gave way: and the Governor-General in Council has to deplore with sincere grief the loss of one of the most distinguished amongst the servants of the East India Company. The death of Mr. Colvin has occurred at a time when his ripe experience, his high ability, and his untiring energy would have been more than usually valuable to the State. But his career did not close before he had won for himself a high reputation in each of the various branches of administration to which he was at different times attached; nor until he had been worthily selected to fill the highest post in Northern India; and he leaves a name which not friends alone, but all who have been associated with him in the duties of Government, and all who may follow in his path, will delight to honour.'
This Memoir may close with two brief extracts showing the estimates formed of Mr. Colvin by men who knew him in widely different spheres, but who were not biased, as others who spoke or wrote of him may have been, by much personal intimacy. Mr. Ritchie, the Advocate-General in Calcutta, who had known him as a Judge in the Sadr Court, said of him at a public meeting held in his honour in the end of 1857: —
'While no man's measures have in this country caused greater difference of opinion, or excited louder remonstrance or opposition, no doubt was ever cast upon the purity of his motives, or the excellence of his character. As Secretary to Lord Auckland, in fair weather and in foul — at first in success and triumph, and afterwards in defeat and difficulty and sorrow — as administrator of the Tenasserim Provinces — as the leading mind in that great Court of Appeal to which such frequent allusion has been made — as Governor of the
