The Life of Sir Rowland Hill and the

354 LIFE OF SIR ROWLAND HILL. [1855-60
accustomed to decide, was submitted to him as usual,
Nor
to the last hour of his remaining in the country.
was decision even then made heedlessly or hurriedly,
but, as before, after full understanding. This was,
however, the easier to him because of his remarkable
quickness of apprehension, which enabled him to seize
one's conceptions almost more rapidly than they could
be set forth ; and I may add that with this happy
quality he combined the invaluable power of per-
ceiving, as it were by intuition, how ideas supplied
for a special case might be made applicable to general
purposes.
Of his eminent services in India it is not for me to
speak, but, as an instance of attention to matters of
detail, I may mention what I afterwards learnt from
Lord Elgin, that at the period of his greatest labour
and anxiety, viz., in the very height of the
he wrote long minutes with his own hand.
mutiny,
I had
always remarked his very strict attention to the precise
wording of the papers he was called upon to sign, and
indeed often thought it overstrained ; but I believe he
had at once an earnest desire that his exact meaning
should be made clear, and a most delicate perception
of the difference produced by the slightest variation of
terms. In common with the whole world, I regarded
his premature death as a severe national calamity.
He was earnest and energetic in the moral reform
of the Post Office, and, had his life been longer
spared, might perhaps
of India.*
have been the moral reformer
*
The following note on Lord Canning was added by Sir Rowland Hill in
June, 1876: "In an able article in the last 'Edinburgh Review,' on Lord
Mayo's Indian administration, the writer thus speaks of Lord Canning: 'And
then we come to Earl Canning, who, almost without exception among English
statesmen, presents the grandest picture of unswerving firmness, courage and
magnanimity in the midst of the most appalling dangers ; who, without losing