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| The Book of Ser Marco Polo : vol.1 |
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Citation Information
MEMOIR OF SIR HENRY YULE 187-80.
lxiv
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edition of Marco Polo, Yule had to mourn the loss of his noble
wife. He was absent from Sicily at the time, but returned a few
hours after her death on 3oth April. She had suffered for many
years from a severe form of heart disease, but her end was
perfect peace. She was laid to rest, amid touching tokens of
both public and private sympathy, in the beautiful camposanto
on Monte Pellegrino. What her loss was to Yule only his
oldest and closest friends were in a position to realise. Long
years of suffering had impaired neither the soundness of her
judgment nor the sweetness, and even gaiety, of her happy,
unselfish disposition. And in spirit, as even in appearance, she
retained to the very last much of the radiance of her youth.
Nor were her intellectual gifts less remarkable. Few who had
once conversed with her ever forgot her, and certainly no one
who had once known her intimately ever ceased to love her.6°
Shortly after this calamity, Yule removed to London, and on
the retirement of his old friend, Sir William Baker, from the
India Council early that autumn, Lord Salisbury at once selected
him for the vacant seat. Nothing would ever have made
him a party-man, but he always followed Lord Salisbury with
conviction, and worked under him with steady confidence.
In 1.877 Yule married, as his second wife, the daughter of an
old friend,67 a very amiable woman twenty years his junior, who
made him very happy until her untimely death in 188i. From
the time of his joining the India Council, his duties at the India
Office of course occupied a great part of his time, but he also
continued to do an immense amount of miscellaneous literary
work, as may be seen by reference to the subjoined bibliography,
66 She was a woman of fine intellect and wide reading ; a skilful musician, who also sang well, and a good amateur artist in the style of Aug. Delacroix (of whom she was a favourite pupil). Of French and Italian she had a thorough and literary mastery, and how well she knew her own language is shown by the sound and pure English of
a story she published in early life, under the pseudonym of Max Lyle (Fair Oaks, or The Experiences of Arnold Osborne, 11 D., 2 vols., I856). My mother was partly of Highland descent on both sides, and many of her fine qualities were very characteristic of that race. Before her marriage she took an active part in many good works, and herself originated the useful School for the Blind at Bath, in a room which she hired with her pocket-money, where she and her friend Miss Elwin taught such of the blind poor as they could gather together.
In the tablet which he erected to her memory in the family burial-place of St. Andrew's, Gulane, her husband described her thus :—" A woman singular in endowments, in suffering, and in faith ; to whom to live was Christ, to die was gain."
67 Mary Wilhelmina, daughter of F. Skipwith, Esq., B.C.S.
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