uable
estate. In the little town on the river Tern, within sight of the old
church built by Stephen, whose architectural characteristics were then
happily unaltered by the hand of the {255} eighteenth century restorer,
the Clives had been born and given in marriage and died, and repeated
the round ever since the twelfth century. Mr. Richard Clive, in the
reign of George the First, married a Manchester lady named Gaskill, who
bore him many children of no note whatever, but who bore him one very
noteworthy child indeed, his eldest son Robert, on September 29th, in
the year 1725.

There was a time, a long time too, during which the worthy Mr. Richard
Clive persisted in regarding the birth of this eldest son as little
less than a curse. He could very well have said of Robert what the
Queen-mother says of Richard of Gloster, tetchy and wayward was his
infancy. Seldom was there born into the world a more stubborn-minded,
high-spirited boy. He may remind us a little of the young Mirabeau in
his strenuous impassioned youth; in the estimate which those nearest to
him, and most ignorant of him, formed of the young lion cub in the
domestic litter; in the strange promise which the great career
fulfilled. There was a kind of madness in the impish pranks which the
boy Clive played in Market-Drayton, scaring the timid and scandalizing
the respectable. He climbed to the top of the lofty steeple of that
church, which dated from the days of Stephen, and perched himself upon
a stone spout near the dizzy summit with a cool courage which Stephen
himself might have envied. He got round him from among the idle lads
of the town "a list of lawless resolutes," and, like David, made
himself a captain over them for the purpose of levying a kind of
guerilla warfare upon the shopkeepers of the little town, and making
them pay tribute for the sanctity of their windows. In fact, he
behaved as wildly as the wildest school-boy could behave--drifting from
school to school, to learn nothing from each new master, and only to
leave behind at each the record of an incorrigible reprobate. Nobody
seems to have discovered that there was anything of the man of genius
in the composition of the incorrigible reprobate, and so it came about
that the town of {256} Market-Drayton in general, and the respectable
family of the Clives in particular, breathed more freely when it was
known that young Robert was "bound to John Company"--that he had
accepted a wri