tership in the East India Service, and had actually
sailed for Madras.

The career to which the young Clive was thus devoted did not, on the
face of it, appear to be especially brilliant. The voyage in itself,
to begin with, was a terrible business; a six months' voyage was then
regarded as an astonishingly quick passage, and in Clive's case the
voyage was longer even than usual. It was more than a year after he
left England before he arrived at Madras, as his ship had stayed for
some months at the Brazils. Clive arrived at Madras with no money,
with many debts, and with some facility in speaking Portuguese,
acquired during the delay in the Brazils. He had absolutely no friends
in India, and made no friends for many months after his arrival. It
would be hard to think of a more desolate position for a proud, shy,
high-spirited lad with a strong strain of melancholy in his
composition. We find him sighing for Manchester with all the profound
and pathetic longing which inspires the noble old English ballad of
"Farewell, Manchester." It is not easy for us of to-day, who associate
the name of Manchester with one of the greatest manufacturing towns in
the world, to appreciate to the full either the spirit of the old
ballad or the longing aspiration which Clive had to see again
Manchester, "the centre of all my wishes." But if he was homesick, if
he was lonely, if he was poor in pocket and weak in health, shadowed by
melancholy and saddened by exile, he never for a moment suffered his
pride to abate or his courage to sink. He treated his masters of the
East India Company with the same scornful spirit which he had of old
shown to the shopkeepers of Market-Drayton and the school-masters of
Shropshire.

In the wretched mood of mind and body that Clive owned during his early
days at Madras the constitutional melancholy asserted itself with
conquering force, and he {257} twice attempted his life. On each
occasion the pistol which he turned upon his desperate and disordered
brain missed fire. Yet Clive had meant most thoroughly and
consistently to kill himself. He did not, like Byron, discover, after
the attempt was made, that the weapon he had aimed at his life was not
loaded. Each time the pistol was properly charged and primed, and each
time it was the accident of the old flint-lock merely causing a flash
in the pan which saved his life. In a nature that is melancholy a
tinge of superstition is appropriate, and it