of Asin corresponds with the month of September and part of October, and not with November; and it is the more extraordinary that Mr. Larkins should mistake this, because he is in an office which requires monthly payments, and consequently great monthly exactness, and a continual transfer from one month to another:  we cannot suppose any accountant in England can be more accurately acquainted with the succession of months than Mr. Larkins must have been with the comparative state of Bengal and English months.  How are we to account for this gross inaccuracy?  If you have a poet, if you have a politician, if you have a moralist inaccurate, you know that these are cases which, from the narrow bounds of our weak faculties, do not perhaps admit of accuracy.  But what is an inaccurate accountant good for?  “Silly man, that dost not know thy own silly trade!” was once well said:  but the trade here is not silly.  You do not even praise an accountant for being accurate, because you have thousands of them; but you justly blame a public accountant who is guilty of a gross inaccuracy.  But what end could his being inaccurate answer?  Why not name October as well as November?  I know no reason for it; but here is certainly a gross mistake:  and from the nature of the thing, it is hardly possible to suppose it to be a mere mistake.  But take it that it is a mistake, and to have nothing of fraud, but mere carelessness; this, in a man valued by Mr. Hastings for being very punctilious and accurate, is extraordinary.

But to return to the bonds.  We find a bond taken in the month of Shawal, 1186, or 1779, but the receipt is said to be in Asin, 1780:  that is to say, there was a year and about three months between the collection and the receipt; and during all that period of time an enormous sum of money had lain in the hands of Gunga Govind Sing, to be employed when Mr. Hastings should think fit.  He employed it, he says, for the Mahratta expedition.  Now he began that letter on the 29th of November by telling you that the bribe would not have been taken from Cheyt Sing, if it had not been at the instigation of an exigency which it seems required a supply of money, to be procured lawfully or unlawfully.  But in fact there was no exigency for it before the Berar army came upon the borders of the country,—­that army which he invited by his careless conduct towards the Rajah of Berar, and whose hostility he was obliged to buy off by a sum of money; and yet this bribe was taken from Cheyt Sing long before he had this occasion for it.  The fund lay in Gunga Govind Sing’s hands; and he afterwards applied to that purpose a part of this fund, which he must have taken without any view whatever to the Company’s interest.  This pretence of the exigency of the Company’s affairs is the more extraordinary, because the first receipt of these moneys was some time in the year 1779 (I have not got the exact date of the agreement); and it was but a year before that the Company was so far from being