charged with having borne a share in the worst abuses which then prevailed; and it is almost equally certain that, if he had borne a share in those abuses, the able and bitter enemies who afterwards persecuted him would not have failed to discover and to proclaim his guilt.  The keen, severe, and even malevolent scrutiny to which his whole public life was subjected, a scrutiny unparalleled, as we believe, in the history of mankind, is in one respect advantageous to his reputation.  It brought many lamentable blemishes to light; but it entitles him to be considered pure from every blemish which has not been brought to light.

The truth is that the temptations to which so many English functionaries yielded in the time of Mr. Vansittart were not temptations addressed to the ruling passions of Warren Hastings.  He was not squeamish in pecuniary transactions; but he was neither sordid nor rapacious.  He was far too enlightened a man to look on a great empire merely as a buccaneer would look on a galleon.  Had his heart been much worse than it was, his understanding would have preserved him from that extremity of baseness.  He was an unscrupulous, perhaps an unprincipled statesman; but still he was a statesman, and not a freebooter.

In 1764 Hastings returned to England.  He had realised only a very moderate fortune; and that moderate fortune was soon reduced to nothing, partly by his praiseworthy liberality, and partly by his mismanagement.  Towards his relations he appears to have acted very generously.  The greater part of his savings he left in Bengal, hoping probably to obtain the high usury of India.  But high usury and bad security generally go together; and Hastings lost both interest and principal.

He remained four years in England.  Of his life at this time very little is known.  But it has been asserted, and is highly probable, that liberal studies and the society of men of letters occupied a great part of his time.  It is to be remembered to his honour that, in days when the languages of the East were regarded by other servants of the Company merely as the means of communicating with weavers and moneychangers, his enlarged and accomplished mind sought in Asiatic learning for new forms of intellectual enjoyment, and for new views of government and society.  Perhaps, like most persons who have paid much attention to departments of knowledge which lie out of the common track, he was inclined to overrate the value of his favourite studies.  He conceived that the cultivation of Persian literature might with advantage be made a part of the liberal education of an English gentleman; and he drew up a plan with that view.  It is said that the University of Oxford, in which Oriental learning had never, since the revival of letters, been wholly neglected, was to be the seat of the institution which he contemplated.  An endowment was expected from the munificence of the Company:  and professors thoroughly competent to interpret Hafiz and Ferdusi