He became a general; he became a sovereign.  Out of the fragments of old principalities, which had gone to pieces in the general wreck he formed for himself a great, compact, and vigorous empire.  That empire he ruled with the ability, severity, and vigilance of Lewis the Eleventh.  Licentious in his pleasures, implacable in his revenge, he had yet enlargement of mind enough to perceive how much the prosperity of subjects adds to the strength of governments.  He was an oppressor; but he had at least the merit of protecting his people against all oppression except his own.  He was now in extreme old age; but his intellect was as clear, and his spirit as high, as in the prime of manhood.  Such was the great Hyder Ali, the founder of the Mahommedan kingdom of Mysore, and the most formidable enemy with whom the English conquerors of India have ever had to contend.

Had Hastings been governor of Madras, Hyder would have been either made a friend, or vigorously encountered as an enemy.  Unhappily the English authorities in the south provoked their powerful neighbour’s hostility, without being prepared to repel it.  On a sudden, an army of ninety thousand men, far superior in discipline and efficiency to any other native force that could be found in India, came pouring through those wild passes which, worn by mountain torrents, and dark with jungle, lead down from the table-land of Mysore to the plains of the Carnatic.  This great army was accompanied by a hundred pieces of cannon; and its movements were guided by many French officers, trained in the best military schools of Europe.

Hyder was everywhere triumphant.  The sepoys in many British garrisons flung down their arms.  Some forts were surrendered by treachery, and some by despair.  In a few days the whole open country north of the Coleroon had submitted.  The English inhabitants of Madras could already see by night, from the top of Mount St. Thomas, the eastern sky reddened by a vast semicircle of blazing villages.  The white villas, to which our countrymen retire after the daily labours of government and of trade, when the cool evening breeze springs up from the bay, were now left without inhabitants; for bands of the fierce horsemen of Mysore had already been seen prowling among the tulip-trees, and near the gay verandas.  Even the town was not thought secure, and the British merchants and public functionaries made haste to crowd themselves behind the cannon of Fort St. George.

There were the means, indeed, of assembling an army which might have defended the presidency, and even driven the invader back to his mountains.  Sir Hector Munro was at the head of one considerable force; Baillie was advancing with another.  United, they might have presented a formidable front even to such an enemy as Hyder.  But the English commanders, neglecting those fundamental rules of the military art of which the propriety is obvious even to men who had never received a military education, deferred