valued friends, by whom his attachment was fully reciprocated. His health in the moist Calcutta climate gave him none of that anxiety which many feel; his wife and younger children were with him. His two elder sons had come out from Haileybury, and had entered the Indian Civil Service. In Hastings House at Alípur, he extended to all his acquaintances a wide and warm hospitality. His reading had made him an excellent companion; and he delighted in converse with the best and ablest of those about him. Since 1842 he had been charged with no duties adequate to his abilities. At a bound, he had made himself the first, almost the only authority on the Bench of the chief Bengal Appellate Court of the Company. He must have felt that in recovering public respect for the Court, and in securing for himself a conspicuous position in it, he had vindicated the reputation formed in earlier years. His thoughts, doubtless, recurred often to old days; to Macaulay's breakfast parties, to morning rides with Trevelyan, and, most of all, to long hours spent within the walls of Government House, in the service of the kind chief, whose sudden death on New Year's day, 1849, cast a shadow over Mr. Colvin's return to the capital.
