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LONDON:

A. and G. A. SPOTTISWOODE,

New-street-Square.

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CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL ESSAYS

CONTRIBUTED TO

THE EDINBURGH REVIEW.

LORD CLIVE. (JANUARY, 1840.)

The Life of Robert Lord Clive; collected from
Papers, communicated by the Earl of Powis.
GENERAL SIR JOHN MALCOLM, K. C. B.
London: 1836.

the Family BY MAJOR3 vols. 8vo.

We have always thought it strange that, while the history of the Spanish empire in America is familiarly known to all the nations of Europe, the great actions of our countrymen in the East should, even among ourselves, excite little interest. Every schoolboy knows who imprisoned Montezuma, and who strangled Atahualpa. But we doubt whether one in ten, even among English gentlemen of highly cultivated minds, can tell who won the battle of Buxar, who perpetrated the massacre of Patna, whether Surajah Dowlah ruled in Oude or in Travancore, or whether Holkar was a Hindoo or a Mussulman. Yet the victories of Cortes

were gained over savages who had no letters, who were ignorant of the use of metals, who had not broken in a single animal to labour, who wielded no better weapons than those which could be made out of sticks, flints, and fish-bones, who regarded a horsesoldier as a monster, half man and half beast, who took a harquebusier for a sorcerer, able to scatter the thunder and lightning of the skies. The people of India, when we subdued them, were ten times as

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