often empty. The French General Bussy, careful of his own interests as he was of those of his country, had gone back to France with an immense fortune, with which he dazzled a niece of the Duc de Choisel into wedlock. Dupleix had once been the richest of them all. Clive returned wealthy, and "Tory Harry" was not less poor. Mr. Scrafton says of the latter gentleman, "he goes about boasting of your Lordship's conversion, abuses Mr. Pitt, impeaching his patriotism and honor, because a private gentleman has left him an estate which he 'swears he has no right to,* and that the will should be set aside, for that the man who made it must have been non com; trumps up the Duchess of Marlborough's legacy, the Hanover 'Millstone, &c. &c., swears Lord Bute is the only man of ' merit, and tories the only true patriots." Mr. Pigot made a stately and triumphal march through a baronetcy to a peerage, and though he died unworthily in a prison house, had saved his forty lakhs. Mr. Vansittart was found lamenting his lot, having secured only three thousand pounds per annum, forgetting the deplorable state of the treasury while he was Governor, the threatened outbreak of the troops, and the intrigues and invasion. The presents of money and jewels, and in many cases land, made by the wealthier natives to the Europeans who were at all concerned in the administration of the country almost surpass belief.† They were great enough to have inspired Camoens when he sang of India in his Lusiad. Meer Jaffier's grant to Clive was the spontaneous impulse of a sentiment believed to be scarce in Orientals, he was grateful for his timely deliverance from the snares of Alumghir the second, and to the romantic extent of ty-the husbands whose deaths were, from a melancholy custom, merely the herald of their own.

The prohibition of this revolting spectacle advanced the native population one generation in point of civilization.

In addition to what he had before.

+ Cowper has given us a severe view of India in two lines less than a sonnet

"Hast thou, though suckled at fair Freedom's breast,
Exported slavery to the conquered East?

Pulled down the Tyrants India served with dread,
And raised thyself, a greater, in their stead?
Gone thither armed and hungry; returned full
Fed from the richest veins of the Mogul,

A despot big with power obtained by wealth,
And that obtained by rapine and by stealth?
With Asiatic vices stored thy mind.

But left their virtues and thine own behind?
And, having trucked thy soul, brought home the fee
To tempt the poor to sell himself to thee?"

thirty thousand pounds sterling a year. Yet for all this Clive pronounced the system to be a "great evil," and he drew up a covenant for all the civil and military servants of the Com pany to sign, which would prohibit them from henceforth listening to these tangible blandishments of the native princes. When General Carnac was requested to write his name at the foot of the bonds he stood in a more awkward position than the reader ean imagine. The emperor had offered him two lakhs of rupees, and he looked upon the gift with a kindly emotion, but after a little delay the authorities considered his case and allowed him to accept the gift, upon which decision the General signed the covenant with precipitate pleasure. These new covenants, says Mr. Verelst, a short while after, had excluded the receipt of presents; while the increased investment of the Company, after the Dewanny was obtained, absorbed the trade of individuals, and removed all prospect of advantage in a foreign commerce. No other fund remained for the reward of services, and without proposing a reasonable prospect of independent fortunes, it was ridiculous to hope that common virtue could withstand the allurements of daily temptation, or that men armed with power would abstain from the spoils of a prostrate nation." But Lord Clive in his admirable minute considered a state of independence and honor must be highly eligible to a Governor, and in his opinion, it could only be acquired by cutting off all possibility of his benefitting himself either by trade, or that influence which his power necessarily gives him in the opulent provinces. Clive writes," although by these means a Governor 'will not be able to amass a fortune of a million, or half a million, in the space of two or three years, yet he will acquire a very handsome independency, and be in that very situation which 'a man of nice honor and true zeal for the service would wish to ' possess. Thus situated he may defy all opposition in Council, he will have nothing to ask, nothing to propose but what he means for the advantage of his employers. He may defy the law, because there can be no foundation for a bill of discovery; and he may defy the obloquy of the world, because there can 'be nothing censurable in his conduct. In short if stability can 'be insured to such a Government as this, where riches have been 'acquired in abundance in a small space of time, by all ways and ' means, and by men with or without capacities, it must be effect

*Sujah-ud-Dowlah wrote to Mr. Verelst on the 1st of August 1768, "I cannot express my thanks for the favor you have done me in putting and end to the English trade in my territories. May the Almighty long preserve you, for I have still greater expectations from your friendship." Tho benediction is accounted for in a thoroughly Asiatic manner.

SEPTEMBER, 1860.

C

'ed by a Governor thus restricted; and I shall think it an honor if my proposal be approved, to set the first example."

This proposal being approved by the Council, a deed between Lord Clive and the Company, correspondent with the oath, was executed and registered in the Mayor's Court, by which the Governor bound himself to the faithful performance of every clause in the penal sum of £150,000 to be forfeited in case he should act contrary to that indenture; one-third to the informer, and two-thirds to the Company; recoverable upon proof given in the Court of Chancery, Exchequer, the Mayor's Court at Calcutta, before the Court of Directors, or the Council of Bengal. We must now consider the memorable trading, the unparallelled monopoly, in salt, betel nut, and tobacco, to have vanished away, so far as the servants of the East Indian Company were concerned. On it they had fattened; untold thousands-for we do not wish to make this brief and imperfect sketch, a handbook to private incomes-had been drained from the fabulous profits of that bartering. We must also consider the singularly splendid career of Clive to have ended too. We will quote from one whose eloquent manly echo has not yet died out-and whose pen not only won a peerage for himself, but in its wonderful power, dispelled the obloquy which attached itself to Clive's. Unbiassed in any way, based only upon the laws of fairness and justice, mellowed in the spirit of comprehensive charity, Macaulay stood forth twenty years ago, and in the obscurity of an anonymous contribution to a Northern magazine, set the world a thinking, forced the people on its surface to sift the truth, and straightway there rose Phoenix-like from the ignoble gloom, the man Robert Clive, who, with all his faults and shortcomings, had incontestably raised British India to the foremost rank in the category of those dominions upon which the sun never sets. Macaulay cannot be too often quoted, when speak. ing of Clive, and "he says that when he landed in Calcutta in 1765 Bengal was regarded as a place to which Englishmen were sent only to get rich, by any means, in the shortest possible time. He first made dauntless and unsparing war on that gigantic system of oppression, extortion and corruption. In that war he manfully put to hazard his ease, his fame and his splendid fortune. The same sense of justice which forbids us to conceal or extenuate the faults of his earlier days compels us to admit that those faults were nobly repaired.

"If the reproach of the Company and of its servants has been 'taken away, if in India the yoke of foreign masters, elsewhere 'the heaviest of all yokes, has been found lighter than that of any native dynasty, if to that gang of public robbers, which

formerly spread terror through the whole plain of Bengal, has 'succeeded a body of functionaries not more highly distinguished by ability and diligence than by integrity, disinterestedness, and public spirit, if we now see such men as Munro, Elphinstone, and Metcalfe, after leading victorious armies, after making and deposing kings, return, proud of their honorable poverty, from a land which once held out to every greedy factor the hope of 'boundless wealth, the praise is in no small measure due to Clive. 'His name stands high on the roll of conquerors. But it is 'found in a better list, in the list of those who have done and 'suffered much for the happiness of mankind. To the warrior, history will assign a place in the same rank with Lucullus and Trajan. Nor will she deny to the reformer a share of that veneration with which France cherishes the memory of Turgot, 'and with which the latest generations of Hindoos will contem'plate the statue of Lord William Bentinck."

Leaving Lord Clive that he may retire to England, -there to kiss the King's hand, and become a Lieutenant over the proud Salopians, and in the same year the Lord Lieutenant of Montgomeryshire, we return to Mr. Harry Verelst, Lord Clive's successor as the Governor of Bengal, and with some of the events of his administration will conclude this retrospect.

The anti-trading covenants had entirely changed the character of India. It was no longer one vast mercantile house, but had stept into the dignity of a sovereign power. The head partners of the old firm had left the business to younger men as it were, contented with the sixteen anna share which had resulted from their toils. They did this, because they saw no more massive profits to be gained.

While the French and English were busy with their strifes in the Carnatic, Hyder Ali, one of the most talented of Asiatics though merely the son of a petty chief at Dinavelli, raised himself by steady degrees until he deposed the royal family and founded the Mahommedan kingdom of Mysore. In the year of Mr. Verelst's accession the dominions of Hyder Ali contained 70,000 square miles, but his temperament was innately aggrarian, and he seemed only to reign that he might conduct never ending feuds with the English and Mahrattas. He was proud of his enmity with the former, as it gave him a distinction, but when he discovered the English were joining the Nizam by agreement, Hyder immediately veered round and entered into friendly conditions with the latter. His next move was to attack the English conjointly with his new and sudden ally, and Mr. Verelst found himself at the head of a people embroiled by the incessant annoyances of such attacks. These attacks were al

ways followed by victories for the English when the real fighting began, and the Nizam commenced to think that he had surely chosen the weaker side, and his object was to be found with the winners. His suspicions being confirmed, he emerged from the difficulty in the simplest manner, by hastily breaking off all connection with Hyder Ali, and renewing his treaty with the Madras Presidency.

The Madras Government seeing then that the Nizam was wholly in its power, and that it might do anything it chose with Mysore, conferred the title of its sovereignty upon Mohammed Ali. Finding that Colonel Smith who then had chief command, had formed a correct estimate of this strange act of the Government, the Council recalled him, and in his stead appointed Colonel Wood, a man as unversed in Indian matters, as Smith was experienced.

This blind act was not kept secret from Hyder Ali, who immediately encountered Wood, and so signal was the defeat which the English had to endure that day, that not even the baggage was saved. By continued strategy which displayed Hyder's soldierly capabilities in a high degree, he succeeded in tempting his enemy away from the capital, and then made an extraordinary forced march upon the town, accomplishing the distance of one hundred and twenty miles in three days.

Placing himself in command of six thousand horse he appeared like an apparition, filling the town with fear and despair, upon Mount St. Thomas.

The effect was instantaneous, for, to save the city, peace was made with Hyder upon his own terms, "a mutual restitution of 'conquests, and a treaty of mutual alliance in defensive wars."

Hitherto the enemies of former Governors had invariably been troops in the battle field bent upon territorial aggrandizement, but a distinctively new one in the form of a single individual arose under Harry Verelst's rule, to the waste of his own wealth, and of his Governor's time.

This individual was a Mr. William Bolts, who was many years in the service of the Company of Bengal, was an Alderman or Judge of the Mayor's Court at Calcutta, and all along, a merchant. Mr. Bolts arrived in India about the year 1758 and we soon find him a principal figure among the group of traders. The extent to which this gentleman engaged, and the moderation with which he conducted himself, will be best known from his fortune of ninety thousand pounds gained within six years, together with the extreme eagerness with which he endeavoured upon all occasions, to degrade the authority of the Government, and prevent any effectual protection being given to the natives.