Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 2.djvu/256

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238
MY LIFE IN TWO HEMISPHERES

you have not been disappointed with Australia, and that the climate is more after my notion.

"I am much obliged to you for your kind inquiries. I have, I believe, quite recovered the blow I received, and which so nearly cut short my career here.

"I have watched with much interest your proceedings, and on the only subject on which so remote a person both in space and time may venture to offer an opinion, 'The Land Question,' wish you very heartily success. The only thing wanting to place Australia on its true footing is cheap and abundant land, and I rejoice to see that the seed which I tried to sow ten years ago is at last beginning to ripen.—Believe me always, very truly yours,

"ROBERT LOWE."

Seventy years ago one of the most noted names among the Edinburgh Reviewers who were fighting the early battles of reform in law, politics, literature, and social progress, was Francis Horner. His sister married Myles Byrne, a Wexford rebel in 1798, later a Chef de Brigade in the armies of Napoleon, and recently dead. In later years he had written his memoirs from the beginning to the end of an honourable career, and his widow, who had published them in Paris and London, sent me a copy of them at this time, which I read with keen interest.

"I send you (she said) a copy of the memoirs of my beloved and lamented husband, Myles Byrne, knowing well how you will value these precious memoirs. My dear husband left them all quite fit for the press. He had the habit of writing some pages every day; I then copied them clearly, and then he revised what I wrote. You may well believe I have not had one word altered of what he wrote with so much care. In order that there might be no interpolations or omissions in the printing I kept everything under my own control, being at the whole expense of printing, &c., and of getting the etching done by a first-rate artist at Paris. It is after a drawing I did of my dear Myles twenty-three years ago, which was considered a striking likeness."

I have mentioned the generous conduct of a young Protestant official, afterwards one of the "Four Kings of Somer-