The Life of Sir Rowland Hill and the

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LIFE OF SIR ROWLAND HILL.
holding, and with one gentle pressure he showed that
the love that he had always borne her from the
beginning he bore her to the end. He never moved
again. He died on the 27th day of August, in the
year 1879. Hitherto this day had always been held
a festival in our family ; for on it his brother Arthur
had, for eighty-one years, kept his birthday.
It had been Rowland Hill's hope that his countrymen
would think him not unworthy to find his last
resting-place in Westminster Abbey. It was, indeed,
with singular agreement that the voice of the people
awarded to him the last great honour which we
Englishmen render to our famous dead. There,
followed by his children and his children's children,
by his two aged brothers, who had shared in his
struggles and his triumphs, by his brothers' children
and their children's children, he was laid in his glorious
place of rest. It was the burial of a man of the
people, and the people came honour.
together to do him
Men came, too, who had worked under him
and worked with him men who knew well what
manner of man he was who was now laid among the
great ones of the land. There was but one left of the
good line of Postmasters-General under whom it had
been his happiness to serve. He unhappily was on
the wide
round the
Duke of
Atlantic the day that we were gathered
"
I open grave. can truly say," wrote the
"
Argyll, that no one among his many
friends and admirers would have joined more sin-
cerely than I should in the mourning of that day. I
had the highest admiration of him, and the strongest
feeling of personal regard and affection towards him."
The City of London, which he had so signally served,
was represented by its chief magistrate, and the great
Liberal party, to which he had been so long attached,