Page:Lord Clive.djvu/14

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6
PREFACE

one of the heroes of Trichinopoli, written at the period of Clive's early victories, but only given to the world, with a memoir of his career, in 1886; Lord Stanhope's History of England; Malcolm's Life of Clive; and above all, that mine of wealth to a searcher into the details of Clive's services in Bengal, Colonel Broome's History of the Bengal Army. Colonel Broome was my intimate and valued friend. He knew more about the history of the rise of the English in India than any man I ever met. He had made the subject a life-study. He had read every tract, however old, every letter, however difficult to decipher, every record of the period up to and beyond the time of Job Charnock, and he was a past-master of hia subject. He had collected an enormous mass of materials, the more bulky of which were dispersed at his untimely death. But I have seen and handled them, and I can state most positively, from my own knowledge, that every item of importance culled from them is contained in the admirable volume to which I have referred, and which was published in 1850. There is, alas, only that volume. Colonel Broome had set apart a vast mass of materials for his second, and had resolved to complete the work at Simla, to which place he was proceeding for the summer of, I think, 1870. But, in the course of transit, the box containing the materials was mysteriously spirited away, and I have not heard that it was ever found. From the nature of the documents collected I cannot but regard the loss as irreparable.

G. B. Malleson.