suppose existed in the prototype himself.  He saw nowhere above-ground one single shilling that he could attach,—­no, not one; every place had been ravaged; no money remained in sight.  But possibly some might be buried in vaults, hid from the gripe of tyranny and rapacity.  “It must be so,” says he.  “Where can I find it? how can I get at it?  There is one illustrious family that is thought to have accumulated a vast body of treasures, through a course of three or four successive reigns.  It does not appear openly; but we have good information that very great sums of money are bricked up and kept in vaults under ground, and secured under the guard and within the walls of a fortress”:  the residence of the females of the family, a guard, as your Lordships know, rendered doubly and trebly secure by the manners of the country, which make everything that is in the hands of women sacred.  It is said that nothing is proof against gold,—­that the strongest tower will not be impregnable, if Jupiter makes love in a golden shower.  This Jupiter commences making love; but he does not come to the ladies with gold for their persons, he comes to their persons for their gold.  This impetuous lover, Mr. Hastings, who is not to be stayed from the objects of his passion, would annihilate space and time between him and his beloved object, the jaghires of these ladies, had now, first, their treasure’s affection.

Your Lordships have already had a peep behind the curtain, in the first orders sent to Mr. Middleton.  In the treaty of Chunar you see a desire, obliquely expressed, to get the landed estates of all these great families.  But even while he was meeting with such reluctance in the Nabob upon this point, and though he also met with some resistance upon the part even of Mr. Middleton, Mr. Hastings appears to have given him in charge some other still more obnoxious and dreadful acts.  “While I was meditating,” says Mr. Middleton, in one of his letters, “upon this [the resumption of the jaghires], your orders came to me through Sir Elijah Impey.”  What these orders were is left obscure in the letter:  it is yet but as in a mist or cloud.  But it is evident that Sir Elijah Impey did convey to him some project for getting at more wealth by some other service, which was not to supersede the first, but to be concurrent with that upon which Mr. Hastings had before given him such dreadful charges and had loaded him with such horrible responsibility.  It could not have been anything but the seizure of the Begum’s treasures.  He thus goaded on two reluctant victims,—­first the reluctant Nabob, then the reluctant Mr. Middleton,—­forcing them with the bayonet behind them, and urging on the former, as at last appears, to violate the sanctity of his mother’s house.