Introduction.--State of England, military and political.--India.-- Critical situation of British interests.--Marquis Wellesley appointed to the Government.--His measures.--War declared.-- Tippoo attacks the army of Cannanore.--Seringapatam invested.-- Stormed by General Baird.--Death, character, and anecdotes of the Sultaun of Mysore.--Military observations.--Acts of cruelty.-- Tippoo killed by an Irish soldier. The history of military nations exhibits periods of disaster and success, when good and evil fortune, as if ruled by a fatality, prevail. With some, in every essay, conquest crowns their arms; while the bravest efforts of others terminate invariably in defeat. Again, the best measures fail to obtain success,--mischances follow thick upon each other,--possessions are lost,--power declines,--and a name, before which a world once trembled, becomes a by-word, and is rarely used but to mark the mutability of national prosperity. In looking back on past events, perhaps the gloomiest period of British history will be found between the outbreak of the war of independence, in 1775, and that of the French revolution at the close of the last century. Conquest deserted those banners which for ages she had crowned with victory,--the days of England’s glory seemed departed,--and her military dispositions were rendered nugatory by a thousand accidental occurrences, which no human prudence could foresee. Disciplined valour was defeated by the raw levies of her own colonists, and her continental influence was placed in abeyance for a time, by those splendid victories achieved by the armies of the French Republic over the best organized and best commanded troops in Europe. Had the pride alone of Britain been lowered by the failure of her arms, that circumstance would have been sufficiently humiliating; but far more disastrous consequences resulted from these continued defeats. The North American colonies were wrested from the parent country, never to be recovered; and a retention of her Indian possessions became a doubtful question. French influence, too successfully employed with almost every European cabinet, had already reached the East; and the native princes, ripe for revolt, were only awaiting a fitting moment to throw off the mask, and, by an appeal to arms, free themselves from the thrall of a power which in secret they both dreaded and detested. This state of things was pregnant indeed with danger to Great Britain; but bold and well-digested measures saved her in this her political extremity; and when every thing was most heavily overcast, the first promise of returning prosperity dawned, and a future tide of conquest flowed from her earlier successes in the East.