Warren Hastings sprang from an ancient and illustrious race.  It has been affirmed that his pedigree can be traced back to the great Danish sea-king, whose sails were long the terror of both coasts of the British Channel, and who, after many fierce and doubtful struggles, yielded at last to the valour and genius of Alfred.  But the undoubted splendour of the line of Hastings needs no illustration from fable.  One branch of that line wore, in the fourteenth century, the coronet of Pembroke.  From another branch sprang the renowned Chamberlain, the faithful adherent of the White Rose, whose fate has furnished so striking a theme both to poets and to historians.  His family received from the Tudors the earldom of Huntingdon, which, after long dispossession, was regained in our time by a series of events scarcely paralleled in romance.

The lords of the manor of Daylesford, in Worcestershire, claimed to be considered as the heads of this distinguished family.  The main stock, indeed, prospered less than some of the younger shoots.  But the Daylesford family, though not ennobled, was wealthy and highly considered, till, about two hundred years ago, it was overwhelmed by the great ruin of the civil wax.  The Hastings of that time was a zealous cavalier.  He raised money on his lands, sent his plate to the mint at Oxford, joined the royal army, and, after spending half his property in the cause of King Charles, was glad to ransom himself by making over most of the remaining half to Speaker Lenthal.  The old seat at Daylesford still remained in the family; but it could no longer be kept up:  and in the following generation it was sold to a merchant of London.

Before this transfer took place, the last Hastings of Daylesford had presented his second son to the rectory of the parish in which the ancient residence of the family stood.  The living was of little value; and the situation of the poor clergyman, after the sale of the estate, was deplorable.  He was constantly engaged in lawsuits about his tithes with the new lord of the manor, and was at length utterly ruined.  His eldest son, Howard, a well-conducted young man, obtained a place in the Customs.  The second son, Pynaston, an idle worthless boy, married before he was sixteen, lost his wife in two years, and died in the West Indies, leaving to the care of his unfortunate father a little orphan, destined to strange and memorable vicissitudes of fortune.

Warren, the son of Pynaston, was born on the sixth of December, 1731.  His mother died a few days later, and he was left dependent on his distressed grandfather.  The child was early sent to the village school, where he learned his letters on the same bench with the sons of the peasantry; nor did anything in his garb or face indicate that his life was to take a widely different course from that of the young rustics with whom he studied and played.  But no cloud could overcast the dawn of so much genius and so much ambition.  The very ploughmen observed,