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An argument certainly somewhat strained has been urged by Mr. Mill, he says, some search was made for a convenient apartment, but none was found; upon which, information was obtained of a place which the English themselves had employed as a prison, and into this, without further enquiry, they were impelled. It unhappily was a small ill-aired and unwhole'some dungeon called the "black hole," and the English had their own practice to thank, for suggesting it to the officers of 'the Subadar as a fit place of confinement."

The innocent Mr. Mill seems to have been oblivious to the laws of space, and to the fact that room for twenty, is scarcely sufficient for seven times that number in an Indian June with the thermometer in the coolest rooms at 85° to 90°. Leaving Calcutta in the hands of the natives we turn to Clive, and find him, as our readers know, organizing in unison with Admiral Watson a strong force intended for the recovery of the town, Clive and Watson being then at Madras, where Mr. Pigot the Governor gave them every assistance."

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The expedition which they conjointly prepared sailed from Madras on the 16th of October, and on the 2nd of January 1757 after considerable delay and manoeuvring which we need not enter more fully into, Calcutta became once more a British Settlement. But another strife, worse than any but for a timely check, arose in the English force. Admiral Watson was " His Majesty's" servant, Clive belonged merely to the Company. It was a distinction in which the Admiral recognized a difference, and he lost no opportunity to exalt his own superiority over his heroic rival. Clive saw and severely felt this. "Between friends," he observes in a letter to Mr. Pigot,* "I cannot help regretting that ever I undertook this expedition. The 'mortifications I have received from Mr. Watson and the gentle'men of the Squadron, in point of prerogative, are such, that 'nothing but the good of the service could induce me to submit to them. The morning the enemy quitted Calcutta, a party ' of our sepoys entered the fort at the same time with a detach'ment from the ships, and were ignominiously thrust out; upon coming near the fort myself, I was informed that there were 'orders that none of the Company's officers or troops should 'have entrance. This, I own, enraged me to such a degree, that I was resolved to enter if possible, which I did, though not, as maliciously reported, by forcing the sentries; for they suffered us to pass very patiently upon being informed. 'who I was. At my entrance, Captain Coote presented me 'with a commission from Admiral Watson, appointing him

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*Sir John Malcolm,

Governor of Fort William, which I knew not a syllable of before; and it seems this dirty, under-hand contrivance was 'carried on in the most secret manner, under a pretence that I intended the same thing, which I declare, never entered my thoughts. This affair was compromised by the Admiral consenting that I should be Governor, and that the Company's troops should remain in the fort. The next day the Admiral delivered up the fort to the Company's representatives in the 'King's name.'

By 1757, Mr. Verelst had worked out one section of his ambitious project, and we find him become an important servant to Government, trusted and talked about, characterized by Clive as a gentleman upright, amiable, and intelligent, and one who had done the Company good service once more with his sword-for he alternated when he could between the desk and battle field and unsheathed his sword at the capture of Hooghly, and Chandernagore.* It was Clive's opinion then that the latter victory was of more consequence to the Company than the taking of Pondicherry, it was considered a "magni'ficent and rich colony; the garrison consisted of more than five hundred Europeans and seven hundred blacks all carrying arms; three hundred and sixty were prisoners, and nearly one hundred had been suffered to give their parole."

All these incidents were the component parts of the great mosaic known as Clive's handiwork. The fact of his remaining at Chandernagore with his troops, led to the battle of Plassey, and Plassey to the ignominious death of the foolish tyrant Suraj-ud-Dowlah. It has taken one hundred years to obliterate the stain which sullied the glory of that Victory. For a Colonel to interpolate a duplicate deed was something so foreign to the British notions of right, that even the fact of his three thousand men pitched on the bank of the river to meet next morning sixty-eight thousand of a foe, was not potent enough to obscure it. Clive's deeds in the field received a soldier's best incentive and reward, the acclamations of his countrymen. They did not wonder that for the first time in his life Colonel

*Lord Clive had paid Verelst the highest compliments. "Remember me to him in the kindest manner" he says in a letter to Mr. Sykes,-" tell him the Company and myself have no other dependence but upon the justness of his and your principles." Mr. Verelst was then supervisor of Burdwan and Midnapore, and in every circumstance of emergency Clive reposed his confidence in him and relied upon the help he received from him. He chose him in the negociations at Patna, and when Mr. Sumner, acting for Clive during the latter's absence from Calcutta, appeared to be working imprudently, Clive commissioned Mr. Verelst to hasten down from Burdwan and remonstrate with him on the weakness of his conduct.

Clive should call a council of war, and meditate retreat; nor did they fail to honor him when he banished his despair on that night at the river's side, when his spirits grew high, so high as to win the victory which inaugurated the English policy in Hindostan; but they did condemn him for the ignoble act which drove the greedy Omichund into a state of fatal idiocy. More than that Harry Verelst was at Plassey, we do not know, but we find that he was as ignorant of Omichund's treatment as the fleet camel which bore the defeated Soubahdar from the field.

We have hastily passed through those years to which Mr. Verelst owed all his experience, and upon which any future successes were based, and must stride rapidly on to the year 1767, without even a notice of 1763, which saw the ambitious Harry Verelst a member of Council. It was a case of self-help; he had no tangible influence in high places. His only grand friend, Clive, was an Omrah with a splendid jaghire of £30,000 per annum, but he was too much engrossed in the matters of his increasing empire to take much heed of the struggler whose grandfather had stood uncovered in the Royal presence; all he could afford to do was to take note of Verelst's worth and turn it to account at a future day. We doubt if the Hero of Assaye ever monopolized the adulation of Britain as much as the Hero of Plassey. We are told that his name was in everybody's 'mouth at Court and every where else; and the most forward 'to load him with praise seems to have been George the Second 'himself. In the year 1758 when disaster attended all the mili'tary operations of England by land and sea, and the Duke of 'Cumberland was forced, by public opinion, to retire from the 'office of Commander-in-Chief, Lord Ligonier, who succeeded 'him, took occasion one day to ask the King's permission for the young Lord Dunmore to serve as a volunteer in the army of the 'King of Prussia. Leave was refused, upon which the Comman'der-in-Chief went on to say, " may he not join the Duke of 'Brunswick then ?" "pshaw" replied the King" what can he get 'by attending the Duke of Brunswick. If he desire to learn the 'art of war, let him go to Clive." But higher renown befel him than this, when the illustrious Pitt spoke of him as" a heavenborn General, as the only officer who by land or sea had sustained the reputation of the country and added to its glory." Then the young writer" received his Irish peerage, and was chafed by its not being an English one, and he hesitated in accepting his Queen's offer when she proposed to stand Godmother for one of his children. He had gone to England to be lionized, and lionized he was. Croesus was a mendicant to him. Fretful in his obscure boyhood, he was overbearing at thirty-four, and exorbitant

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for the worship of the world. Homage was not paid to him so bulkily as he could have wished; it did not pour in as his lakhs had done, he saw around him jealousy and envy; even the Company's Directors stood ominously aloof from him. He cast them all into chancery because they coveted his rich jaghire, and then in the face of that outrage demanded the trinitarian appointment of Commander-in-Chief, President, and Governor of Bengal. The length, and breadth, and height of that Shropshire boy's ambition cannot be measured. His fights in the fairs of Market Drayton were all small Plasseys. He who had bestridden the dragon gurgoil of the church steeple, two hundred feet above his terrified spectators, simply to procure a certain smooth stone, maintained the allegory inviolate. He was on the gurgoil through his whole life. Can we marvel that he taxed the timid shopkeepers of Drayton in small pence and trifling articles, in compensation to himself and the little band he led for abstaining from breaking their windows? Was he not breaking larger windows all his life?

The year 1767 which witnessed Clive's return to England, when a feather in the scale of public opinion would have made him either a hero or charlatan, saw Harry Verelst fairly engaged upon the third section of his life. There was nobody to whom Lord Clive felt or evinced more attachment than to him who had worked boldly but silently at his side, and upon his retirement Harry Verelst became Governor of Bengal. Before Clive left, he administered to his friend and successor advice so sound and earnest, that there was no doubting the sincerity of either his friendship or his hopes of India. In a letter to Mr. Verelst he says, alluding to the Batta disputes-" There 'was a committee to each brigade sworn to secrecy, and I have it from undoubted authority, that the officers thought themselves 'so sure of carrying their point, that a motion was made and agreed to, that the Governor and Council should be directed to release them from their covenants. The next step would, I suppose, have been the turning me and the committee out of the service. In short I tremble with horror when I think how near the Company were to the brink of destruction. The plot hath been deeply laid, and of four months' standing. I can give a shrewd guess at the first promoters. One of them I have already mentioned to you, who will ere long, I hope, be brought to condign punishment. Remember again to act with the greatest spirit; and if the Civilians entertain the 'officers, dismiss them the service; and if the latter behave with insolence, or are refractory, make them all prisoners,

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' and confine them in the new Fort.* If you have any thing to apprehend write me word, and I will come down in'stantly, and bring with me the third brigade, whose officers and men can be depended upon." The following month he wrote to the same gentleman. "The spirit of civil as well as military mutiny that has lately appeared in Calcutta, deserves so 'much of our attention, as to mark the most turbulent, whe'ther Company's servants, or free merchants, and resolutely send them to Europe, for Bengal never can be what it ought to be, whilst licentiousness is suffered to trample upon "authority."

Besides this advice which was not lost upon Mr. Verelst, Lord Clive sprinkled with the utmost pleasantness admonitions of a kind not likely to be treated with disregard. "I would strongly recommend you," said he, " to remain in India until you have increased your fortune," urging somewhat strangely that unless he did so, his friends at home, upon his return, would be disappointed and annoyed. Clive himself during his first eighteen months in England spent sixty thousand pounds. Why Verelst should keep aloof from the gold and be alone as an exception, was a question Clive was unable to answer.† India was Pactolian ground, albeit the treasury at Calcutta was so

"The foundations of the new Fort were laid by Lord Clive in 1757, soon after the battle of Plassey. It cost two millions of pounds sterling. Some Military critics have objected to it that it is much too expensive to be easily defended by a small force, and that a force large enough to defend it could keep the field. It would require in war time to be garrisoned by 10,000 men. But then it is to be remembered that it could hold on an emergency all the Christian population of Calcutta, and sometimes unmilitary people, comparatively inefficient in the open field, may do good service under the protection of the ramparts."—Major D. L. Richardson.

+ Time has changed the customs and habits of the Europeans in India in various ways, and if large fortunes are yet to be acquired with comparative rapidity and ease, still the disappearance of that marvellous monopoly of a century ago has called for an energy and activity, for thew and sinew, which then had scarcely an existence. They of Verelst's time engaged in commerce or in higher avocations were nothing more than a time-killing race of men, who diversified their slothful routine of life with excesses in wine-cooled not by ice but saltpetre-or poisoned themselves with the nauseating numdungus which their Hookah-Burdars palmed off upon them as the genuine leaf or Bilsah. But the Hookah at that period was seldom out of the hands of the Europeans, its use was as general as it was pernicious, and a servant, or sometimes two, were considered necessary, whose duty was to take charge of the pipe and prepare it whenever their masters required it. One hundred Rupees per month was not at all an unusual item attached to the smoking expenses.

And those were the days too of unrestrained Suttee when the infatuated Hindoo widows exceeded the wild fanaticism of the Crestonians of Herodotus, and followed while yet in the vigour of youth, and sometimes beau