THREE:In return for this favour, Clive obtained one of infinitely more importance. It was the transfer of the sole right of dominion throughout the provinces of Bengal, Orissa, and Bahar. All that vast territory was thus made the legal and valid property of the East India Company. The conveyance was ratified by public deed, which was delivered by the Great Mogul to Clive in presence of his court, the throne on which he was elevated during this most important ceremony being an English dining-table, covered with a showy cloth. And of this princewho was entirely their own puppetthe British still continued to style themselves the vassals, to strike his coins at their mint, and to bear his titles on their public seal! Clive saw the immense importance of maintaining the aspect of subjects to the highest native authority, and of avoiding alarming the minds of the native forces by an open assumption of proprietorship. By this single treaty, at the same time that he had freed the Company from all dependence on the heirs of Meer Jaffier, he derived the Company's title to those states from the supreme native power in India; and he could boast of having secured to his countrymen an annual revenue of two millions of money. Thus began a system which has played a leading part in our Indian history.Cairness knew that it was true, too true to refute.
Perspiciatis unde omnis iste natus error sit voluptatem accu santium doloremque laudantium, totam rem aperiam, eaque ipsa quae ab illo inventore veritatis et quasi architecto beatae vitae dicta sunt explicabo.
THREE:At the head of the poets of this period stands Alexander Pope, who became the founder of a school which has had followers down to our own time. Pope was the poet of society, of art, and polish. His life was spent in London and in the country, chiefly between Binfield, in Windsor Forest, and Twickenham; and his poetry partakes very much of the qualities of that sceneryrich, cultivated, and beautiful, but having no claims to the wild or the sublime. He is opposed to poets like Milton and Shakespeare as pastures and town gardens are opposed to seas, forests, and mountains. In style he is polished to the highest degree, piquant, and musical; but, instead of being profound and creative, he is sensible, satiric, and didactic. He failed in "the vision and the faculty divine," but he possessed fancy, a moderate amount of passion, and a clear and penetrating intellect. He loved nature, but it was such only as he knewthe home-scenes of Berkshire and the southern counties, the trained and polished beauties in his gardens, the winding walks and grottoes at Twickenham. Mountains he had never seen, and there are none in his poetry. He was born in the year of the Revolution, and died in 1744, aged fifty-six; and, considering that he suffered from a feeble constitution and defective health, he was a remarkably industrious man. His pastorals appeared in Tonson's "Miscellany" when he was only twenty-one years old. Before this he had translated the first book of the "Thebais," and Ovid's "Epistle from Sappho to Phaon;" paraphrased Chaucer's "January and May," and the prologue to "The Wife of Bath's Tale." In two years after his "Pastorals" appeared his "Essay on Criticism" (1711). "The Messiah" and "The Rape of the Lock" were published in 1712the year in which the "Spectator" died. "The Rape of the Lock" celebrated the mighty event of the clipping of a lock of hair from the head of Miss Belle Fermor by Lord Petre.[151] This act, adorned with a great machinery of sylphs and gnomes, a specimen of elegant trifling, enchanted the age, which would have less appreciated grander things, and placed Pope on the pinnacle of fame. In 1713 he published "Windsor Forest," a subject for a pleasant but not a great poem, yet characteristic of Pope's genius, which delighted in the level and ornate rather than the splendid and the wild. In 1715 appeared the first four books of his translation of Homer's "Iliad," which was not completed till 1720. This still continues the most popular translation of the great heroic poet of Greece; for although it is rather a paraphrase of this colossal yet simple poem, and therefore not estimated highly by Greek scholars who can go to the original, it has that beauty and harmony of style which render it to the English reader an ever-fascinating work. In 1717 appeared his "Epistle from Eloisa to Abelard," a poem displaying more passion than any other of Pope's writings, but too sensuous, and the subject itself far from well chosen. Next succeeded his "Odyssey" of Homer, in conjunction with Fenton and Broome, and in 1728 the first three books of "The Dunciad," in which he took a sweeping vengeance on the critics and poetasters of the time, who had assailed him fiercely on all sides, with John Dennis at their head. The vigour with which Pope wielded the satiric lash excited the wonder of the public, which had seen no such trenchant production hitherto in the language, and filled the whole host of flayed and scalded dunces with howls of wrath and agony. Pope was not sparing of foul language in his branding of others, and they were still more obscene and scurrilous in their retorts. It is questionable whether they or Pope felt the most torture; for, so far from silencing them, they continued to kick, sting, and pelt him with dirt so long as he lived. So late as 1742 he published a fourth book of the satire, to give yet one more murderous blow to the blackguard crew. Besides this satire, he modernised an edition of Donne's Satires, and produced his "Essay on Man," his "Epistle on Taste," his "Moral Essays," and other poems, down to 1740. His "Essay on Man," "Moral Essays," etc., display shrewd sense, and a keen perception of the characteristics of human nature and of the world; yet they do not let us into any before unknown depths of life or morals, but, on the contrary, are, in many particulars, unsound. In fact, these productions belong by no means to poetry, of which they exhibit no quality, and might just as well have been given in prose. On the whole, Pope is a poet whose character is that of cleverness, strong intellect, carefully-elaborative art, much malice, and little warmth or breadth of genuine imagination. He reflects the times in which he lived, which were corrupt, critical, but not original, and he had no conception of the heavens of poetry and soul into which Milton and Shakespeare soared before him, and Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, Wordsworth and Tennyson in our time have wandered at large.
Perspiciatis unde omnis iste natus error sit voluptatem accu santium doloremque laudantium, totam rem aperiam, eaque ipsa quae ab illo inventore veritatis et quasi architecto beatae vitae dicta sunt explicabo.
THREE:The English army was now in full march against them. About eight o'clock in the morning of April 16 a man who had been left asleep in the wood of Kilravock hastened to Culloden House, where Charles and his chief officers were resting, to announce that Cumberland's troops were coming. There was then a hurried running and riding to get the army drawn up to receive them. Cumberland came on with his army, divided into three columns of five battalions each. The artillery and baggage followed the second column along the sea-coast on the right; the cavalry covered the left wing, which stretched towards the hills. The men were all in the highest spirits, and even the regiments of horse, which had hitherto behaved so ill, seemed as though they meant to retrieve their characters to-day. The Highlanders were drawn up about half a mile from the part of the moor where they stood the day before, forming a sad contrast to Cumberland's troops, looking thin, and dreadfully fatigued. In placing them, also, a fatal mistake was made. They were drawn up in two lines, with a body of reserve; but the Clan Macdonald, which had always been accustomed to take their stand on the right since Robert Bruce placed them there in the battle of Bannockburn, were disgusted to find themselves now occupying the left. Instead of the Macdonalds now stood the Athol Brigade. As the battle began, a snow-storm began to blow in the faces of the Highlanders, which greatly confounded them.
Perspiciatis unde omnis iste natus error sit voluptatem accu santium doloremque laudantium, totam rem aperiam, eaque ipsa quae ab illo inventore veritatis et quasi architecto beatae vitae dicta sunt explicabo.
