principle through life. His fortune, amounting to nearly half a million sterling, he bequeathed in innumerable legacies. Amongst them were three to the poor of Calcutta, Chandernagore, and Lucknow, the interest of which was to be doled daily at certain fixed places, distinguished by tablets bearing an inscription in English, French, or Persian, according to the location, and notifying that the aims distributed were the gift of General Martin, and to he so disbursed in perpetuity. He left a large sum in trust to the Government of Bengal or the establishment and endowment of a school to be called La Martiniere, which still exists, and where, on the anniversary of his death, a sermon was to be preached, followed by a public dinner, at which the toast of "The Memory of the Founder" was to be drunk in solemn silence. To his relatives and the town of Lyons he bequeathed large legacies. and two separate sums to that city and Calcutta, their interest to he devoted to releasing poor debtors from gaol on the anniversary of his death. He left directions that his house Constantia should never be sold, but serve as a mausoleum for his remains, and he committed it to the care of the ruling power in the country for the time being. Such were the elaborate precautions taken by this eccentric man to keep his memory alive and hand it down to posterity.
The thirtieth clausein his Will was perhaps the most remarkable of all. It ran as follows:— "When I am dead, I request that my body may be salted, put in spirits, or embalmed, and afterwards deposited in a leaden coffin made of some sheet lead in my godown, which is to be put in another of sissoo wood, and then deposited in the cave in the small round room north-east in Constantia, with two feet of masonry raised above it, which is to bear the following inscription:—
"Major-General CLAUDE MARTIN,
Born at Lyons, 5th January 1735.
Arrived in India as a common soldier, and died at Lucknow.
(the 13th of September 1800,) a Major-General;
and he is buried in this tomb.
Pray for his Soul.”
His wishes were faithfully fulfilled, and when Lady Fanny Parkes visited the tomb in 1831 she mentions that a bust of the General adorned the vault; lights were constantly burning before the tomb and the figures of four soldiers, as large as life, with their arms reversed, stood in niches at the side of the monument. In the centre of the vault was a large plain slab hearing the inscription above recorded.
Perchance it sufficiently summarises Martin's life, and after the lapse of nearly a hundred years, one cannot help reflecting on the achievements of the man epitomised in the few terse words. Dynasties have died out, thrones have tottered and fallen, kingdoms have crumbled into dust and been forgotten since this private soldier sought to perpetuate his name; and it is not an unpleasing thought that the atonement of his testamentary charity still keeps alive the pious memory of the founder of La Martiniere.
" 'Tis said that memory is life,
And that, though dead, men are alive.
Removed from sorrow, care, and strife,
They live because their works survive."
