mutual compact to poison one another.  That Arabian tale, fit only to form a ridiculous tragedy, has been gravely mentioned to your Lordships for the purpose of slandering the pedigree of this Vizier of Oude, and making him vile in your Lordships’ eyes.  My honorable friend has exposed to you the absurdity of these stories, but he has not shown you the malice of their propagators.  The prisoner and his counsel have referred to Dow’s History, who calls this Nabob “the more infamous son of an infamous Persian peddler.”  They wish that your Lordships should consider him as a person vilely born, ignominiously educated, and practising a mean trade, in order that, when it shall be proved that he and his family were treated with every kind of indignity and contempt by the prisoner at your bar, the sympathy of mankind should be weakened.  Consider, my Lords, the monstrous perfidy and ingratitude of this man, who, after receiving great favors from the Nabob, is not satisfied with oppressing his offspring, but goes back to his ancestors, tears them out of their graves, and vilifies them with slanderous aspersions.  My Lords, the ancestor of Sujah Dowlah was a great prince,—­certainly a subordinate prince, because he was a servant of the Great Mogul, who was well called King of Kings, for he had in his service persons of high degree.  He was born in Persia; but was not, as is falsely said, the more infamous son of an infamous Persian peddler.  Your Lordships are not unacquainted with the state and history of India; you therefore know that Persia has been the nursery of all the Mahometan nobility of India:  almost everything in that country which is not of Gentoo origin is of Persian; so much so, that the Persian language is the language of the court, and of every office from the highest to the lowest.  Among these noble Persians, the family of the Nabob stands in the highest degree.  His father’s ancestors were of noble descent, and those of his mother, Munny Begum, more eminently and more illustriously so.  This distinguished family, on no better authority than that of the historian Dow, has been slandered by the prisoner at your bar, in order to destroy the character of those whom he had already robbed of their substance.  Your Lordships will have observed with disgust how the Dows and the Hastings, and the whole of that tribe, treat their superiors,—­in what insolent language they speak of them, and with what pride and indignity they trample upon the first names and the first characters in that devoted country.

But supposing it perfectly true that this man was “the more infamous son of an infamous Persian peddler,” he had risen to be the secondary sovereign of that country.  He had a revenue of three millions six hundred thousand pounds sterling:  a vast and immense revenue; equal, perhaps, to the clear revenue of the King of England.  He maintained an army of one hundred and twenty thousand men.  He had a splendid court; and his country was prosperous