Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 6.djvu/87



I a stranger had at this time [in 1782] gone into the kingdom of Oude, ignorant of what had happened since the death of Sujah Dowlah—that man who with a savage heart had still great lines of character, and who with all his ferocity in war, had still with a cultivating hand preserved to his country the riches which it derived from benignant skies, and a prolific soil—if this stranger, ignorant of all that had happened in the short interval, and observing the wide and general devastation, and all the horrors of the scene—of plains unclothed and brown—of vegetation burnt up and extinguished—of villages 77