progress, and was sent by Lord Ripon to Kandahar in the autumn of the same year, when it was a question whether the plan of Lord Lytton to make the province of Kandahar a separate state under the Wali Sher Ali should be maintained or abandoned. On Lyall's report of the Wali's weakness and desire to leave Kandahar, and in view of other considerations of policy, that scheme was abandoned. Lyall was a strong advocate of the retention of Quetta and the Sibi and Pishin districts, a step which, after some delay, was sanctioned by the imperial government. On retiring from the foreign secretaryship in 1881 Lyall wrote a note strongly advocating the policy of a definite treaty with Russia with regard to the position of Afghanistan, a policy which eventually prevailed, and led up to the convention of 1907 between England and Russia, with results beneficial to both Asia and Europe. In recognition of his services he was made C.B. in 1879 and K.C.B. in 1881.
In 1881 Lyall was appointed lieutenant-governor of the North-West Provinces and Oudh, now called the United Provinces, and entered upon that office in April 1882. 'During nearly six years' (in the words of Sir William Hunter) 'he laboured with unflagging devotion for the welfare of the people. It fell to him to introduce Lord Ripon's scheme of local self-government in towns and districts. He carried out, by means of the supreme legislative council, a reform of the land laws in Oudh, for the protection of tenants. . . . Through his influence a separate legislative council was created for what are now the United Provinces, and a new university was founded at Allahabad' (The Times, April 1911). These institutions were intended, Lyall wrote 'to be important steps towards a kind of provincial autonomy, which I hold to be one of the cardinal points of our constitutional policy in India.' His administration was also marked by an extension of railways and other public works.
Lyall retired from the Indian civil service in Dec. 1887, and immediately on his return to England was appointed to be a member of the India Council in London. This post he held for the unusually long period of fifteen years, being re-appointed in 1897 by the secretary of state at the close of the ten years which then formed the usual term. In the India Council he adhered consistently to his views both as to Indian foreign policy and as to the extension of local self-government, or devolution of powers, in India. Lord Knutsford, then colonial secretary, offered him in 1888 the governorship of Cape Colony, but this he declined. In Feb. 1887 he had been been made a K.C.I.E., and in 1896 he was promoted to be a G.C.I.E. On his retirement from the India office in 1902 he was made a privy councillor by King Edward VII.
During the twenty-three years between his return from India. and his death Lyall was one of the best-known and most distinguished men in English society. His many-sided character brought him into relation with statesmen, soldier, officials, philosophers, historians, and poets, and he was also the friend of many cultivated women; he belonged to such dining clubs as The Club, the literary Society (1888), Grillion's, as well as to Grant Duff's Breakfast Club (1890), and was also a member of the Athenæm Club. He was one of the earliest members of the Synthetic Society formed in Jane 1890, with a view to the discussion of religions and philosophic questions. The members included E. S. Talbot, then bishop of Rochester, Mr. Arthur Balfour, Frederic Myers, Lord Rayleigh, R. H. Hutton, Canon Scott Holland, and others. His social position was due to his original genius, his singular personal charm, and to the wide range of his interests. In a rare way he united the faculty for, and experience of, the active life with a philosophic mind tinged by melancholy, a poetic imagination, and the power of vivid and realistic expression. Lyall's cousin, the Countess Martinengo di Cesaresco, in her 'Outdoor life in Greek and Roman Poets' (1912), recognised in Lyall a counterpart of the Roman public servant, who could both think and do. 'He was the only man I have ever known,' the countess writes, 'who gave me the idea that he would have been at home in the Roman world.'
From an early period in his Indian career Lyall had made himself known by occasional poems and by essays upon Indian subjects contributed to the London reviews. Both the poems and the essays revealed an imaginative genius by which he was to enter into the minds and feelings of men of remote races. The poems after a period of private circulation were published in 1889 in a volume called 'Verses' written in India,' and, with some later additions, have gone through several editions. The sixth edition was published in 1905. The best known and most popular of these poems were, perhaps, those entitled 'The Old Pindaree,' 'Theology in Extremis,' 'The Rajput Chief,' and the 'Meditations of a Hindu Prince.'
