Western instruction. In March, 1836, he was selected by Lord Auckland, on his arrival in India, to be his Private Secretary. Returning with Lord Auckland in the spring of 1842 to England, he remained there till September, 1845, when he left it for the last time. He was sent, on his return to India, to Nepál, relieving Captain (afterwards Sir Henry) Lawrence as Resident at the Court of Khátmándu. In the end of 1846 he succeeded Captain (afterwards Sir Henry) Durand as Commissioner of the Tenasserim Provinces in Burma. From thence, in the close of 1848, he was recalled to Calcutta, and took his seat on the Bench of the Company's Chief Appellate Court, where twenty-two years earlier he had begun official life as Assistant to the Registrar. On the death of Mr. Thomason he was selected by Lord Dalhousie to be the Lieutenant-Governor of the North-West Provinces. There, in the midst of his labours, the Mutinies burst on him in 1857. On September 9 of that year he closed his life in the Fort of Agra.
Mr. Colvin's career in India coincides with the later and final stages of the long course of operations which brought the Peninsula from Cape Comorin to the Indus under the flag of the East India Company. The making of British India was still, during much of his career, the chief business of the Government. The main questions of interest in public offices, in the journals, and in pamphlets and reviews, were till 1848 those of warlike enterprise, or of foreign policy. In the decade preceding his arrival the Nepál war. had
