ing 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 single 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 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, of Turcaret and Nero, of Monsieur Jourdain 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 RestoraThe Nabobs soon became a most tion, burst on the servants of the Comunpopular class of men. Some of them pany. The humane man was horrorhad in the East displayed eminent ta- struck at the way in which they had lents, and rendered great services to got their money, the thrifty man at the the state; but at home their talents way in which they spent it. The Diwere not shown to advantage, and lettante sneered at their want of taste. their services were little known. That The Maccaroni black-balled them as they had sprung from obscurity, that vulgar fellows. Writers the most unthey had acquired great wealth, that like in sentiment and style, Methodists they exhibited it insolently, that they and libertines, philosophers and bufspent it extravagantly, that they raised foons, were for once on the same side. the price of every thing in their neigh-It is hardly too much to say that, during bourhood, from fresh eggs to rotten a space of about thirty years, the whole boroughs, that their liveries outshone lighter literature of England was cothose of dukes, that their coaches were loured by the feelings which we have finer than that of the Lord Mayor, that described. Foote brought on the stage the examples of their large and ill-go- an Anglo-Indian chief, dissolute, unverned households corrupted half the generous, and tyrannical, ashamed of servants in the country, that some of the humble friends of his youth, hating them, with all their magnificence, could the aristocracy, yet childishly eager to not catch the tone of good society, but, be numbered among them, squandering in spite of the stud and the crowd of his wealth on pandars and flatterers, menials, of the plate and the Dresden tricking out his chairmen with the most china, of the venison and the Burgundy, costly hot-house flowers, and astounding were still low men; these were things the ignorant with jargon about rupees, which excited, both in the class from lacs, and jaghires. Mackenzie, with which they had sprung and in the class more delicate humour, depicted a plain into which they attempted to force country family raised by the Indian themselves, the bitter aversion which is acquisitions of one of its members to the effect of mingled envy and con- sudden opulence, and exciting derision tempt. But when it was also rumoured by an awkward mimicry of the manners that the fortune which had enabled its of the great. Cowper, in that lofty expossessor to eclipse the Lord Lieute-postulation which glows with the very nant on the race-ground, or to carry spirit of the Hebrew poets, placed the

oppression of India foremost in the list | A few follies of this description, grossly of those national crimes for which God exaggerated by report, produced an 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 villain 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.

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 and another at Claremont. His parliamentary influence might vie with that of the greatest families. But in all this splendour and power envy found something to sneer at. On some of his relations wealth and dignity seem to have sat as awkwardly as on Mackenzie's Margery Mushroom. Nor was he himself, with all his great qualities, free from those weaknesses which the satirists of that age represented as characteristic of his whole class. In the field, indeed, his habits were remarkably simple. He was constantly on horseback, was never seen but in his uniform, never wore silk, never entered a palanquin, and was content with the plainest fare. But when he was no longer at the head of an army, he laid aside this Spartan temperance for the ostentatious luxury of a Sybarite. Though his person was ungraceful, and though his harsh features were redeemed from vulgar ugliness only by their stern, dauntless, and commanding expression, he was fond of rich and gay clothing, and replenished his wardrobe with absurd profusion. Sir John Malcolm gives us a letter worthy of Sir Matthew Mite, in which Clive orders "two hundred shirts, the best and finest that can be got for love or money.'

unfavourable impression on the public mind. But this was not the worst. Black stories, of which the greater part were pure inventions, were circulated touching his conduct in the East. He had to bear the whole odium, not only of those bad acts to which he 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 all 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, whom Clive employed to lay out his pleasure 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 could suffer him to sleep with such an object so near to his bedchamber. The peasantry of Surrey looked with mysterious horror on the stately house which was rising 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 Hunt, since widely known as William Huntington, 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.

In the mean time, the impulse which Clive had given to the administration of Bengal was constantly becoming fainter and fainter. His policy was to a great extent abandoned; the abuses which he ." had suppressed began to revive; and at

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, however, so loud and so general that it appears to have imposed even 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 acts 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.

length the evils which a bad government | have gained by the scarcity, is certain. had engendered were aggravated by But there is no reason for thinking that one of those fearful visitations which the best government cannot avert. In the summer of 1770, the rains failed; the earth was parched up; the tanks were empty; the rivers shrank within their beds; and a famine, such as is known only in countries where every household depends for support on its own little patch of cultivation, filled the whole valley of the Ganges with misery and death. Tender and delicate women, whose veils had never been lifted before the public gaze, came forth from the inner chambers in which Eastern jealousy had kept watch over their beauty, threw themselves on the earth before the passers-by, and, with loud wailings, implored a handful of rice for their children. The Hoogley every day rolled down thousands of corpses close to the porticoes and gardens of the English conquerors. The very streets of Calcutta were blocked up by the dying and the dead. The lean and feeble survivors had not energy enough to bear the bodies of their kindred to the funeral pile or to the holy river, or even to scare away the jackals and vultures, who fed on human remains in the face of day. The extent of the mortality was never ascertained; but it was popularly reckoned by mil- Parliament had hitherto bestowed lions. This melancholy intelligence very little attention on our Eastern added to the excitemer: which already possessions. Since the death of George prevailed in England on Indian sub- the Second, a rapid succession of weak jects. The proprietors of East India administrations, each of which was in stock were uneasy about their dividends. turn flattered and betrayed by the Court, All men of common humanity were had held the semblance of power. Intouched by the calamities of our un-rigues in the palace, riots in the capital, happy subjects; and indignation soon began to mingle itself with pity. It was rumoured 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 a hundred guineas, had, during that season of misery, remitted sixty thousands pounds to London. These charges we believe to have been 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

and insurrectionary movements in the American colonies, had left the advisers of the crown little leisure to study Indian politics. When they did interfere, their interference was feeble and irresolute. Lord Chatham, indeed, during the short period of his ascendancy in the councils of George the Third, had meditated a bold attack on the Company. But his plans were rendered abortive by the strange malady which about that time began to overcloud his splendid genius.

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

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 au

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 of public men. There was a short and delusive lull between two tempests. The excitement produced by the Middlesex election was over; the discontents of America did not yet threaten civil war; the financial diffi-dience. Lord Chatham, who, now the culties of the Company brought on a crisis; the Ministers were forced to take up the subject; and the 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 country, 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 | which still followed 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 only on the votes 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

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, when the fullest allowance has been made for the assistance which he may have obtained from literary friends, proves him to have possessed, 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. He 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.

The earlier part of his life unfortunately presented some assailable points to their hostility. A committee was chosen by ballot to inquire into the affairs of India; and by this committee the whole history of that great revolution which threw down Surajah Dowlah and raised Meer Jaffier was sifted with malignant care. Clive was subjected to the most unsparing examination 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 of his eastern negotiations, he had sometimes descended. He avowed the arts which he had employed to deceive Omichund, and resolutely said that he was not ashamed of them, and that, in 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 vio- | dulgence. Such men should be judged lated any obligation of morality or by their contemporaries as they will be honour. He laid claim, on the con-judged by posterity. Their bad actions trary, and not without some reason, to ought not indeed to be called good; the praise of eminent disinterestedness. but their good and bad actions ought He described in vivid language the to be fairly weighed; and if on the situation in which his victory had whole the good preponderate, the senplaced him great princes dependent tence ought to be one, not merely of on his pleasure: an opulent city afraid acquittal, but of approbation. Not a of being given up to plunder; wealthy single great ruler in history can be abbankers bidding against each other for solved by a judge who fixes his eye inhis smiles; vaults piled with gold and exorably on one or two unjustifiable jewels thrown open to him alone. "By acts. Bruce the deliverer of Scotland, God, Mr. Chairman," he exclaimed, Maurice the deliverer of Germany, at this moment I stand astonished at William the deliverer of Holland, his my own moderaton." great descendant the deliverer of England, Murray the good regent, Cosmo the father of his country, Henry the Fourth of France, Peter the Great of Russia, how would the best of them pass such a scrutiny? History takes wider views; and the best tribunal for great political cases is the tribunal which anticipates the verdict of history.

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Reasonable and moderate men of all parties felt this in Clive's case. They could not pronounce him blameless; but they were not disposed to abandon him to that low-minded and rancorous

The inquiry was so extensive that the Houses rose before it had been completed. It was continued in the following session. When at length the committee had concluded its labours, enlightened and impartial men had little difficulty in making up their minds as to the result. It was clear that Clive had been guilty of some acts which it is impossible to vindicate without attacking the authority of all the most sacred laws which regulate the intercourse of individuals and of states. But it was equally clear that he had dis-pack who had run him down and were played great talents, and even great vir- eager to worry him to death. Lord tues; that he had rendered eminent North, though not very friendly to him, services both to his country and to the was not disposed to go to extremities people of India; and that it was in against him. While the inquiry was truth not for his dealings with Meer still in progress, Clive, who had some Jaffier, nor for the fraud which he had years before been created a Knight of practised on Omichund, but for his the Bath, was installed with great determined resistance to avarice and pomp in Henry the Seventh's Chapel. tyranny, that he was now called in He was soon after appointed Lord question. Lieutenant of Shropshire. When he Ordinary criminal justice knows no-kissed hands, George the Third, who thing of set-off. The greatest desert had always been partial to him, adcannot be pleaded in answer to a charge mitted him to a private audience, of the slightest transgression. If a talked to him half an hour on Indian man has sold beer on a Sunday morn-politics, and was visibly affected when ing, it is no defence that he has saved the persecuted general spoke of his serthe life of a fellow-creature at the risk vices and of the way in which they of his own. If he has harnessed a had been requited. Newfoundland dog to his little child's carriage, it is no defence that he was wounded at Waterloo. But it is not in this way that we ought to deal with men who, raised far above ordinary restraints, and tried by far more than ordinary temptations, are entitled to a more than ordinary measure of in

At length the charges came in a definite form before the House of Commons. Burgoyne, chairman of the committee, a man of wit, fashion, and honour, an agreeable dramatic writer, an officer whose courage was never questioned, and whose skill was at that time highly esteemed, appeared