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The variety, elegance, and costliness of the equipages in grand livery that crowd the Maidan during the fashionable hour was a surprise, the whole scene enlivened by the brilliant dresses of the ladies, the dashing costumes, and gold lace of the nabobs, the quaint Oriental dress of their barefooted attendants, and the spirited music of the military band.
Long before that year, they made a Nabob of Arcot; they made and unmade Nabobs of Bengal; they humbled the Vizier of Oude; they braved the Emperor of Hindostan himself; more than half the revenues of Bengal were, under one pretence or another, administered by them. And after the grant, the Company was not, in form and name, an independent power. It was merely a minister of the Court of Delhi.
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.
There were nabobs in those days in the "flush times," I mean. Every rich strike in the mines created one or two. I call to mind several of these. They were careless, easy-going fellows, as a general thing, and the community at large was as much benefited by their riches as they were themselves possibly more, in some cases.
"How can you expect a state to be happily governed by the Tartars? Our rajahs, our omrahs, our nabobs, are very content, but the citizens are hardly so; and millions of citizens are something." Reasoning, the councillor and the Brahmin traversed the whole of Upper Asia. "I make the observation," said the Brahmin, "that there is not one republic in all this vast part of the world."
The era of nabobs, returning with vast wealth to astonish the English people, has long since passed away. These men had small pay, but great perquisites. The pay has been greatly increased, but the perquisites are gone, and India has benefited vastly by the change.
Few travellers that have visited Canada some thirty years since, in the days of the M'Tavishes, the M'Gillivrays, the M'Kenzies, the Frobishers, and the other magnates of the Northwest, when the company was in all its glory, but must remember the round of feasting and revelry kept up among these hyperborean nabobs.
There was a promising young artist at that time in Albany, and Irving wishes he were a man of wealth, to give him a helping hand; a few acts of munificence of this kind by rich nabobs, he breaks out, "would be more pleasing in the sight of Heaven, and more to the glory and advantage of their country, than building a dozen shingle church steeples, or buying a thousand venal votes at an election."
It is true, however, that I have a foreigner to deal with one of those half-civilized nabobs who come here every year to astonish the Parisians with their wealth and display, and who, by their idiotic prodigality, have so increased the price of everything that life has become well-nigh an impossibility to such of us as don't care to squander an entire fortune in a couple of years.
"I ain't what ye might call an old residenter," said David, "though I was part raised on Buxton Hill, an' I ain't so well 'quainted with the nabobs; but Polly's lived in the village ever sence she got married, an' knows their fam'ly hist'ry, dam, an' sire, an' pedigree gen'ally.
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