To this journal Bain contributed many important articles and discussions; and in fact he bore the whole expenses of it till Robertson, owing to ill-health, resigned the editorship in 1891, when it passed into other hands.
When his father was sent as minister to Great Britain in 1825 he accompanied him as secretary of the American legation, and when his father returned home on account of ill health he remained as charge d'affaires until August 1826.
He was adjutant-general of New York state in 1839-1843, and became a brigadier-general of volunteers in the Union army in 1861, commanded a division in Virginia in 1862-1863, and, being compelled by ill health to resign from the army, was U.S. minister to the Papal States in 1863-1867.
There is good reason to suppose that the Beauforts had gone so far as to contemplate a forced abdication on the score of the king's ill-health.
Meanwhile his indiscriminate appetite for reading had begun to fix itself more and more decidedly upon history; and the list of historical works devoured by him during this period of chronic ill-health is simply astonishing.
