PUBLIC BUILDINGS
numbers still lingered among the streets. Bow Bazar with its spacious width was long a fashionable quarter, and many of the old houses, given up now to squalor and decay, still show traces of their ancient splendour in their large and lofty rooms, beneath whose decorated ceilings ladies in hooped skirts and powdered hair once tripped lightly in the dance with gallant partners brave in lace ruffles and wigs, or passed through the tall doors and down the wide stairs to their sedan chairs or high swinging chariots, to be marshalled home by mussalchies with flaming torches.
The house which Clive occupied on the recovery of Calcutta, and from which Clive Street took its name, is thought by Doctor Busteed to have stood about the site of the present Royal Exchange, and to have been the house "behind the Play House" which Philip Francis rented, in 1776, at £100 per month. The following extract from a private diary, under date of October, 1795, would suggest rather that Clive's house stood in Lyons Range. The entry, which is in reference to a survey of the house in question on behalf of an intending purchaser, is as follows:—
"28th October, 1795. To Williamson's; it is Hamilton's house behind the Writers' Buildings. After examining the house carefully, I advised him to have nothing to do with it, either to
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