Henry Yule was the youngest son of Major William Yule, by his first wife,
Elizabeth Paterson, and was born at Inveresk, in Midlothian, on 1st May,
1820. He was named after an _aunt_ who, like Miss Ferrier's immortal
heroine, owned a man's name.

On his father's side he came of a hardy agricultural stock,[1] improved by
a graft from that highly-cultured tree, Rose of Kilravock.[2] Through his
mother, a somewhat prosaic person herself, he inherited strains from
Huguenot and Highland ancestry. There were recognisable traces of all
these elements in Henry Yule, and as was well said by one of his oldest
friends: "He was one of those curious racial compounds one finds on the
east side of Scotland, in whom the hard Teutonic grit is sweetened by the
artistic spirit of the more genial Celt."[3] His father, an officer of the
Bengal army (born 1764, died 1839), was a man of cultivated tastes and
enlightened mind, a good Persian and Arabic scholar, and possessed of much
miscellaneous Oriental learning. During the latter years of his career in
India, he served successively as Assistant Resident at the (then
independent) courts of Lucknow[4] and Delhi. In the latter office his
chief was the noble Ouchterlony. William Yule, together with his younger
brother Udny,[5] returned home in 1806. "A recollection of their voyage
was that they hailed an outward bound ship, somewhere off the Cape,
through the trumpet: 'What news?' Answer: 'The King's mad, and Humfrey's
beat Mendoza' (two celebrated prize-fighters and often matched). 'Nothing
more?' 'Yes, Bonapart_y_'s made his _Mother_ King of Holland!'

"Before his retirement, William Yule was offered the Lieut.-Governorship
of St. Helena. Two of the detailed privileges of the office were residence
at Longwood (afterwards the house of Napoleon), and the use of a certain