which God had punished England with years of disastrous war, with discomfiture in her own seas, and with the loss of her transatlantic empire.  If any of our readers will take the trouble to search in the dusty recesses of circulating libraries for some novel published sixty years ago, the chance is that the villain or sub-villain of the story will prove to be a savage old Nabob, with an immense fortune, a tawny complexion, a bad liver, and a worse heart.

Such, as far as we can now judge, was the feeling of the country respecting Nabobs in general.  And Clive was eminently the Nabob, the ablest, the most celebrated, the highest in rank, the highest in fortune, of all the fraternity.  His wealth was exhibited in a manner which could not fail to excite odium.  He lived with great magnificence in Berkeley Square.  He reared one palace in Shropshire and another at Claremont.  His parliamentary influence might vie with that of the greatest families.  But in all this splendour and power envy found something to sneer at.  On some of his relations wealth and dignity seem to have sat as awkwardly as on Mackenzie’s Margery Mushroom.  Nor was he himself, with all his great qualities, free from those weaknesses which the satirists of that age represented as characteristic of his whole class.  In the field, indeed, his habits were remarkably simple.  He was constantly on horseback, was never seen but in his uniform, never wore silk, never entered a palanquin, and was content with the plainest fare.  But when he was no longer at the head of an army, he laid aside this Spartan temperance for the ostentatious luxury of a Sybarite.  Though his person was ungraceful, and though his harsh features were redeemed from vulgar ugliness only by their stern, dauntless, and commanding expression, he was fond of rich and gay clothing, and replenished his wardrobe with absurd profusion.  Sir John Malcolm gives us a letter worthy of Sir Matthew Mite, in which Clive orders “two hundred shirts, the best and finest that can be got for love or money.”  A few follies of this description, grossly exaggerated by report, produced an unfavourable impression on the public mind.  But this was not the worst.  Black stories, of which the greater part were pure inventions, were circulated touching his conduct in the East.  He had to bear the whole odium, not only of those bad acts to which he had once or twice stooped, but of all the bad acts of all the English in India, of bad acts committed when he was absent, nay, of bad acts which he had manfully opposed and severely punished.  The very abuses against which he had waged an honest, resolute, and successful war were laid to his account.  He was, in fact, regarded as the personification of all the vices and weaknesses which the public, with or without reason, ascribed to the English adventurers in Asia.  We have ourselves heard old men, who knew nothing of his history, but who still retained the prejudices conceived in their youth, talk of him as an incarnate fiend.  Johnson