family and Staff, or for the convenience of the public
occasions inseparable from my situation, that it is my
intention to make such an addition to it as may be
calculated to answer both purposes.'

Lord Clive thereupon, in 1801, developed Government House at a cost of
more than Rs. 3 lakhs; and two years later he built the beautiful
Banqueting Hall, at a cost of Rs. 2 1/2 lakhs. The recent fall of
Tipu's capital of Seringapatam was an event that the Banqueting Hall
could appropriately commemorate; and Lord Clive, with pious respect
for his dead father's memory, coupled Plassey with Seringapatam, and
ordered that the fine figure-work on the facade of the hall should be
a commemoration of both victories. In England the Directors of the
Company complained of what they called 'such wasteful extravagance;'
but the developments were a real want, and it is a matter of
present-day satisfaction that the Madras Government have no need to be
acquiring a site now and to be building a new Government House in
these expensive days. Lord Clive was certainly no miser with the
Company's money, for he built also a second Government House--a
'country residence' at Guindy. The 'country residence' was developed
and improved some forty years later by Lord Elphinstone, who was
Governor of Madras in the middle of last century. It is a truly
beautiful house, standing in beautiful grounds; and it has lately been
a proposition that the house at Guindy should be the Governor's only
residence, and that Government House, Madras, should be used for
Government offices.

'Government House, Madras!' To most people it is suggestive of dinner
parties within and garden parties without; and the Banqueting Hall is
suggestive of dances and levees and meetings for good causes. But to
people who can look at Government House, Madras, with an historic
glance it rouses other memories. Within its original walls more than
two centuries ago a belaced Senhor kept Portuguese state. It was here
that Frenchmen were encamped while their guns were fruitlessly
hammering at the walls of Fort St. George. It was here that Lally
lived sumptuously in prison, till he was sent to Europe--eventually to
be executed in Paris for having failed to capture Madras. It was
within these grounds that Tipu's horsemen were scampering about on a
September morning, looking for houses where money or jewels could be
commandeered. It was here that an ennobled Governor of Ma