miscalculated. The governor was inexorable. | able and vigorous Mayors of the Palace-to The troops were steady. The sepoys, over Charles Martel and to Pepin. At one time whom Clive had always possessed extraordi- Clive had almost made up his mind to discard nary influence, stood by him with unshaken this phantom altogether; but he afterwards fidelity. The leaders in the plot were arrested, thought that it might be convenient still to use tried, and cashiered. The rest, humbled and the name of the Nabob, particularly in dealings dispirited, begged to be permitted to withdraw with other European nations. The French, the their resignations. Many of them declared Dutch, and the Danes, would, he conceived, their repentance even with tears. The younger submit far more readily to the authority of the offenders Clive treated with lenity. To the native prince, whom they had always been acringleaders he was inflexibly severe; but his customed to respect, than to that of a rival severity was pure from all taint of private ma- trading corporation. This policy may, at that levolence. While he sternly upheld the just time, have been judicious. But the pretence authority of his office, he passed by personal was soon found to be too flimsy to impose on insults and injuries with magnanimous disdain. anybody; and it was altogether laid aside. The One of the conspirators was accused of having heir of Meer Jaffier still resides at Moorshedaplanned the assassination of the governor; but bad, the ancient capital of his house, still bears Clive would not listen to the charge. "The the title of Nabob, is still accosted by the Engofficers," he said, "are Englishmen, not assas-lish as "Your Highness," and is still suffered sins."

While he reformed the civil service and established his authority over the army, he was equally successful in his foreign policy. His landing on Eastern ground was the signal for immediate peace. The Nabob of Oude, with a large army, lay at that time on the frontier of Bahar. He had been joined by many Afghans and Mahrattas, and there was no small reason to expect a general coalition of all the native powers against the English. But the name of Clive quelled in an instant all opposition. The enemy implored peace in the humblest language, and submitted to such terms as the new governor chose to dictate.

At the same time, the government of Bengal was placed on a new footing. The power of the English in that province had hitherto been altogether undefined. It was unknown to the ancient constitution of the empire, and it had been ascertained by no compact. It resembled the power which, in the last decrepitude of the western empire, was exercised over Italy by the great chiefs of foreign mercenaries, the Ricimers and the Odoacers, who put up and pulled down at their pleasure a succession of insignificant princes, dignified with the names of Cæsar and Augustus. But as in one case, so in the other, the warlike strangers at length found it expedient to give to a domination which had been established by arms alone, the sanction of law and ancient prescription. Theodoric thought it politic to obtain from the distant court of Byzantium a commission appointing him ruler of Italy; and Clive, in the same manner, applied to the court of Delhi for a formal grant of the powers of which he already possessed the reality. The Mogul was absolutely helpless; and, though he murmured, had reason to be well pleased that the English were disposed to give solid rupees, which he never could have extorted from them, in exchange for a few Persian characters which cost him nothing. A bargain was speedily struck; and the titular sovereign of Hindostan issued a warrant, empowering the Company to collect and administer the revenues of Bengal, Orissa, and Bahar.

There was still a Nabob, who stood to the British authorities in the same relation in which the last drivelling Chilperics and ChilHerics of the Merovingian line stood to their

to retain a portion of the regal state which surrounded his ancestors. A pension of a hundred and sixty thousand pounds a year is annually paid to him by the government. His carriage is surrounded by guards, and preceded by attendants with silver maces. His person and his dwelling are exempted from the ordinary authority of the ministers of justice. But he has not the smallest share of political power, and is, in fact, only a noble and wealthy subject of the Company.

It would have been easy for Clive, during his second administration in Bengal, to accumulate riches such as no subject in Europe possessed. He might, indeed, without subjecting the rich inhabitants of the province to any pressure beyond that to which their mildest rulers had accustomed them, have received presents to the amount of three hundred thousand pounds a year. The neighbouring princes would gladly have paid any price for his favour. But he appears to have strictly adhered to the rules which he laid down for the guidance of others. The Prince of Benares offered him diamonds of great value. The Nabob of Oude pressed him to accept a large sum of money and a casket of costly jewels. Clive courteously, but peremptorily, refused; and it deserves notice that he made no merit of his refusal, and that the facts did not come to light till after his death. He kept an exact account of his salary, of his share of the profits accruing from the trade in salt, and of those presents, which, according to the fashion of the East, it would be churlish to refuse. Out of the sum arising from these resources, he defrayed the expenses of his situation. The sur plus he divided among a few attached friends who had accompanied him to India. He always boasted, and as far as we can judge he boasted with truth, that his last administration diminished instead of increasing his for tune.

One large sum indeed he accepted. Meer Jaffier had left him by will above sixty thousand pounds sterling, in specie and jewels and the rules which had been recently laid down extended only to presents from the living and did not affect legacies from the dead. Clive took the money, but not for himself. He made the whole over to the Company, in trust for officers and soldiers invalided in their service

The fund, which still bears his name, owes its origin to this princely donation.

After a stay of eighteen months, the state of his health rendered it necessary for him to return to Europe. At the close of January, 1767, he quitted for the last time the country on whose destinies he had exercised so mighty an influence.

His second return from Bengal was not, like his first, greeted by the acclamations of his countrymen. Numerous causes were already at work which imbittered the remaining years of his life, and hurried him to an untimely grave. His old enemies at the India House were still powerful and active; and they had been reinforced by a large band of allies, whose violence far exceeded their own. The whole crew of pilferers and oppressors from whom he had rescued Bengal, persecuted him with the implacable rancour which belongs to such abject natures. Many of them even invested their property in India stock, merely that they might be better able to annoy the man whose firmness had set bounds to their rapacity. Lying newspapers were set up for no purpose but to abuse him; and the temper of the public mind was then such, that these arts, which under ordinary circumstances would have been ineffectual against truth and merit, produced an extraordinary impression.

from obscurity, that they had acquired great wealth, that they exhibited it insolently, that they spent it extravagantly, that they raised. the price of every thing in their neighbourhood, from fresh eggs to rotten boroughs; that their liveries outshone those of dukes, that their coaches were finer than that of the Lord, Mayor, that the examples of their large and illgoverned households corrupted half the servants in the country; that some of them, with all their magnificence, could not catch the tone of good society, but, in spite of the stud and the crowd of menials, of the plate and the Dresden china, of the venison and the Burgundy, were still low men ;-these were things which excited, both in the class from which they had sprung, and in that into which they attempted to force themselves, that bitter aversion which is the effect of mingled envy and contempt. But when it was also rumored that the fortune which had enabled its possessor to eclipse the Lord-Lieutenant on the race-ground, or to carry the county against the head of a house as old as "Domesday Book," had been accumulated by violating public faith-by deposing legitimate princes, by reducing whole provinces to beggary-all the higher and better as well as all the low and evil parts of human nature, were stirred against the wretch who had obtained, by guilt and dishonour, the riches which he now lavished with arrogant and inelegant profusion. The unfortunate Nabob seemed to be made up of those foibles against which comedy has pointed the most merciless ridicule, and of those crimes which have thrown the deepest gloom over tragedy

The great events which had taken place in India had called into existence a new class of Englishmen, to whom their countrymen gave the name of Nabobs. These persons had generally sprung from families neither ancient nor opulent; they had generally been sent at an early age to the East; and they had thereof Turcaret and Nero, of Monsieur Jourdain acquired large fortunes, which they had brought back to their native land. It was natural that, not having had much opportunity of mixing with the best society, they should exhibit some of the awkwardness and some of the pomposity of upstarts. It was natural that, during their sojourn in Asia, they should have acquired some tastes and habits surprising, if not disgusting, to persons who never had quitted Europe. It was natural that, having enjoyed great consideration in the East, they should not be disposed to sink into obscurity at home; and as they had money, and had not birth or high connection, it was natural that they should display a little obtrusively the advantage which they possessed. Wherever they settled there was a kind of feud between them and the old nobility and gentry, similar to that which raged in France between the farmer-general and the marquess. This enmity to the aristocracy long continued to distinguish the servants of the Company. More than twenty years after the time of which we are now speaking, Burke pronounced, that among the Jacobins might be reckoned the East Indians almost to a man, who cannot bear to find that their present importance does not bear a proportion to their wealth."

The Nabobs soon became a most unpopular class of men. Some of them had in the East displayed eminent talents, and rendered great services to the state; but at home their talents were not shown to advantage, and their services were little known. That they had sprung

and Richard the Third. A tempest of execration and derision, such as can be compared only to that outbreak of public feeling against the Puritans which took place at the time of the Restoration, burst on the servants of the Company. The humane man was horrorstruck at the way in which they had got their money, the thrifty man at the way in which they spent it. The dilettante sneered at their want of taste. The maccaroni black-balled them as vulgar fellows. Writers the most unlike in sentiment and style-Methodists and libertines, philosophers and buffoons-were for once on the same side. It is hardly too much to say, that, during a space of about thirty years, the whole lighter literature of England was coloured by the feelings which we have described. Foote brought on the stage an Anglo-Indian chief, dissolute, ungenerous, and tyrannical, ashamed of the humble friends of his youth, hating the aristocracy, yet childishly eager to be numbered among them, squandering his wealth on panders and flatterers, tricking out his chairmen with the most costly hot-house flowers, and astounding the ignorant with jargon about rupees, lacs, and jaghires. Mackenzie, with more delicate humour, depicted a plain country family, raised by the Indian acquisitions of one of its members to sudden opulence, and exciting derision by an awkward mimicry of the manners of the great. Cowper, in that lofty expostulation which glows with the very spirit of the Hebrew poets, placed the oppression of India fore

grounds, was amazed to see in the house of his noble employer a chest which had once been filled with gold from the treasury of Moorshedabad; and could not understand how the conscience of the criminal suffered him to sleep with such an object so near to his bedchamber. The peasantry of Surrey looked with mysteri

most in the list of those national crimes for which God had punished England with years of disastrous war, with discomfiture in her own seas, and with the loss of her transatlantic empire. If any of our readers will take the trouble to search in the dusty recesses of circulating libraries for some novel published sixty years ago, the chance is, that the villainous horror on the stately house that was rising or sub-villain of the story will prove to be a savage old Nabob, with an immense fortune, a tawny complexion, a bad liver, and a worse heart.

at Claremont, and whispered that the great wicked lord had ordered the walls to be made so thick in order to keep out the devil, who would one day carry him away bodily. Among the gaping clowns who drank in this frightful story, was a worthless ugly lad of the name of Hunter, since widely known as William Hunt. ingdon, S.S.; and the superstition which was strangely mingled with the knavery of that remarkable impostor, seems to have derived no small nutriment from the tales which he heard of the life and character of Clive.*

Such, as far as we can now judge, was the feeling of the country respecting Nabobs in general. And Clive was eminently the Nabob -the ablest, the most celebrated, the highest in rank, the highest in fortune, of all the fraternity. His wealth was exhibited in a manner which could not fail to excite odium. He lived with great magnificence in Berkeley Square. He reared one palace in Shropshire, In the mean time, the impulse which Clive and another at Claremont. His parliamentary had given to the administration of Bengal, was influence might vie with that of the greatest constantly becoming fainter and fainter. His families. But in all this splendour and power, policy was to a great extent abandoned; the envy found something to sneer at. On some abuses which he had suppressed began to reof his relations, wealth and dignity seem to vive; and at length the evils which a bad have sate as awkwardly as on Mackenzie's government had engendered, were aggravated "Margery Mushroom." Nor was he himself, by one of those fearful visitations which the with all his great qualities, free from those best government cannot avert. In the summer weaknesses which the satirists of that age re- of 1770, the rains failed; the earth was parchpresented as characteristic of his whole class. ed up; the tanks were empty; the rivers shrank In the field, indeed, his habits were remarkably within their beds; a famine, such as is known simple. He was constantly on horseback, was only in countries where every household denever seen but in his uniform, never wore silk, pends for support on its own little patch of never entered a palanquin, and was content cultivation, filled the whole valley of the Ganges with the plainest fare. But when he was no with misery and death. Tender and delicate longer at the head of an army, he laid aside women, whose veils had never been lifted bethis Spartan temperance for the ostentatious fore the public gaze, came forth from the inner luxury of a Sybarite. Though his person was chambers in which Eastern jealousy had kept ungraceful, and though his harsh features were watch over their beauty, threw themselves on redeemed from vulgar ugliness only by their the earth before the passers-by, and with loud stern, dauntless, and commanding expression, wailings implored a handful of rice for their he was fond of rich and gay clothing, and re- children. The Hoogley every day rolled down plenished his wardrobe with absurd profusion. thousands of corpses close by the porticoes Sir John Malcolm gives us a letter worthy of and gardens of the English conquerors. The Sir Matthew Mite, in which Clive orders "two very streets of Calcutta were blocked up by hundred shirts, the best and finest that can be the dying and the dead. The lean and feeble got for love or money." A few follies of this survivors had not energy enough to bear the description, grossly exaggerated by report, pro- bodies of their kindred to the funeral pile or to duced an unfavourable impression on the pub- the holy river, or even to scare away the jack. lic mind. But this was not the worst. Black als and vultures, who fed on human remains stories, of which the greater part were pure in the face of day. The extent of the mortality inventions, were circulated respecting his con- was never ascertained, but it was popularly duct in the East. He had to bear the whole reckoned by millions. This melancholy intelodium, not only of these bad acts to which heligence added to the excitement which already had once or twice stooped, but of all the bad acts of all the English in India-of bad acts committed when he was absent-nay, of bad acts which he had manfully opposed and severely punished. The very abuses against which he had waged an honest, resolute, and successful war, were laid to his account. He was, in fact, regarded as the personification of ail the vices and weaknesses which the public, with or without reason, ascribed to the English adventurers in Asia. We have ourselves heard old men, who knew nothing of his history, but who still retained the prejudices conceived in their youth, talk of him as an incarnate fiend. Johnson always held this language. Brown, See Huntingdon's Kingdom of Heaven taken by whom Clive employed to lay out his pleasure- Prayer, and his Letters.

prevailed in England on Indian subjects. The proprietors of East India stock were uneasy about their dividends. All men of common humanity were touched by the calamities of our unhappy subjects, and indignation soon began to mingle itself with pity. It was ru moured that the Company's servants had created the famine by engrossing all the rice of the country; that they had sold grain for eight, ten, twelve times the price at which they had bought it; that one English functionary, who, the year before, was not worth one hundred guineas, had, during that season of mise

ry, remitted sixty thousand pounds to London. These charges we believe to have been utterly unfounded. That servants of the Company had ventured, since Clive's departure, to deal in rice, is probable. That if they dealt in rice, they must have gained by the scarcity, is certain. But there is no reason for thinking that they either produced or aggravated an evil which physical causes sufficiently explain. The outcry which was raised against them on this occasion was, we suspect, as absurd as the imputations which, in times of dearth at home, were once thrown by statesmen and judges, and are still thrown by two or three old women, on the corn-factors. It was, how ever, so loud and so general, that it appears to have imposed on an intellect raised so high above vulgar prejudices as that of Adam Smith.* What was still more extraordinary, these unhappy events greatly increased the unpopularity of Lord Clive. He had been some years in England when the famine took place. None of his measures had the smallest tendency to produce such a calamity. If the servants of the Company had traded in rice, they had done so in direct contravention of the rule which he had laid down, and, while in power, had resolutely enforced. But in the eyes of his countrymen, he was, as we have said, the Nabob-the Anglo-Indian character personified; and, while he was building and planting in Surrey, he was held responsible for all the effects of a dry season in Bengal.

Parliament had hitherto bestowed very little attention on our Eastern possessions. Since the death of George the Second, a rapid succession of weak administrations, each of which was in turn flattered and betrayed by the court, had held the semblance of power. Intrigues in the palace, riots in the city, and insurrectionary movements in the American colonies, had left them little leisure to study Indian politics. Where they did interfere, their interference was feeble and irresolute. Lord Chatham, indeed, during the short period of his ascendency in the councils of George the Third, had meditated a bold and sweeping measure respecting the acquisitions of the Company. But his plans were rendered abortive by the strange malady which about that time began to overcloud his splendid genius.

try, hated at the India House, hated, above all, by those wealthy and powerful servants of the Company, whose rapacity and tyranny he had withstood. He had to bear the double odium of his bad and of his good actions-of every Indian abuse, and of every Indian reform. The state of the political world was such, that he could count on the support of no powerful connection. The party to which he had belonged, that of George Grenville, had been hostile to the government, and yet had never cordially united with the other sections of the Opposition-with the little band who still fol lowed the fortunes of Lord Chatham, or with the large and respectable body of which Lord Rockingham was the acknowledged leader. George Grenville was now dead: his followers were scattered; and Clive, unconnected with any of the powerful factions which divided the Parliament, could reckon on the votes only of those members who were returned by himself. His enemies, particularly those who were the enemies of his virtues, were unscrupulous, ferocious, implacable. Their malevolence aimed at nothing less than the utter ruin of his fame and fortune. They wished to see him expelled from Parliament, to see his spurs chopped off, to see his estate confiscated; and it may be doubted whether even such a result as this would have quenched their thirst for revenge.

Clive's parliamentary tactics resembled his military tactics. Deserted, surrounded, outnumbered, and with every thing at stake, he did not even deign to stand on the defensive, but pushed boldly forward to the attack. At an early stage of the discussions on Indian affairs, he rose, and in a long and elaborate speech, vindicated himself from a large part of the accusations which had been brought against him. He is said to have produced a great impression on his audience. Lord Chatham, who, now the ghost of his former self, loved to haunt the scene of his glory, was that night under the gallery of the House of Commons, and declared that he had never heard a finer speech. It was subsequently printed under Clive's direction, and must be allowed to exhibit, not merely strong sense and a manly spirit, but talents both for disquisition and declamation, which assiduous culture might have improved into the highest excellence. confined his defence on this occasion to the measures of his last administration; and succeeded so far, that his enemies thenceforth thought it expedient to direct their attacks chiefly against the earlier part of his life.

He

At length, in 1772, it was generally felt that Parliament could no longer neglect the affairs of India. The government was stronger than any which had held power since the breach between Mr. Pitt and the great Whig connection in 1761. No pressing question of domestic or European policy required the attention The earlier part of his life unfortunately preof public men. There was a short and delu- sented some assailable points to their hostility. sive lull between two tempests. The excite- A committee was chosen by ballot, to inquire ment produced by the Middlesex election was into the affairs of India; and by this committe over; the discontent of America did not yet the whole history of that great revolution which threaten civil war; the financial difficulties of threw down Surajah Dowlah, and raised Meer the Company brought on a crisis; the minis-Jaffier, was sifted with malignant care. Clive ters were forced to take up the subject; and was subjected to the most unsparing examinathe whole storm, which had long been gathering, now broke at once on the head of Clive. His situation was indeed singularly unfortunate. He was hated throughout the coun

• Wealth of Nationa, Book IV. chap. v.-Digression.

tion and cross-examination, and afterwards bitterly complained that he, the Baron of Plassey, had been treated like a sheep-stealer. The boldness and ingenuousness of his replies would alone suffice to show how alien from his nature were the frauds to which, in the course

f his Eastern negotiations, he had sometimes descended. He avowed the arts which he had employed to deceive Omichund; and resolutely aid that he was not ashamed of them, and that, n the same circumstances, he would again act in the same manner. He admitted that he had received immense sums from Meer Jaffier; but he denied that, in doing so, he had violated any obligation of morality or honour. He laid claim, on the contrary, and not without some reason, to the praise of eminent disinterested-posed to go to extremities against him. While ness. He described, in vivid language, the situation in which his victory had placed him; -a great prince dependent on his pleasure; an opulent city afraid of being given up to plunder; wealthy bankers bidding against each other for his smiles; vaults piled with gold and jewels, thrown open to him alone. By God, Mr. Chairman," he exclaimed, "at this moment I stand astonished at my own moderation!"