-air group at Hayes; recognised by it as something of a paler and more spiritual type than the warm colouring of the life around her. Into that life she managed to infuse a consciousness that, somehow, there was a higher and more beautiful existence than the vigorous animalism of boyhood dreamed of. Richard as the eldest cherished her memory with a touching retentiveness. A thoroughly manly boy, the leader in all the pastimes and mischief of Hayes, his childhood reflected the more retired aspects of his mother's nature, not less than his father's love of out-door sports. There remains a little collection of sermons written by him before the age of twelve, and instinct with the pathos of an imaginative child under strong religious impressions. These discourses, chiefly upon texts dear to the evangelical mind, dwell with a quaint earnestness on such subjects as the doctrine of grace, the worthlessness of this world, and the glories and terrors of the next.

The taste for history soon began to mingle with his meditations, and his twelfth year produced a little book in a straggling boyish hand, entitled, 'A Preface to the Holy Bible, by R. S. B. of H——': with the motto, 'Multae terricolis linguae, coelestibus una.' In this fasciculus he gives a historical introduction to each of the books of the Old Testament as far as the Psalms, with notices of their authors and contents. His boyish letters breathe the pronounced Protestantism of the people among whom he lived. At fifteen he writes to his father: 'There is a poor man here on the verge of the grave just come out of Popery. Lord Roden' (the relative with whom he was then staying), 'has received alarming letters from M. Caesar Malan of Geneva, giving an alarming account of the increase of Popery on the Continent.' Such sentences contrast curiously with the tolerant sobriety of Lord Mayo's maturer mind. But they illustrate that ready sympathy with his surroundings, which won for him in later life the love of his own countrymen, and produced so deep an impression among the princes and peoples of India.

With one more quotation I must bid good-bye to the home-life at Hayes. It is a letter written to his mother on his thirty-seventh birthday, when he was Chief Secretary for Ireland for the second time, amid the distracting cares of Phoenix Park agitations, and the coming defeat of his party in Parliament.

'MY DEAREST MOTHER,—I am very thankful for your motherly letter and all the good advice it contains. I have had many blessings in my time, and I am most thankful for them in my heart, though I may not make any great demonstration of my thoughts. We are all getting on in years, and are, I hope, setting our faces homewards. My life is, at the very most, more than half over, even supposing that I should live to be old. And how many chances there are against that! This time thirty-seven years ago I was a small thing. How much smaller in one sense shall I be thirty-seven years hence! How much greater, we may hope, in another!'

In 1838, Richard being then sixteen, the Hayes family went abroad for a couple of years. The first year they spent in Paris, the tutor and governess living as usual in the house. But for the first time in their lives, the boys bent their necks to the discipline of exact teaching, beginning with the French professor at 8 A.M. and ending with the dancing-master