82 MEMOIR OF DR WRIGHT. 



ence. A good heart makes him full of gratitude ; 

 and I am confident he will be kind to his relations." 



Such is the kind and considerate manner in which 

 the balm of consolation is offered to an afflicted father, 

 and to the more sensitive apprehensions of a doting 

 mother, at parting, perhaps for ever, in the bloom of 

 manhood, with an only son. Soon after his arrival at 

 Fort St George, Mr Wright was appointed Surgeon 

 to the 23d Battalion of Native Infantry. He had the 

 fortune to be engaged with the combined army from 

 the different presidencies under Lord Cornwallis, 

 in storming the lines of Tippoo Sultan before the 

 walls of Seringapatam ; and his services on that occa- 

 sion produced an offer from Colonel Baird, then in 

 the command of the 71st, of a vacancy which had oc- 

 curred in the office of assistant-surgeon to his regi- 

 ment. But Mr Wright was obliged to forego the 

 flattering prospect of promotion in the British service, 

 which the proposal of Sir David Baird had afforded 

 him, in consequence of the necessity which arose for 

 making a pecuniary arrangement with the surgeon of 

 the regiment, to which, at such a distance from 

 Europe, his finances were unfortunately unequal. A 

 few months after this period, when Mr Wright was 

 in the immediate prospect of an appointment as bo- 

 tanist to the Honourable Company, a situation for 

 which he was eminently qualified *, he was suddenly 



" In Mr Wright's letters to liis uncle, on the occasion of his ap- 

 plication for this appointment, he makes many grateful acknowledg- 

 ments of the unwearied exertions which were made on his belialf 



