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MINUTES OF PROCEEDINGS OF 
Orme then mentions the Company's officers who served zealously under 
“ their preceptor in the siege,” the veteran Lawrence; and adds the in¬ 
teresting fact that this was the first siege, whether offensive or defensive, in 
which Mr Call, the chief engineer, to whose journal and plans the historian 
was probably much indebted, had served. " Captain Hislop, who arrived 
with a company of the king's artillerymen, at the same time as Aldercron's 
regiment, was the senior officer in this branch; he had served in Bergen-op- 
Zoom. The Company's artillery, which furnished all the cannon and 
ammunition, was commanded by Captain Robert Barker; even the enemy 
acknowledged that the promptitude and execution of the fire from the fort 
was superior to their own: whatever guns or mortars were disabled on the 
defences, were immediately replaced by others prepared in store.'' 
"Thus,” he adds in conclusion, "every officer of distinction on the 
establishment of Coromandel was employed in the defence of Madras, ex¬ 
cepting Captain Joseph Smith,” who was in command at Trichinopoly. 
The statistics on the Trench side are less precise. Orme estimates their 
force, on its advance from Conjeveram, at 2700 firelocks; and an intercepted 
letter of Lally's, towards the close of the siege, states that he had still 2000 
Europeans; but on the spot seemingly not more than 1000 Sepoys. 
On the whole, though the failure of this great undertaking was far from 
ending the war, it is not too much to say that it was " the beginning of the 
end;” for henceforth Lally was practically on the defensive. 
And the end came full soon. The last act of the drama in India, though 
a bloody afterpiece was to be performed in Europe, disclosed the fall of 
Pondicherry, and with it that of the political power of the Erench in the 
Peninsula. Pitt and Coote, English valour, good conduct and wealth, the 
indispensable and powerful co-operation of our fleet, on the one hand; and 
on tlie other, the ill success of the Trench arms in Europe and America, 
the consequent absence of their fleet' from the scene of action in India, and 
the baleful predominance there of internal dissension, mismanagement, and 
corruption—proximately famine, had consummated the ruin of the once 
proud metropolis of Dupleix's contemplated empire. 
Haughty and impracticable in his tone to the last, Lally surrendered; 
to experience (even after the victor had occupied the place, and had dropped 
a tear over the sad spectacle of his emaciated prisoners, and the fateful 
catastrophe of their wild but gallant general) renewed insults from his 
intractable and exasperated underlings; and to expiate, on a Trench scaffold, 
not surely his own alleged treachery to the interests of a country which 
he had served not wisely but too well, but the accumulated mass of evil 
connected with the old regime at home, and the settlement in India, and 
the unpardonable crime of having commanded where Trance, smarting under 
repeated blows in other parts of the world, had sustained a scandalous, total, 
and irretrievable overthrow. 
And we, who were the gainers by his faults, and who have risen upon that 
overthrow to Imperial greatness in the East, should of all men most com¬ 
passionate his failings, and condone them in the memory of his cruel death; 
and solemnly ask ourselves, How have we used, how are we henceforth 
disposed to use, those vast opportunities, how to fulfil that heavy responsi¬ 
bility, which his ill-starred but not altogether inglorious career in part 
tended to devolve upon us ? 
