The charter of 1833 was not an unmixed good. It stopped all progress in Madras and Bombay by bringing those Presidencies too closely under the control of Bengal. For twenty years they had no representatives in the Council at Calcutta. They had framed their own systems of land revenue. They were relieved of the cares of trade, which had been a worry to Governors and Governors-General from the days of the Marquis of Wellesley to those of Lord William Bentinck. But after the year 1833 they were more or less paralysed by the loss of all discretion and responsibility in matters of legislation and expenditure. Great events were about to agitate Northern India, but for twenty years Madras and Bombay were without a history, and the work of administration was as lifeless and monotonous as the working of a machine. [Sidenote: Popular administration of Bentinck.] Lord William Bentinck left India in 1835. His administration had been eminently popular with all classes of the community; and his memory is preserved to this day as that of a just and able ruler, who paid due regard to the rights and claims of Asiatics as well as of Europeans. [Sidenote: Sir Charles Metcalfe, 1835-6: coming collisions with Asiatic powers.] Sir Charles Metcalfe, the Bengal civilian, who was sent on a mission to Runjeet Singh in 1808, and since then had filled some of the most responsible posts in the Anglo-Indian empire, acted as Governor-General between the departure of Lord William Bentinck in 1835 and the arrival of Lord Auckland in 1836. A new era was beginning to dawn upon India. Great Britain was about to appear, not only as mistress of an Anglo-Indian empire, but as an Asiatic power coming more or less into collision with four other Asiatic powers--Persia, Russia, Afghanistan and China. FOOTNOTES: [17] The following fragment preserves something of the feeling of the time:-- "Fill the wine-cup fast, for the storm is past, The tyrant Tippu is slain at last, And victory smiles To reward the toils Of Britons once again. "Let the trumpet sound, and the sound go round Along the bound of Eastern ground; Let the cymbals clang With a merry-merry bang, To the joys of the next campaign." [18] There was also some show of treaty rights in appropriating the territory, but the question is obscure and obsolete. In 1775 the Nawab Vizier had ceded the revenues of the territory for the maintenance of a British force in Oudh, and Lord Wellesley is said to have only closed the mortgage by taking over the country.