D'Estaing, who expected to have taken the place with little trouble, greatly alarmed lest the English should seize most of the French West Indian islands in his absence, urged an assault contrary to the wishes of Lincoln, and this was made on the 9th of October. The forces, five thousand eight hundred in number, were led on in two columns, but they were received by such a raking fire from walls and redoubts, and from the brig flanking the right of the British lines, that they were thrown back in confusion; and before D'Estaing and Lincoln could restore order, Colonel Maitland made a general sortie with fixed bayonets, and the whole attacking force fled in utter rout. D'Estaing would now remain no longer, but re-embarked his forces, and sailed away, to the unspeakable chagrin of the Americans, who retreated in all haste, the greater part of the militia breaking up and returning home.
But the League did more than attempt to convert the country party. They determined to create a country party of their own. They had already taken up the registration of voters in the[510] boroughs, from which they proceeded, with that practical common sense which had distinguished nearly all their movements, to inquire into the position of the country constituencies, where hitherto the landowners had held undisputed sway. The scheme which resulted from this incursion into the dominions of the enemy was developed by Mr. Cobden at a meeting in the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, on the 24th of October, 1844. The Chandos clause in the Reform Act, giving the tenant-farmers votes for county members, had so strengthened the landlords' influence in the county that opposition at most of the county elections was hopeless. But Mr. Cobden showed his hearers that the counties were really more vulnerable than the small pocket boroughs. In many of these there was no increase from year to year in the number of votersno extension of houses. The whole property belonged to a neighbouring noble, and as Mr. Cobden said, "You could no more touch the votes which he held through the property than you could touch the balance in his banker's hands." But the county constituency might be increased indefinitely, for there it required but a freehold property of the value of forty shillings a year to give a man a vote. This sum had been adopted from an ancient regulation, when money was of far greater value, and land of far less money worth than it was then; but the forty-shilling qualification existed, and was a powerful engine for the creation of voters. Up to that time it had had but little effect. The laws of England, but more especially the habits and prejudices of landowners, had always kept the land of the county in so few hands as to present an extraordinary contrast with the condition of things in all other nations of Europe. The danger of the forty-shilling clause to aristocratic influence in the county was not perceived, simply because forty-shilling freeholders were rare. But there was no reason why they should be rare. The passion for possessing freehold land was widely spread, and a few facilities offered for purchasing it would soon create a large number of small holders. The chief difficulty in the way of this had hitherto been the great cost of transferring land. Owing to the complicated laws of real property, the land, unlike other articles, could only be bought and sold after a minute investigation into the owner's title, which necessitated an historical account of the ownership extending back over many years. All this, however, the League could easily obviate. They could buy land in the lump, register its title once for all, and part it into small pieces for small buyers. "This," remarked Mr. Cobden, "must be done," and it was done. The Conservative party sneered at the Manchester man's proposition of serving land over a counter, like calico, by the yard; but the movement soon began to tell upon elections, and to alarm the great landed proprietors.Fortunately, the princess was safely delivered at St. James's (June 4), though the house was unprepared for such an emergencythe rooms and beds being unaired, and there being no adequate suite of servants. The moment that the king heard of this extraordinary conduct of the prince, he despatched Walpole and Lord Harrington to attend the birth, but they were too late. After that the king repulsed all the prince's advances towards a reconciliation. Frederick betook himself to Norfolk House, St. James's Square, and there all the opponents of his father's Government collected around him. The prince was now the head and centre of the Opposition himself.
ONE:[See larger version]
TWO:Much opposition was excited by the part of Mr. Stanley's letter to the Duke of Leinster which spoke of "encouraging" the clergy to give religious instruction, and requiring the attendance of the scholars at their respective places of worship on Sunday to be registered by the schoolmaster. This was treading on religious ground, and committing both Protestants and Catholics to the actual support of what they mutually deemed[359] false. But the Government were driven to this course by the cry of "infidelity" and "atheism" which the new plan encountered as soon as it was proposed in Parliament. Explanations were afterwards issued by authority, showing that the "encouragement" of religious instruction meant only granting "facility of access" to the children out of school hours, not "employing or remunerating" the teachers. The Commissioners very properly treated the Bible as a book for religious instruction; but so far from offering the sacred volume an "indignity," or "forbidding" its use, they said: "To the religious instructors of the children they cheerfully leave, in communicating instruction, the use of the sacred volume itself, as containing those doctrines and precepts a knowledge of which must lie at the foundation of all true religion." To obviate every cavil, however, as far as possible, without departing from the fundamental principle of the Board, it was arranged that the Bible might be read at any hour of the day, provided the time was distinctly specified, so that there should be no suspicion of a desire to take advantage of the presence of Roman Catholics. This satisfied the Presbyterians, who nearly all placed their schools in connection with the Board. But the great body of the Established clergy continued for some time afterwards hostile, having put forward the Church Education Society as a rival candidate for Parliamentary recognition and support. Its committee declared that the national system was "essentially defective" in permitting the Catholic children to refuse the Bible. They said this permission "involves a practical indignity to the Word of God," and that it was "carrying into effect the discipline of the Church of Rome, in restricting the use of the inspired writings." This was the grand charge against the Board, the vital point in the controversy.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.
ONE:But the event which, far more than the battle of Baylen, showed Buonaparte and the world the sort of war he had provoked, was the siege of Saragossa. This ancient city, the capital of Aragon, stands on the right bank of the Ebro, with a suburb on the left bank connected with it by a bridge. Another river, a small one, called the Cozo, flowed into the Ebro, close under the city walls. The immediate neighbourhood of Saragossa is flat, and, on one side of the river, marshy; its walls were of brick, about ten feet high, old and ruinous, but in places they were only of mud. It might seem that no strong defence of such a place could be made against an army of thirteen thousand menveterans who had served in Germany and Poland, and who were furnished with battering trains and every means of assault. But the streets of the city were narrow and crooked, the houses strong and lofty, the rooms being almost all vaulted, and therefore almost impervious to shell. The inhabitants were sixty thousand. Saragossa raised the flag of resistance the moment that Murat issued his proclamation on the 20th of May, informing the Spanish people of the abdication of Charles and Ferdinand, and calling on the Spaniards to submit to the new government. On the 16th of June General Lefebvre commenced the attack by driving in the outposts of Palafox, the Spanish General, and establishing strong guards before the gates, but the Spaniards fought him street by street. As fast as they knocked down the walls and scattered the sandbags, they were repaired again by the Spaniards. At this stage of the siege, Augustina, "the Maid of Saragossa," a handsome woman of the lower class, of about twenty-two years of age, arrived on one of the batteries with refreshments, and found every man who had defended it lying slain. The fire was so tremendous that the citizens hesitated to re-man the guns. Augustina sprang forward over the bodies of the dead and dying, snatched a match from the hand of a dead artilleryman, and fired off a six-and-twenty-pounder. She then jumped upon the gun, and vowed never to quit it alive during the siege. Such an example added new courage to the defenders; and the siege proceeded with incessant fury. At this juncture Buonaparte withdrew a part of the troops, ordering Lefebvre to join Bessires with them, and Verdier was left to continue the siege with about ten thousand men. The Saragossans, encouraged by this, and assisted by some regular troops, not only defended the town more vigorously than ever, but sent out detachments to cut off Verdier's supplies. After several determined assaults he raised the siege on the 13th of August.
TWO:Otherwise the prospect was dismal enough, and some of the greatest thinkers of the age were profoundly affected by the conviction that they were on the eve of a vast convulsionthat the end of the world was at hand, and that the globe was about to emerge into a new state of existence. The unsettled state of society accounts, in some measure, for the prevalence of the delusions of Edward Irvingthen in the height of his fame; delusions from which such minds as Dr. Arnold's did not wholly escape. In reply to inquiries about the gift of tongues, this great man wrote:"If the thing be real, I should take it merely as a sign of the coming day of the Lord. However, whether this be a real sign or no, I believe the day of the Lord is comingi.e. the termination of one of the great ages of the human race; whether the final one of all, or not, that, I believe, no created being knows, or can know.... My sense of the evils of the times, and to what purpose I am bringing up my children, is overwhelmingly bitter. All the moral and physical worlds appear so exactly to announce the coming of the great day of the Lordi.e. a period of fearful visitation, to terminate the existing state of thingswhether to terminate the whole existence of the human race, neither man nor angel knowsthat no entireness of private happiness can possibly close my mind against the sense of it."
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.
ONE:The House of Commons received the speech with enthusiasm, and carried up an address of thanks in a body. Very different, however, was the reception of the speech in the House of Lords. Lord Wharton proposed that in the address they should declare themselves against a separate peace, and the Duke of Marlborough supported that view. He said that for a year past the measures pursued were directly opposed to her Majesty's engagement with the Allies, had sullied the glories of her reign, and would render our name odious to all nations. Lord Strafford, who had come over from the Hague purposely to defend the Government policy, and his own share in it at Utrecht, asserted that the opposition of the[6] Allies would not have been so obstinate had they not been encouraged by a certain member of that House who corresponded with them, and stimulated them by assurances that they would be supported by a large party in England. This blow aimed at Marlborough called up Lord Cowper, who directed his sarcasm against Strafford on the ground of his well-known illiterate character, observing that the noble lord had been so long abroad that he had forgotten not only the language but the constitution of his country; that according to our laws it could never be a crime in an individual to correspond with its allies, but that it was a crime to correspond, as certain persons did, with the common enemy, unknown to the allies, and to their manifest prejudice. The amendment of Lord Wharton, however, was rejected, and the protest, entered against its rejection by twenty peers and bishops, was voted violent and indecorous, and erased from the journal.
TWO:Admirable as was the character of Caroline, she has been accused of retaining her resentment against her son to the last. Pope and Chesterfield affirm that she died refusing to see or forgive her son; but Ford, though he says she would not see him, states that she "heartily forgave him"; and Horace Walpole says she not only forgave him, but would have seen him, but that she feared to irritate her husband. To Sir Robert Walpole she expressed her earnest hope that he would continue to serve the king as faithfully as he had done, and, curiously enough, recommended the king to him, not him to the king. She died on the 20th of November, perhaps more lamented by Walpole than by her own husband (though, as Lord Hervey tells us, George was bitterly affected), for Walpole well knew how much her strong sense and superior feeling had tended to keep the king right, which he could not hope for when she was gone. The king appeared to lament her loss considerably for a time, that is, till consoled by his mistress, the Countess of Walmoden, whom he had kept for a long time at Hanover, and now soon brought over to England. He sent for her picture when she was dead, shut himself up with it some hours, and declared, on reappearing, that he never knew the woman worthy to buckle her shoe.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.
TWO:Meanwhile, the Highland army was continuing its retreat. On the 20th of December they left Carlisle, and crossed into Scotland by fording[103] the Esk. On the 26th Lord George entered Glasgow, and Charles, with the other division, on the 27th. At Glasgow the prince and the army lay for seven days to rest, and to levy contributions of all kinds of articles of apparel for the soldiers. On the 3rd of January, 1746, the same day that Cumberland left Carlisle for London, Charles marched his army out of Glasgow, new clad and new shod, for Stirling. The next day he took up his quarters at the house of Bannockburn, and distributed his men through the neighbouring villages, Lord George Murray occupying Falkirk. Lords Strathallan and Drummond soon arrived from Perth with their united force, attended by both battering-guns and engines from France.
FORE:The ruinous expenditure of the war, and the continual difficulties into which the Civil List had fallen, now roused throughout the country a strong demand for economical reform. The Duke of Richmond introduced the subject into the Upper House by moving, on the 7th of December, that an Address be conveyed to his Majesty representing the distress of the country, the heavy demands upon it for the complicated war, and recommending a reduction of all useless expenses; it also set out that profusion, so far from being strength, was weakness; that it behoved all classes of officials to consent to a curtailment of the lavish salaries; and that it would be a noble example in the Crown to take the lead, which could not fail of enhancing the love of the people, and diffusing an excellent influence throughout every department of the State. His grace represented that the vast military establishment by sea and land could not include less than three hundred thousand men; that, since the beginning of the American war the expenditure had added sixty-three millions of pounds to the Debt, and its interest, eight millions, to our annual payments. The interest of the Debt had now become of itself equal to the whole of our expenditure in years of peace before. He laid much stress on the belief that the example of the king would induce all orders of men to make equal sacrifices to the needs of their country. Richmond declared that he had no wish to curtail the pensions of those who had wasted their fortunes in the service of their country, as the Pelhams, for the Duke of Newcastle was said to have sunk five hundred thousand pounds during the years that he so fondly adhered to office. He gave the Ministers and the aristocracy credit for a disinterestedness which they did not possess. They admitted the vastness of the expenditure, and that there was wastefulness, and that they were desirous of economy; but they could not believe that any reduction of the Civil List would be sensibly felt, whilst it would reflect dishonour on the country, as if it were incapable of maintaining the Crown in due credit. Lord Chancellor Thurlow affected not to believe in the distress, or that any case of public extravagance had been made out. The Duke of Richmond's motion was negatived by seventy-seven votes against thirty-six.Sir David Wilkie (b. 1785), one of the greatest of Scottish painters, claims a few words here, especially regarding the latter part of his brilliant career. In 1820-1 he accomplished his masterpiece, "The Chelsea Pensioners listening to the[433] News of Waterloo," for which he received 1,200 guineas from the Duke of Wellington. His later works did not increase his reputation, chiefly because he abandoned the style in which he excelled and adopted the pseudo-Spanish. In 1830 he was made painter in ordinary to his Majesty on the death of Lawrence, and became a candidate for the Presidentship of the Royal Academy, but had only one vote recorded in his favour. Between 1830 and 1840 he painted a considerable number of works, among which were "John Knox preaching before Mary," and "The Discovery of the Body of Tippoo Sahib," painted for the widow of Sir David Baird, for 1,500. In 1836 he was knighted, and in 1840 he set out on a tour to the East, and went as far as Jerusalem, which he viewed with rapture. At Constantinople he had the honour of painting the Sultan for the Queen. He returned by Egypt, but never saw his native land again. He died off Gibraltar, and, the burial service having been read by torchlight, his body was committed to the deep, on the 1st of June, 1841.
FORE:To such a pitch of folly and despotism had the Grafton Ministry been driven by the events of the Session of 1769, by their conduct towards the Americans and Wilkes. The Rockinghams and Grenvilles were combined against the Grafton Cabinet, and thus acquiring popularity at its expense. Lord Camden, though still retaining his place, utterly disapproved of their proceedings. The people everywhere held meetings to express their total loss of confidence in both the Ministers and Parliament, and to pray the king to dissolve the latter. In the autumn, the action of Wilkes against Lord Halifax, for the seizure of his papers, was tried, and the jury gave him four thousand pounds damages.
FORE:Rodney, who was still commanding in the West Indies, had been on the look-out for De Grasse, but, missing him, he had dispatched Sir Samuel Hood after him, supposing that he had made for New York. Hood had with him fourteen ships of the line, and, arriving at Sandy Hook on the 28th of August, he found that De Grasse had then sailed for the Chesapeake. Admiral Arbuthnot had been replaced by Admiral Graves, but Graves had only seven ships of the line, and of these only five fit for action. Taking the chief command, with these twenty-one ships Graves set sail for the Chesapeake, with Hood as second in command. There, on the 5th of September, he discerned the fleet of De Grasse at anchor, just within the Capes of Virginia, and blocking up York River with his frigates. Graves had his nineteen ships, De Grasse twenty-eight, and Nelson could have desired nothing better than such a sight in the narrow waters of the Chesapeake: not a ship would have escaped him; but Graves was no Nelson, and allowed De Grasse to cut his cables and run out to sea. There, indeed, Graves attacked him, but under infinitely greater disadvantages, at four o'clock in the afternoon. The night parted them, and De Grasse returned to his old anchorage in the Chesapeake, and Graves sailed away again for New York.
FORE:During the years 1767, 1768, and 1769, Mr. Thomas Whatelyat one time private secretary to Grenville, and several years Under-Secretary of State to Lord Suffolk, but during these years out of office, and simply member of Parliamenthad maintained a private correspondence with Governor Hutchinson and his brother-in-law, Andrew Oliver, the Lieutenant-Governor. In these letters Hutchinson and Oliver had freely expressed to their old friend their views of the state of affairs in the colony; and, of course, said many things never intended to come to the public eye, or to operate officially. On the death of Whately, in 1772, some villain purloined these letters and conveyed them to Franklin, who was acting as agent for Massachusetts. Who this dishonest firebrand was, was never discovered. Franklin pledged himself to secrecy, both as to the letters and as to the name of the person who so basely obtained them. The name of this person he faithfully kept; but the contents of the letters were too well calculated to create irreconcilable rancour in the minds of the Americans, for him to resist the pleasure of communicating them to the Massachusetts Assembly. He accordingly forwarded them to Mr. Curling, the Speaker of the Assembly.
FORE:Argyll, who received the news of the retreat about four in the afternoon of that day, occupied Perth with Dutch and English troops by ten o'clock the next morning. They had quitted Stirling on the 29th, and that night they encamped on the snow amid the burnt remains of the village of Auchterarder. Argyll and Cadogan followed the advanced guard and entered Perth on[32] the evening of the 1st of February; but the remainder of the troops did not arrive till late at night, owing to the state of the roads and the weather. Some few of the rebels, who had got drunk and were left behind, were secured. The next day Argyll and Cadogan, with eight hundred light foot and six squadrons of dragoons, followed along the Carse of Gowrie to Dundee. Cadogan, in a letter to Marlborough, complained of the evident reluctance of Argyll to press on the rebels. When he arrived at Dundee on the 3rd, the rebel army was already gone. He and Cadogan then separated, taking different routes towards Montrose. Cadogan, whose heart was in the business, pushed on ahead, and on the 5th, at noon, reached Arbroath, where he received the news that the Pretender had embarked at Montrose and gone to France. In this manner did the descendant of a race of kings and the claimant of the Crown of Great Britain steal away and leave his unhappy followers to a sense of his perfidious and cruel desertion. His flight, no doubt, was necessary, but the manner of it was at once most humiliating and unfeeling. The consternation and wrath of the army on the discovery were indescribable. They were wholly broken up when Argyll reached Aberdeen on the 8th of February.
FORE:The lace manufacture was still prosecuted merely by hand, and chiefly in Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire, and in the West of England. No lace was produced from machinery before 1768.LADY HAMILTON WELCOMING THE VICTORS OF THE NILE.
FORE:Charles was anxious to follow up his victory by marching directly into England, trusting to the effect of this signal triumph to bring all inclined to the Stuart dynasty to his standard. He was confident that if he met with anything like success on the way, a rapid march would put London in his possession. And, in truth, such was the miserably misgoverned condition of the country at the time, that, had he come with a tolerable French army, nothing could have prevented him from becoming master of the kingdom. Never was England so thoroughly exposed to foreign danger, so utterly unarmed and unprotected,[98] whilst it had been sending such armaments to the Continent. Fortunately, the French had not supported the Pretender on this occasion, as they had promised, and fortunately, too, when Charles came to review the army with which he proposed to enter England, there remained of it only one thousand four hundred men. The rest had gone home with their booty; nay, some had gone and were returning, not to fight, but to carry off more which they had concealed.
TWO:"I well know that there are those upon whom such considerations as these to which I have been adverting will make but a faint impression. Their answer to all such appeals is the short, in their opinion the conclusive, declaration'The Protestant Constitution in Church and State must be maintained at all hazards, and by any means; the maintenance of it is a question of principle, and every concession or compromise is the sacrifice of principle to a low and vulgar expediency.' This is easily said; but how was Ireland to be governed? How was the Protestant Constitution in Church and State to be maintained in that part of the empire? Again I can anticipate the reply'By the overwhelming sense of the people of Great Britain; by the application, if necessary, of physical force for the maintenance of authority; by the employment of the organised strength of Government, the police and the military, to enforce obedience to the law.'"There were various actions at sea, in one quarter or other. Sir Hyde Parker, convoying a merchant fleet from the Baltic, on the 5th of August fell in with Admiral Zouttman near the Dogger Bank, also convoying a fleet of Dutch traders. An engagement took place, Zouttman having a few men-of-war more than Parker. The engagement was terrible. The ships on both sides were severely damaged, and the Hollandiaa sixty-four-gun ship of Zouttman'swent down with all its crew. Many of the other ships were with difficulty kept afloat. On reaching the Nore, the king and the Prince of Wales went on board, where they highly complimented both Parker and the rest of the officers. On the 12th of December Admiral Kempenfeldt, with thirteen ships-of-the-line, discovered, off Ushant, the French fleet, under De Guichen, convoying a fleet of transports and merchantmen, bound, some for the East and others for the West Indies, with troops and stores. The fleet of De Guichen was far superior to that of Kempenfeldt, but, the convoy being at a considerable distance from the transports and traders, Kempenfeldt adroitly made himself master of twenty sail of these vessels, and sailed off with them; and within a few days afterwards he[286] captured five more of these ships. There were also other fights of minor importance.
TWO:(After the Picture by Laslett J. Pott, by permission of Ephraim Hallam, Esq.)
$ 0$ 600
TWO:He was proceeding in all apparent safety when, approaching the village of Tarrytown, three militiamen suddenly sprang forward, and, seizing his bridle, demanded who he was. Andr, being on neutral ground, exceeded his former incaution, and instead of ascertaining whether the men were Americans, in which case Arnold's pass was his security, he asked the men who they were, and being answered "From below," which was the pass for New York, replied, "And so am I." By this, discovering that he was a British officer, the men began to search him, and soon made prize of his fatal papers. Warned in time, Arnold escaped on board a British man-of-war. But very different was the fate of Major Andr. General Clinton, the moment he was aware of his arrest, sent a letter to Washington, stating that Andr had gone on shore under a flag of truce, and, at the time of his arrest, was travelling under a pass from Arnold, the commander of the district. Clinton therefore requested Washington to liberate Andr immediately. To this letter Washington did not reply till after a lapse of four days, and after the board of officers appointed for the purpose had declared Andr a spy. He even rejected the last prayer of the gallant soldier that he might be spared the gibbet, and had him hanged.The conduct of the young king, considering his shyness and the defects of his education, was, during the first days of his sudden elevation, calm, courteous, affable, and unembarrassed. "He behaved throughout," says Horace Walpole, "with the greatest propriety, dignity, and decency." He dismissed his Guards to attend on the body of his grandfather. But it was soon seen that there would be great changes in his Government. Pitt waited on him with the sketch of an address to his Council; but the king informed him that this had been thought of, and an address already prepared. This was sufficient for Pitt; he had long been satisfied that the favourite of mother and son, the Groom of the Stole, and the inseparable companion, Bute, would, on the accession of George, mount into the premiership.
In the meantime, General Lake had made a march on Delhi, continuing, as he went, his correspondence with M. Perron. As General Lake approached the fortress of Allyghur, the stronghold of Perron, the Frenchman came out with fifteen thousand men, but again retreated into the fortress. This was on the 29th of August. Perron made a strong resistance, and held out till the 4th of September, when the place was stormed by a party headed by Colonel Monson and Major Macleod. The success was somewhat clouded by the surprise[492] and surrender of five companies of General Lake's sepoys, who had been left behind to guard an important position, but with only one gun. This accident, however, was far more than counterbalanced by the withdrawal of Perron from the service of the Mahrattas. He had found so much insubordination amongst his French officers, and saw so clearly that there was no chance of competing with the British, that he had at length closed with General Lake's offers, and, abandoning his command, had obtained a passport for himself, family, suite, and effects, and retired to Lucknow. This being accomplished, General Lake continued his march on Delhi, in order to release Shah Allum, the Mogul, and drew near it on the 11th of September. He there found that the army previously commanded by Perron, but now by Louis Bourquien, nineteen thousand strong, had crossed the Jumna and was posted between him and the city. Bourquien had posted his army on a rising ground, flanked on both sides by swamps, and defended in front by strong entrenchments and about seventy pieces of cannon. As Lake had only four thousand five hundred men, to attack them in that position appeared madness. The British were briskly assailed before they could pitch their tents, and General Lake, feigning a retreat, succeeded in drawing the enemy down from their commanding situation and out of their entrenchments; he then suddenly wheeled, fired a destructive volley into the incautious foe, and followed this rapidly by a charge with the bayonet. The enemy fled, and endeavoured to regain their guns and entrenchments; but Lake did not leave them timeanother volley and another bayonet charge completely disorganised them, and they fled for the Jumna and the road by which they had come. The troops of Scindiah, which had held the Mogul prisoner, evacuated the city, and on the 16th General Lake made a visit of state to the aged Shah Allum, who expressed himself as delighted at being delivered from his oppressors and received under the protection of the British.Whilst this war was raging in Europe, and carrying its ramifications to the most distant regions of the world, Clive and Eyre Coote were extending the British Empire in India, and, in the case of Clive, with as much ability as Frederick of Prussia showed in enlarging his kingdom in Europe. Clive, in 1757, put down Surajah Dowlah, the Nabob of Bengal, and in June of that year defeated him at Plassey with a mere handful of men against his enormous host. He set up Surajah Dowlah's General-in-chief, Meer Jaffier, and hailed him Nabob of Bengal, Orissa, and Bahar. We claimed from Meer Jaffier two million seven hundred and fifty thousand pounds as the share of the Company, the fleet, and the army. Clive's own share was two hundred and fifty-four thousand pounds, and the shares of the members of the committee ran from twenty thousand to one hundred thousand pounds each. Besides this, it was stipulated that the French factories and effects should be given up to the English, and the French[177] never again allowed to enter Bengal. The territory surrounding Calcutta, within a given distance of the town, was to be granted them on zemindary tenure, the company paying the rent, like the other zemindars or landholders. Thus the British, who were before merely the tenants of a factory, became in reality the rulers of Bengal.FATHER MATHEW.Of Napoleon's monster army, Marshal Macdonald commanded the left wing; the Austrians were on the right under Schwarzenberg; and the main body consisted of a succession of vast columns commanded by the most famous French generals, including Bessires, Lefebvre, Mortier, Davoust, Oudinot, Ney, Grouchy, King Jerome of Westphalia, Junot, Poniatowski, Regnier, Eugene Viceroy of Italy, etc.; and Murat commanding all the cavalry. Buonaparte led this centre of two hundred and fifty thousand men with his Imperial[42] Guard. To oppose this huge army, composed of numbers and of officers such as the world had not seen before, Alexander had about two hundred and sixty thousand men. He lay at Wilna, with Barclay de Tolly and one hundred and twenty thousand men. In different positions, more northwards, lay Count Essen, Prince Bagration, the Hetman Platoff, with twelve thousand Cossacks; and, watching the Austrian right in Volhynia, lay General Tormasoff, with twenty thousand men. Advancing on them in three vast masses, the French army approached the Niementhe King of Westphalia directing his march on Grodno, the Viceroy of Italy on Pilony, and Buonaparte himself on Nagaraiski, three leagues beyond Kovno. On the 23rd of June the head of Napoleon's column came upon the Niemen, and saw the other bank covered with vast and gloomy forests. As the Emperor rode up to reconnoitre this scene, his horse stumbled and threw him; and a voice, from the crowd behind him, was heard saying, "A bad omen! A Roman would return!" When the head of the column the next morning crossed the river, a single Cossack issued from the solemn woods, and demanded their reason for violating the Russian soil. The soldiers replied, "To beat you, and take Wilna!" The Cossack disappeared, and left all solitary as before. Three days were required to get the army across, and before they could pitch their tents they were assailed by a violent thunderstorm, accompanied by torrents of rain.
TWO:
