Such was the condition of affairs in the year 1743, when the apparently insignificant fact that a young gentleman of a ne'er-do-well disposition, who seemed likely to come to a bad end in England, and who was accordingly shipped off to India by his irritated relations, altered and exalted the destinies not merely of a wealthy trading company, but of the British Crown. In the market town of Drayton-in-Hales, better known as Market-Drayton, in Shropshire, there lived, in the reign of George the First, a Mr. Richard Clive--a man whose comparatively meagre abilities were divided between the profession of the law and the cares of a small and not very valuable estate. In the little town on the river Tern, within sight of the old church built by Stephen, whose architectural characteristics were then happily unaltered by the hand of the {255} eighteenth century restorer, the Clives had been born and given in marriage and died, and repeated the round ever since the twelfth century. Mr. Richard Clive, in the reign of George the First, married a Manchester lady named Gaskill, who bore him many children of no note whatever, but who bore him one very noteworthy child indeed, his eldest son Robert, on September 29th, in the year 1725. There was a time, a long time too, during which the worthy Mr. Richard Clive persisted in regarding the birth of this eldest son as little less than a curse. He could very well have said of Robert what the Queen-mother says of Richard of Gloster, tetchy and wayward was his infancy. Seldom was there born into the world a more stubborn-minded, high-spirited boy. He may remind us a little of the young Mirabeau in his strenuous impassioned youth; in the estimate which those nearest to him, and most ignorant of him, formed of the young lion cub in the domestic litter; in the strange promise which the great career fulfilled. There was a kind of madness in the impish pranks which the boy Clive played in Market-Drayton, scaring the timid and scandalizing the respectable. He climbed to the top of the lofty steeple of that church, which dated from the days of Stephen, and perched himself upon a stone spout near the dizzy summit with a cool courage which Stephen himself might have envied. He got round him from among the idle lads of the town "a list of lawless resolutes," and, like David, made himself a captain over them for the purpose of levying a kind of guerilla warfare upon the shopkeepers of the little town, and making them pay tribute for the sanctity of their windows. In fact, he behaved as wildly as the wildest school-boy could behave--drifting from school to school, to learn nothing from each new master, and only to leave behind at each the record of an incorrigible reprobate. Nobody seems to have discovered that there was anything of the man of genius in the composition of the incorrigible reprobate, and so it came about that the town of {256} Market-Drayton in general, and the respectable