spacious and well placed apartments.  He had been furnished with letters of recommendation to a gentleman who might have assisted him; but when he landed at Fort St. George he found that this gentleman had sailed for England.  The lad’s shy and haughty disposition withheld him from introducing himself to strangers.  He was several months in India before he became acquainted with a single family.  The climate affected his health and spirits.  His duties were of a kind ill-suited to his ardent and daring character.  He pined for his home, and in his letters to his relations expressed his feelings in language softer and more pensive than we should have expected either from the waywardness of his boyhood, or from the inflexible sternness of his later years.  “I have not enjoyed” says he “one happy day since I left my native country”; and again, “I must confess, at intervals, when I think of my dear native England, it affects me in a very peculiar manner....  If I should be so far blest as to revisit again my own country, but more especially Manchester, the centre of all my wishes, all that I could hope or desire for would be presented before me in one view.”

One solace he found of the most respectable kind.  The Governor possessed a good library, and permitted Clive to have access to it.  The young man devoted much of his leisure to reading, and acquired at this time almost all the knowledge of books that he ever possessed.  As a boy he had been too idle, as a man he soon became too busy, for literary pursuits.

But neither climate nor poverty, neither study nor the sorrows of a home-sick exile, could tame the desperate audacity of his spirit.  He behaved to his official superiors as he had behaved to his schoolmasters, and he was several times in danger of losing his situation.  Twice, while residing in the Writers’ Buildings, he attempted to destroy himself; and twice the pistol which he snapped at his own head failed to go off.  This circumstance, it is said, affected him as a similar escape affected Wallenstein.  After satisfying himself that the pistol was really well loaded, he burst forth into an exclamation that surely he was reserved for something great.

About this time an event which at first seemed likely to destroy all his hopes in life suddenly opened before him a new path to eminence.  Europe had been, during some years, distracted by the war of the Austrian succession.  George the Second was the steady ally of Maria Theresa.  The house of Bourbon took the opposite side.  Though England was even then the first of maritime powers, she was not, as she has since become, more than a match on the sea for all the nations of the world together; and she found it difficult to maintain a contest against the united navies of France and Spain.  In the eastern seas France obtained the ascendency.  Labourdonnais, governor of Mauritius, a man of eminent talents and virtues, conducted an expedition to the continent of India in spite of the opposition of the British