Clive was now secure in the enjoyment of his fortune and his honours.  He was surrounded by attached friends and relations; and he had not yet passed the season of vigorous bodily and mental exertion.  But clouds had long been gathering over his mind, and now settled on it in thick darkness.  From early youth he had been subject to fits of that strange melancholy “which rejoiceth exceedingly and is glad when it can find the grave.”  While still a writer at Madras, he had twice attempted to destroy himself.  Business and prosperity had produced a salutary effect on his spirits.  In India, while he was occupied by great affairs, in England, while wealth and rank had still the charm of novelty, he had borne up against his constitutional misery.  But he had now nothing to do, and nothing to wish for.  His active spirit in an inactive situation drooped and withered like a plant in an uncongenial air.  The malignity with which his enemies had pursued him, the indignity with which he had been treated by the committee, the censure, lenient as it was, which the House of Commons had pronounced, the knowledge that he was regarded by a large portion of his countrymen as a cruel and perfidious tyrant, all concurred to irritate and depress him.  In the meantime, his temper was tried by acute physical suffering.  During his long residence in tropical climates, he had contracted several painful distempers.  In order to obtain ease he called in the help of opium; and he was gradually enslaved by this treacherous ally.  To the last, however, his genius occasionally flashed through the gloom.  It was said that he would sometimes, after sitting silent and torpid for hours, rouse himself to the discussion of some great question, would display in full vigour all the talents of the soldier and the statesman, and would then sink back into his melancholy repose.

The disputes with America had now become so serious that an appeal to the sword seemed inevitable; and the Ministers were desirous to avail themselves of the services of Clive.  Had he still been what he was when he raised the siege of Patna and annihilated the Dutch army and navy at the mouth of the Ganges, it is not improbable that the resistance of the colonists would have been put down, and that the inevitable separation would have been deferred for a few years.  But it was too late.  His strong mind was fast sinking under many kinds of suffering.  On the twenty-second of November, 1774, he died by his own hand.  He had just completed his forty-ninth year.

In the awful close of so much prosperity and glory, the vulgar saw only a confirmation of all their prejudices; and some men of real piety and genius so far forgot the maxims both of religion and of philosophy as confidently to ascribe the mournful event to the just vengeance of God, and to the horrors of an evil conscience.  It is with very different feelings that we contemplate the spectacle of a great mind ruined by the weariness of satiety, by the pangs of wounded honour, by fatal diseases, and more fatal remedies.