"I do not wish to shorten my term of office, nor do I wish to prolong it," he said in answer to the question as to what his feelings were now that he was about to deliver over the government of the country.
"It was a proud moment for me," he added, "when I walked up the steps of this house, feeling that without political interest or influence I had been chosen to fill the highest office under the Crown, the Viceroy of the Queen. But it will be a happier moment for me when I walk down the steps with the feeling that I have tried to do my duty."
On his return home he was made a peer, and for some years he devoted himself untiringly to public and philanthropic work, acting as Chairman to the London School Board until his failing eyesight and his broken health put an end to his public life. "It is overpowering to see him thus laid low and worn out," wrote one who saw him daily. "But to us he seems grander than ever in his affliction, and we realise the truth that 'he who ruleth his spirit is greater than he who taketh a city.'"
Ten years after he had left India the end came, and Honest John, as he was affectionately called, was carried to the Abbey, to be buried there with all the honour that was his due.
It is impossible to wander round the Poets' Corner without a longing that the Abbey could claim as her own all the great singers and seers who have made the literature of our country. Chaucer and Spenser indeed we have, with other writers of the Elizabethan and Stuart periods; but many familiar names are missing altogether, or marked only by a bust or slab. John Philips, Matthew Prior, John Gay, and Thomas Campbell--these were the last poets buried in Westminster for many a long day. Shakespeare, Milton, Goldsmith, Coleridge, Burns, Keble, Wordsworth, Thackeray, Matthew Arnold, Kingsley, Ruskin, have monuments, and so we have their names; but how many a one is there for whom we look in vain in this national temple of honour. Langland, Herrick, Herbert, Sidney, Pope, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Bunyan, Sir Thomas More, Defoe, and Swift are unknown English writers so far as the Abbey is concerned.
Towards the latter end of the nineteenth century, however, there came a change. Macaulay and Grote, historians, were both buried within its walls, and when Charles Dickens died in 1870, Dean Stanley at once suggested Westminster to his family, who declined the offer. Then there appeared an article in the _Times_ declaring that the Abbey was the one place worthy to receive so distinguished a writer. Still his family hesitated, and at last only consented on the condition that the ceremony should be entirely private. So it came to pass that, one evening after dark, when the Abbey was closed, a grave was dug in the Poets' Corner close to Thackeray's bust, and in the early summer morning the funeral took place in solitary simplicity. But in a few hours the news had spread, and before the day was over thousands of persons had been to take a last look at the grave of the writer they loved, many of them the very poorest people, who yet brought with them a few flowers or some other humble token of remembrance.