e chief objects of apprehension to Hastings.
The measures which he had adopted for the purpose of breaking their
power had at first been frustrated by the errors of those whom he was
compelled to employ; but his perseverance and ability seemed likely to
be crowned with success, when a far more formidable danger showed itself
in a distant quarter.

About thirty years before this time, a Mahommedan soldier had begun to
distinguish himself in the wars of Southern India. His education had
been neglected; his extraction was humble. His father had been a petty
officer of revenue; his grandfather a wandering dervise. But though thus
meanly descended, though ignorant even of the alphabet, the adventurer
had no sooner been placed at the head of a body of troops than he
approved himself a man born for conquest and command. Among the crowd of
chiefs who were struggling for a share of India, none could compare with
him in the qualities of the captain and the statesman. 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 Louis 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 neighbor'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;