Lord Clive: Quill-Driver and Conqueror

It is one of the distinctions of Robert Clive to be at once the model of all bad boys and the forlorn hope of their despairing fathers. He was probably the very worst boy that ever became a really great man. Of his early youth there is absolutely nothing good to be said, saving only the fact that he was possessed of that brute, bulldog courage which thousands of English boys, whose names have never been heard beyond their native towns, have possessed in common with him.

He was idle, passionate, aggressive, not over truthful, and of a distinctly turbulent, not to say piratical disposition. For instance, he had not reached his teens before he established a sort of juvenile reign of terror in the sleepy old town of Market Drayton, which had at once the misfortune and the honour of being his birthplace.