of Mexico or Lima, entered Madrid with a long train of gilded coaches, and of sumpter-horses trapped and shod with silver, were now outdone.  Cruelty, indeed, properly so called, was not among the vices of the servants of the Company.  But cruelty itself could hardly have produced greater evils than sprang from their unprincipled eagerness to be rich.  They pulled down their creature, Meer Jaffier.  They set up in his place another Nabob, named Meer Cossim.  But Meer Cossim had parts and a will; and, though sufficiently inclined to oppress his subjects himself, he could not bear to see them ground to the dust by oppressions which yielded him no profit, nay, which destroyed his revenue in the very source.  The English accordingly pulled down Meer Cossim, and set up Meer Jaffier again; and Meer Cossim, after revenging himself by a massacre surpassing in atrocity that of the Black Hole, fled to the dominions of the Nabob of Oude.  At every one of these revolutions, the new prince divided among his foreign masters whatever could be scraped together in the treasury of his fallen predecessor.  The immense population of his dominions was given up as a prey to those who had made him a sovereign, and who could unmake him.  The servants of the Company obtained, not for their employers, but for themselves, a monopoly of almost the whole internal trade.  They forced the natives to buy dear and to sell cheap.  They insulted with impunity the tribunals, the police, and the fiscal authorities of the country.  They covered with their protection a set of native dependants who ranged through the provinces, spreading desolation and terror wherever they appeared.  Every servant of a British factor was armed with all the power of his master; and his master was armed with all the power of the Company.  Enormous fortunes were thus rapidly accumulated at Calcutta, while thirty millions of human beings were reduced to the extremity of wretchedness.  They had been accustomed to live under tyranny, but never under tyranny like this.  They found the little finger of the Company thicker than the loins of Surajah Dowlah.  Under their old masters they had at least one resource:  when the evil became insupportable, the people rose and pulled down the government.  But the English government was not to be so shaken off.  That government, oppressive as the most oppressive form of barbarian despotism, was strong with all the strength of civilisation.  It resembled the government of evil Genii, rather than the government of human tyrants.  Even despair could not inspire the soft Bengalee with courage to confront men of English breed, the hereditary nobility of mankind, whose skill and valour had so often triumphed in spite of tenfold odds.  The unhappy race never attempted resistance.  Sometimes they submitted in patient misery.  Sometimes they fled from the white man, as their fathers had been used to fly from the Mahratta; and the palanquin of the English traveller was often carried through silent villages and towns, which the report of his approach had made desolate.