ave received them, it will not be proper to take
any public steps for the assembling of the army. But whatever can be
done without a disclosure of the ultimate object, I authorize you to do
immediately; intending to apprise you, by this letter, that it is my
positive resolution to assemble the army upon the coast."

The Mysore dynasty was one of the natural productions of Indian
sovereignty. They had each been founded by a successful soldier, had
made conquests of prodigious extent, had devastated the land with
frightful rapidity; and then, after a generation or two of opulent
possession, had seen their provinces divided by rebellious viceroys;
until some slave, bolder than the rest, sprang up, broke down the
tottering viceroyalties, and seized the supreme throne. Hyder Ali, the
father of Tippoo, had been a common trooper in the service of the Rajah
of Mysore--by his intrepidity he became the captain of one of those
bands, half soldier and half robber, which form the irregulars of an
Asiatic army. By his address as a courtier, he rose into favour with the
rajah, who gave him the command of his army. By the treachery which
always surrounds and subverts an Asiatic throne, he finally took the
sovereign power to himself. Disputes of the new rajah with the Company's
agents produced a war, and the cavalry of this daring adventurer rode
up to the gates of Madras. Peace was at length proclaimed, and Hyder
acquired a vast reputation among the natives as the champion of India.
In 1770, an invasion of the Mahrattas, a robber nation, but the most
renowned of Indian plunderers, determined to crush the new power, and
poured down upon Mysore. Hyder now applied for assistance to Madras; but
the settlement had no assistance to give, and Hyder was forced to make a
disadvantageous treaty. He now loudly protested against the failure of
the English contingent, which he declared to have been the subject of a
treaty, and resolved on revenge. The plunder of the merchants' stores at
Madras was the more probable motive to his next desperate attack. The
half military, half commercial government of the Company, at that
period, paralyzed all measures of effective resistance; and while the
garrison urged vigorous proceedings, and the inhabitants dreaded
mercantile loss, the plains surrounding Madras were deluged by an
invasion from the Mysore. Hyder ranged in line seventy thousand horse
and twenty thousand regular infantry! with all the marauders of