history.
It reads rather like some of those desperate and heroic adventures in
which the fiction of the elder Dumas delighted than the sober chronicle
of recorded warfare. For fifty days the siege raged. For fifty days
Rajah Sahib did his best to take the town, and for fifty days Clive and
his little band of Europeans and Sepoys frustrated all his efforts.
The stubborn defence began to create allies. The fighting capacity of
the English had come to be regarded with great contempt by the native
races, but the contempt was now rapidly changing to admiration. Murari
Rao, the great Mahratta leader, who had been hired to assist the cause
of Mohammed Ali, but who had hitherto hung in idleness upon the
Carnatic frontier, convinced that the English must be defeated, now
declared that since he had learned that the "English could fight," he
was willing to fight for them, and with them, and prepared to move to
the assistance of Clive. Before they could arrive, Rajah Sahib made a
desperate last effort to capture Arcot, was completely defeated with
great loss, and withdrew from Arcot, leaving Clive and his little army
masters of the place.

Great was the glory of Clive in Fort St. George; but Clive was not
going to content himself with so much and no more. With an army
increased to nearly a thousand men, he assailed the enemy, defeated
Rajah Sahib once and again, and in his triumphal progress caused to be
razed to the ground the memorial city which the pride of Dupleix had
erected to his victory, and the vaunting monument which set forth in
four languages the glory of his deeds. The astonished Nabobs began for
the first time to understand that the glory of France was not
invincible, that a new star had arisen before which the star of Dupleix
must pale, and might vanish. The star of Clive continued to mount.
Though the arrival of Major Lawrence from {264} England took away from
his hands the chief command, he worked under Lawrence as gallantly as
when he was alone responsible for his desperate undertakings, and
success, as before, followed all the enterprises in which he was
concerned.

Trichinopoly was relieved; Chunda Sahib was captured by the Mahrattas
and put to death; Covelong and Chingkeput, two of the most important
French forts, were captured by Clive with an army as unpromising as
Falstaff's ragged regiment. At this point, and on the full tide of
victory, Clive's health broke down, and he was compelled to return t