A History of the Four Georges and of William IV Volume II Part 13

The inhabitants of Madras, smarting under what may {260} fairly be called the treachery of Dupleix, considered rightly that they were no longer bound by the convention with the luckless La Bourdonnais. One at least of the inhabitants was a man not likely to be bound by the mere letter of a convention which had already been broken in the spirit. Clive disguised himself as a Mussulman--we may be permitted to wonder how a man who to the end of his days remained eccentrically ignorant of all Eastern languages accomplished this successfully--and, escaping from Madras, made his way to Fort St. David. At Fort St.

David his military career began. The desperate courage which had carried him to the top of the tower of Stephen's church, and which had enabled him to overawe the "military bully who was the terror of Fort St. David," now found its best vent in "welcoming the French," like the hero of Burns's ballad, "at the sound of the drum." The peace which was concluded between England and France sent Clive for a season, however, back to the counting-house, and gave back Madras again to the English company.

[Sidenote: 1748--The dream of Dupleix]

But the ambition of Dupleix was not a thing to be bounded by the circ.u.mscription of war or peace between England and France. England and France might be at peace, but there was no need that the English East India Company and the French East India Company should be at peace as well. The internal troubles of India afforded Dupleix the opportunity he coveted of pushing his own fortunes, and doing his best to drive the English traders out of the field. Unfortunately for him, however, his opportunity was also the opportunity of the young writer and ensign who had already won the admiration and the esteem of Major Lawrence, then looked upon as the first English officer in India.

While the French still held Madras, before the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle compelled the reluctant Dupleix to restore it to the English, a military episode, which might almost be called an accident, had helped to confirm enormously the influence of France in India. The Nabob of {261} the Carnatic, offended by the action of the English governor of Madras, who had omitted to send him those presents which are essential to all stages of Oriental diplomacy, had practically winked at the action of the more liberal-handed Dupleix in his movement against Madras. When, too late, the Nabob heard of the fall of Madras, he sent an army to recapture the town, and called upon the French governor to surrender it. The governor was Duval D'Espremesnil, the father of that mad D'Espremesnil who fuliginates through a portion of the French Revolution. He refused to obey the Nabob, opened fire upon his forces, and repulsed them. The repulse was followed a little later by a vigorous attack of the French troops under Paradis, which smashed the armament of the Nabob to pieces at St. Thome on November 4, 1746.

This victory gave the French a prestige of which Dupleix was the very man to appreciate the full importance. When, in 1748, Nizam-Al-Mulk, the Viceroy of the Deccan, died, there arose at once pretenders not merely to the Deccan viceroyalty, but also to the government of the Carnatic. The first was claimed by Mirzapha Jung; the second by Chunda Sahib. Mirzapha Jung and Chunda Sahib, profoundly impressed by the triumph of French arms two years earlier, appealed to Dupleix to help them, joined their forces, and invaded the Carnatic.

Dupleix was not unwilling to listen to the appeal of the invaders. He saw that the chance had arisen for him to const.i.tute himself the Warwick, the king-maker, of India. He lent all the force of his European troops, of his native troops trained in the European fashion, and of the prestige of France to the invaders. The old Nabob of the Carnatic, Anaverdi Khan, was defeated and killed. His son fled with his broken army to Trichinopoly, and the invaders nominally, and Dupleix actually, reigned supreme in the Carnatic.

At that moment the sun of Dupleix's fortunes reached its zenith. He was the chosen companion and confidant of the new Nizam of the Deccan; he was made Governor {262} of India from the river Kristna to Cape Comorin; he pomped it with more than Oriental splendor in the pageantries of triumph at Pondicherry; he set up on the scene of his victory a stately column, bearing in four languages inscriptions celebrating his fame; he had treasure, power, and influence even to his ambitious heart's content. When Mirzapha Jung died, shortly after his accession to the government of the Deccan, Dupleix held equal influence over his successor. He might well have believed that his glory was complete, his plans perfected; he might well have believed that he could afford to smile at the feeble efforts which the English made to stay his progress.

[Sidenote: 1751--The defence of Arcot]

He soon ceased to smile. Clive, then five-and-twenty years old, urged upon his superiors that Trichinopoly must soon fall before famine and leaguer, that with the overthrow of the House of Anaverdi Khan the power of the French over India would be established, and the power of the English in India destroyed. The great deed to be done was to raise the siege of Trichinopoly. This Clive coolly proposed to do by effecting a counter-diversion in besieging Arcot, the favored home of the Nabobs. With a little handful of an army--200 Europeans and 300 Sepoys--Clive marched through the wildest weather to Arcot, captured it, and prepared to hold his conquest. We may perhaps here be permitted to say that in using, as we shall continue to do, the old familiar forms of spelling the names of Indian towns and of Indian princes, we do so not in ignorance of the fact that in many, if not most cases, they present but a very poor idea indeed of the actual Oriental sounds and spelling. The modern writers on Indian history adopt a new and more scientific spelling, which makes Arcot Arkat, and Trichinopoly Trichinapalli. But, all things considered, it seems best for the present to adhere to those old forms which have become, as it were, portion and parcel of English history.

Chunda Sahib, who was besieging Trichinopoly, immediately despatched 4000 men against Arcot, which, {263} joining with the defeated garrison and a few French, made up a muster of some 10,000 men under Rajah Sahib, Chunda Sahib's son, against a garrison of little more than 300.

The defence of Arcot is one of the most brilliant episodes in 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 a.s.sist 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 a.s.sistance 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 a.s.sailed 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 to England for change of climate. Before he left Madras he married Miss Maskelyne. Never did a man return to his native land under more auspicious conditions who had gone thence under conditions so inauspicious. The bad boy of Market-Drayton was now the ill.u.s.trious and opulent soldier whom the gentlemen of the India House delighted to salute as General Clive, and about whom it seemed as if it was impossible for the nation to make too much ado.

[Sidenote: 1755--Back to India]

Clive was now seized with the ambition to play a part in home politics.

The general election of 1754 seemed to offer him a tempting opportunity of entering Parliament. He came forward as one of the members for St.

Michael's in Cornwall, was opposed by Newcastle, and supported by Sandwich and Fox, was returned, was pet.i.tioned against, and was unseated on pet.i.tion. To fight a parliamentary election in those days meant the spending of a very great deal of money, and Clive, who had squandered his well-earned fortune right and left since his return to his native land, found himself, after he was unseated, in a decidedly disagreeable position. His money was dwindling; his hope of political triumphs had vanished into thin air; naturally enough, his thoughts turned back to the India of his youth. The curious good-luck that always attended upon him stood him in good stead here. If he had need of the India of his youth, the India of his youth had need of him. If France and England were not at {265} war, the rumor of war was busy between them, and there was a desire for good leaders in the advancing English colonies in India. Poor Dupleix was out of the way already.

The brilliant spirit whom Clive's genius had over-crowed had vanished forever from the scenes of his triumphs and his humiliations. He had suffered something of the same hard measure that he had himself meted out to his colleague La Bourdonnais; he had been recalled in comparative disgrace to France, with ruined fortunes and ruined hopes, to die, a defeated and degraded man, the shadow of his own great name.

But the influence of France was not extinct in India; it might at any moment rea.s.sert itself--at any moment come to the push of arms between France and England in the East as well as in the West; and where could the English look for so capable a leader of men as Clive? So it came about that in the year 1755 Clive again sailed the seas for India, under very different conditions from those under which he first adventured for the East. Then he was an unknown, unappreciated rapscallion of a lad, needy, homesick, desperate, and alone; now he was going out as the Governor of Fort St. David, as lieutenant-colonel in the British army, with a record of fame and fortune behind him. New fame, new fortune, awaited him almost on the very moment of his arrival in India. The pirate stronghold of Gheriah fell before him almost as easily as if the place had been a new Jericho and Clive a second Joshua. But there was greater work in store for him than the destruction of pirate strongholds. Bengal became suddenly the theatre of a terrible drama. Up to the year 1756 the tranquillity of the English settlers and traders in Bengal had been undisturbed. Their relations with the Nabob Ali Vardi Khan had been of the friendliest kind, and the very friendliness of those relations had had the effect of making the English residents in Bengal, like the native population, men of a milder mould than those whom hard fortune had fashioned into soldiers and statesmen at Madras. But in the year 1758 the Nabob Ali Vardi Khan died, and was {266} succeeded by his grandson, Siraju'd Daulah, infamous in English history as Surajah Dowlah.

[Sidenote: 1756--The Blackhole]

This creature, who incarnated in his own proper person all the worst vices of the East, without apparently possessing any of the East's redeeming virtues, cherished a very bitter hatred of the English.

Surajah Dowlah was unblessed with the faintest glimmerings of statesmanship; it seemed to his enfeebled mind that it would be not only a very good thing to drive the English out of Bengal, but that it would be also an exceedingly easy thing to do. All he wanted, it seemed to him, was a pretext, and to such a mind a pretext was readily forthcoming. Had not the English dogs fortified their settlement without his permission? Had they not afforded shelter to some victim flying from his omnivorous rapacity? These were pretexts good enough to serve the insane brain of Surajah Dowlah. He attacked Fort William with an overwhelming force; the English traders, unwarlike, timorous, and deserted by their leaders, made little or no resistance; the madman had Fort William in his power, and used his power like a madman. The memory of the Blackhole of Calcutta still remains a mark of horror and of terror upon our annals of Indian empire. When Lord Macaulay, eighty-four years after the event, penned his famous pa.s.sage in which he declared that nothing in history or in fiction, not even the story which Ugolino told in the sea of everlasting ice, approached the horrors of the Blackhole, he wrote before the worst horrors of Indian history had yet become portion and parcel of our own history. But even those who write to-day, more than a century and a quarter after that time; those in whose minds the memories are fresh of the butcher's well at Cawnpore and the ma.s.sacre on the river-bank; those to whom the names of Nana Sahib and Azimoolah Khan sound as horridly as the names of fiends--even those can still think of the Blackhole as almost incomparable in horror, and of Surajah Dowlah as among the worst of Oriental murderers. It is true that certain efforts have been made to reduce the {267} measure of Surajah Dowlah's guilt. Colonel Malleson, than whom there is no fairer or abler Indian historian, thinks there can be no doubt that Surajah Dowlah did not desire the death of his English prisoners. Mr. Holwell, one of the few survivors of that awful night, the man whose narrative thrilled and still thrills, horrified and still horrifies, the civilized world, does give testimony that goes towards clearing the character of Surajah Dowlah from direct complicity in that terrible crime. "I had in all three interviews with him," he wrote, "the last in Darbar before seven, when he repeated his a.s.surances to me, on the word of a soldier, that no harm should come to us; and, indeed, I believe his orders were only general that we for that night should be secured, and that what followed was the result of revenge and resentment in the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of the lower jemidars to whose custody we were delivered for the number of their order killed during the siege." Yet these words do not go far to cleanse Surajah Dowlah's memory. What had occurred? The English prisoners were brought before the triumphant Nabob, bullied and insulted, and finally left in charge of the Nabob's soldiery, while the Nabob himself retired to slumber.

The soldiery, whether prompted by revenge or mere merciless cruelty, forced the prisoners, one hundred and forty-six in number, into the garrison prison--a fearful place, only twenty feet square, known as the Blackhole. The senses sicken in reading what happened after this determination was carried out. The death-struggles of those unhappy English people crowded in that narrow s.p.a.ce, without air, in the fearful summer heat, stir the profoundest pity, the profoundest anguish. The Nabob's soldiers all through that fearful night revelled in the sights and sounds that their victims' sufferings offered to them.

When the night did end and the awakened despot did allow the door of the Blackhole to be opened, only twenty-three out of the hundred and forty-six victims were alive. The hundred and twenty-three dead bodies were hurriedly buried in a common pit.

{268}

It is simply impossible to exonerate Surajah Dowlah from the shame and stain of that deed. The savage who pa.s.sed "the word of a soldier" that the lives of his prisoners should be spared took no precautions to insure the carrying out of his promise. If, as Mr. Holwell says, the lower jemidars were thirsting for revenge, then the Nabob, who gave his prisoners over to the care of those jemidars, was directly responsible for their deeds. Even in Surajah Dowlah's army there must have been men, there must have been officers, to whom the tyrant, if he had wished his prisoners to be well treated, could have intrusted them, in the full confidence and certainty that his commands would be carried out, and his humane wishes humanely interpreted. But even if by the utmost straining we can in any degree acquit the Nabob of direct personal responsibility before the act, his subsequent conduct involves him in direct complicity, and forces upon him all the responsibility and all the infamy. He did not punish the miscreants who forced their victims into the Blackhole, and who gloated over their appalling sufferings. He did not treat the survivors with ordinary humanity. He was evidently convinced that he could deal with the wretched English as he pleased, that their power in India was annihilated, that Surajah Dowlah was among the mightiest princes of the earth.

[Sidenote: 1757--Plot and counterplot]

For six long months, for a fantastical half-year, Surajah Dowlah revelled in the crazy dream of his own omnipotence. Then came retribution, swift, successive, comprehensive. Clive was upon him--Clive the unconquerable, sacking his towns, putting his garrisons to the sword, recapturing those places from which Surajah Dowlah had imagined that he had banished the Englishman forever. The news of the tragedy of the Blackhole, and of the capture of Calcutta and Fort William, had reached Madras in August, and the warlike community had resolved upon prompt and speedy revenge. But it took time to raise the expedition, took time to despatch the expedition. In October the army of two thousand four hundred men, {269} of which nine hundred were European troops, and fifteen hundred Sepoys, sailed for the Hoogly, under Clive as military, and Admiral Watson as naval, commander.

Hostile winds delayed the armament until December, but when it did reach its destination it carried all before it. The luck which always attended upon Clive was still faithful to him. The Nabob, at the head of his vast hordes, was soon as eager to come to terms with Clive at the head of his little handful of men as he had before been eager to obliterate the recollection of the Englishmen from the soil of Bengal.

He offered to treat with Clive; he was ready to make terms which from a military point of view were satisfactory; he was evidently convinced that he had underrated the power of England, and he was prepared to pay a heavy penalty for his blunder.

We are now approaching that chapter of Clive's career which has served his enemies with their readiest weapon, and has filled his admirers with the deepest regret. The negotiations between Clive and Surajah Dowlah were conducted on the part of all the Orientals concerned, from Surajah Dowlah to Omichund, the wealthy Bengalee who played the part of go-between, with an amount of treachery that has not been surpa.s.sed even in the tortuous records of Oriental treachery. But unhappily the treachery was not confined to the Oriental negotiators; not confined to the wretched despot on the throne; not confined to Meer Jaffier, the princ.i.p.al commander of his troops, who wanted the throne for himself; not confined to the unscrupulous Omichund, who plotted with his left hand against Surajah Dowlah, and with his right hand against the English. Treachery as audacious, treachery more ingenious, treachery more successful, was deliberately practised by Clive. The brilliant and gallant soldier of fortune showed himself to be more than a match for Oriental cunning in all the worst vices of a vicious Oriental diplomacy. If Surajah Dowlah was unable to make up his miserable mind, if he alternately promised and denied, cajoled and threatened, Clive, on his side, while affecting to treat {270} with Surajah Dowlah, was deliberately supporting the powerful conspiracy against Surajah Dowlah, the object of which was to place Meer Jaffier on the throne. If Omichund, with the keys of the conspiracy in his hand, threatened to betray all to Surajah Dowlah unless he was promised the heaviest hush-money, Clive on his side was perfectly ready to promise without the remotest intention of paying. If Omichund, wary and suspicious, was determined to have his bond in writing, Clive was quite ready to meet him with a false and fraudulent bond. Clive professed to be perfectly willing that in the secret treaty which was being drawn up between the English and Meer Jaffier a clause should be inserted promising the fulfilment of all Omichund's claims. But as Clive had not the remotest intention of satisfying those claims, he composedly prepared two treaties. One--the one by which he and Meer Jaffier were to be bound--was written on white paper, and contained no allusion to the avaricious Omichund. [Sidenote: 1757--The Red Treaty] Another, on red paper, which was to be disregarded by the parties to the swindle, contained a paragraph according to Omichund's heart's desire. Thus bad begins, but worse remains behind. Clive, to his great astonishment, found that Admiral Watson entertained different views from his about the honor of an English soldier and gentleman. However convenient it might be to bamboozle Omichund with a sham treaty, Admiral Watson declined to be a party to the trick by signing his name to the fraudulent doc.u.ment. Yet Admiral Watson's name was essential to the success of the Red Treaty, and Clive showed that he was not a man to stick at trifles. He wanted Admiral Watson's signature; he knew that Omichund would want Admiral Watson's signature; he satisfied himself, and he satisfied Omichund, by forging Admiral Watson's signature at the bottom of the Red Treaty.

It is simply impossible to imagine any defence of Clive's conduct in this most disgraceful business. The best that can be said for him is that the whole process of the {271} treason was so infamous, the fabrication of the Red Treaty so revolting a piece of duplicity, that the forging of Admiral Watson's name does not materially add to the darkness of the complete transaction. Nothing can palliate Clive's conduct. It may, indeed, be said that as civilized troops after long engagements in petty wars with savage races lose that morale and discipline which come from contests with their military peers, so minds steeped in the degrading atmosphere of Oriental diplomacy become inevitably corrupted, and lose the fine distinction between right and wrong. But so specious a piece of special pleading cannot serve Clive's turn. English diplomacy at home and abroad has always, with the rarest exceptions, plumed itself on its truthfulness, and has often been successful by reason of that very truthfulness. The practically unanimous condemnation which Clive's countrymen then and since have pa.s.sed upon his action with regard to the Red Treaty is the best answer to all such pitiful prevarications.

However, Clive did prepare a sham treaty, did forge Admiral Watson's name, did fool Omichund to the top of his bent. Omichund being thus cunningly bought over, Clive prepared for action, flung defiance at Surajah Dowlah, and marched against him. On June 23, 1757, the fate of England in India was decided by the famous battle of Pla.s.sey, or, as it should be more correctly called, Palasi.

Pla.s.sey was a great victory. Yet, in the words of the conspirator in Ben Jonson's "Catiline," it was but "a cast at dice in Fortune's hand"

that it might have been a great defeat, Clive was astonishingly, grotesquely out-numbered. The legendary deeds of chivalrous paladins who at the head of a little body of knights sweep away whole hosts of paynims at Saragossa or Roncesvalles were rivalled by Clive's audacity in opposing his few regiments to the swollen armament of the Nabob.

Moreover, Meer Jaffier, whose alliance with the English, whose treason to Surajah Dowlah, was an important part of the scheme, {272} was not to be counted upon. He hesitated, unwilling to fling his fortunes into the English scale before he was convinced that the English were certain of success, although he was himself one of the most important factors in the possibility of that success. But the greatest danger that threatened the English arms was, curiously enough, due to Clive himself. On the eve of Pla.s.sey he held a council of war at which it was discussed whether they should fight at once or postpone fighting to what might seem a more seasonable opportunity. Clive at this council departed from his usual custom. He gave his own vote first, and he voted against taking any immediate action. Naturally enough, the majority of the council of war voted with Clive, in spite of the strenuous opposition of Major Eyre Coote and a small minority. By a majority of thirteen to seven it was resolved not to fight.

It is needless to speculate on what would have been the fortunes of the English in Bengal if that vote had settled the question. Luckily, Clive was a man of genius, and was not either afraid to admit that he had made a mistake, or to change his mind. A short period of solitary reflection convinced him that he and the majority were wrong, and that Eyre Coote and the minority were right. He informed Eyre Coote of his new decision, gave the necessary orders, and the next day the battle of Pla.s.sey was fought and won.

It is not necessary here to go into the details of that momentous day.

The desperate courage, daring, and skill of the English troops carried all before them; their cannonade scattered death and confusion into the Nabob's ranks. Within an hour an army of sixty thousand men was defeated, with astonishingly slight loss to the victors; Surajah Dowlah, abandoned at the judicious moment by one traitor, Meer Jaffier, was flying for his life in obedience to the insidious counsels of another traitor, Rajah Dulab Ram. From that hour Bengal became part of the English empire.

{273}

The fate of the different actors on the Indian side was soon decided.

Meer Jaffier was duly invested with the Nabob's authority over Bengal, Behar, and Orissa; Omichund, on learning the shameful trick of the Red Treaty, went mad and died mad; Surajah Dowlah was soon captured and promptly killed by Meer Jaffier: the Blackhole was avenged.

[Sidenote: 1757--The conqueror returns]

Clive had now reached the pinnacle of his greatness. Victor of Pla.s.sey, Governor of Bengal, he remained in India for three more resplendent years; he added to the number of his conquests by defeating the great enterprise of Shah Alum against Meer Jaffier, and shattered the Dutch descent upon the Hoogly--a descent secretly favored by the ever-treacherous Meer Jaffier--both on land and sea. Then, with laurel victory upon his sword, and smooth success strewn before his feet, Clive resolved to return again to England. He sailed from India, full of honors, in 1760, the year in which George the Second died. When he arrived in England George the Third was king. Here for the moment we must leave him, the greatest living soldier of his country, with a career of practically unbroken glory behind him. He had reached his apogee. We shall meet with him again under less happy conditions, when the sun of Pla.s.sey had begun to set.

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CHAPTER x.x.xIX.

CHANGES.

[Sidenote: 1751--"Give us back our eleven days"]

Meanwhile some changes were taking place in political affairs at home which were full of importance to the coming time. William Pitt had taken office; not, indeed, an office important enough for his genius, but still one which gave him an opportunity of making his power felt.

The King still detested him; all the more, perhaps, because it was now becoming more and more evident that the King would have to reckon with him as Prime-minister before very long. The stately form of Pitt was, indeed, already throwing a gigantic shadow before it. Henry Fox, too, was beginning to show himself an administrator and a debater, and, it may be added, a political intriguer, of all but consummate ability.

Murray was beginning to be recognized as a great advocate, and even a great man. Lyttelton was still making brilliant way in politics, but was even yet hovering somewhat uncertain between politics and literature, destined in the end to become another ill.u.s.tration of the career marred for both fields by the effort to work in both fields. On the other hand, Chesterfield had given up office. He had had a dispute with his colleagues when he was strongly in favor of making a peace, and they would not have it, and he left them to go their own way. He refused the t.i.tle of duke which the King offered him. He withdrew for the remainder of his years to private life, saying: "I have been behind the scenes both of pleasure and business; I have seen all the coa.r.s.e pulleys and dirty ropes which exhibit and move all the gaudy machines; and I have seen and smelt the tallow candles which illuminate the whole {275} decoration to the astonishment and admiration of the ignorant mult.i.tude." He seldom spoke in Parliament afterwards; he was growing deaf and weary. In 1751 he broke silence, and with success, when he delivered his celebrated speech on the reform of the calendar. He was "coached," as we should say now, by two able mathematicians, the Earl of Macclesfield and Mr. Bradley. The ignorant portion of the public were greatly excited by what they considered the loss of eleven days, and were strongly opposed to the whole scheme. Years later, when Mr.

Bradley was sinking under mortal disease, many people ascribed his sufferings to a judgment from Heaven for having taken part in that "impious undertaking."

The "impious undertaking" was a very needed scientific reform in the calendar, which had long before been adopted in some other countries.

Julius Caesar was the first great regulator of the calendar; his work in that way was not the least wonderful of his achievements. The calculations of his astronomers, however, were discovered in much later times to be "out" by eleven minutes in each year. When Pope Gregory the Thirteenth came to the throne of the papacy, in 1572, he found that the eleven minutes had grown by mere process of time to eleven days.

He started a new reform of the calendar, which was adopted at once in Italy, Spain, and Portugal. It gradually commended itself to France and Germany, and it was adopted by Denmark and Sweden in 1700. England only came into line with the reform of the calendar in 1751. The Act of Parliament which sanctioned the change brought in the use of the words "new style" and "old style." Only Russia and Greece now of European countries cling to the old style. But the new style, as we have said, was bitterly resented by the mob in England, and every one remembers Hogarth's picture of the patriot drunk in the gutter with his banner near him bearing the inscription, "Give us back our eleven days."

Chesterfield laughed at the success of his speech on the {276} reform of the calendar, and made little of it. Perhaps he helped thus to explain the comparative failure of his whole career. Life was to him too much of a gibe and a sarcasm, and life will not be taken on those terms.