were to be engaged in the East.  Hastings called on Johnson, with the hope, as it should seem, of interesting in this project a man who enjoyed the highest literary reputation, and who was particularly connected with Oxford.  The interview appears to have left on Johnson’s mind a most favourable impression of the talents and attainments of his visitor.  Long after, when Hastings was ruling the immense population of British India, the old philosopher wrote to him, and referred in the most courtly terms, though with great dignity, to their short but agreeable intercourse.

Hastings soon began to look again towards India.  He had little to attach him to England; and his pecuniary embarrassments were great.  He solicited his old masters the Directors for employment, They acceded to his request, with high compliments both to his abilities and to his integrity, and appointed him a Member of Council at Madras.  It would be unjust not to mention that, though forced to borrow money for his outfit, he did not withdraw any portion of the sum which he had appropriated to the relief of his distressed relations.  In the spring of 1769 he embarked on board of the Duke of Grafton, and commenced a voyage distinguished by incidents which might furnish matter for a novel.

Among the passengers in the Duke of Grafton was a German of the name of Imhoff.  He called himself a Baron; but he was in distressed circumstances, and was going out to Madras as a portrait-painter, in the hope of picking up some of the pagodas which were then lightly got and as lightly spent by the English in India.  The Baron was accompanied by his wife, a native, we have somewhere read, of Archangel.  This young woman, who, born under the Arctic circle, was destined to play the part of a Queen under the tropic of Cancer, had an agreeable person, a cultivated mind, and manners in the highest degree engaging.  She despised her husband heartily, and, as the story which we have to tell sufficiently proves, not without reason.  She was interested by the conversation and flattered by the attentions of Hastings.  The situation was indeed perilous.  No place is so propitious to the formation either of close friendships or of deadly enmities as an Indiaman.  There are very few people who do not find a voyage which lasts several months insupportably dull.  Anything is welcome which may break that long monotony, a sail, a shark, an albatross, a man overboard.  Most passengers find some resource in eating twice as many meals as on land.  But the great devices for killing the time are quarrelling and flirting.  The facilities for both these exciting pursuits are great.  The inmates of the ship are thrown together far more than in any country-seat or boarding-house.  None can escape from the rest except by imprisoning himself in a cell in which he can hardly turn.  All food, all exercise, is taken in company.  Ceremony is to a great extent banished.  It is every day in the power of a mischievous person to inflict innumerable