disposed to be suspicious and punctilious.  When men are in such a frame of mind, any trifle is sufficient to give occasion for dispute.  The members of Council expected a salute of twenty-one guns from the batteries of Fort William.  Hastings allowed them only seventeen.  They landed in ill-humour.  The first civilities were exchanged with cold reserve.  On the morrow commenced that long quarrel which, after distracting British India, was renewed in England, and in which all the most eminent statesmen and orators of the age took active part on one or the other side.

Hastings was supported by Barwell.  They had not always been friends.  But the arrival of the new members of Council from England naturally had the effect of uniting the old servants of the Company.  Clavering, Monson, and Francis formed the majority.  They instantly wrested the government out of the hands of Hastings, condemned, certainly not without justice, his late dealings with the Nabob Vizier, recalled the English agent from Oude, and sent thither a creature of their own, ordered the brigade which had conquered the unhappy Rohillas to return to the Company’s territories, and instituted a severe inquiry into the conduct of the war.  Next, in spite of the Governor-General’s remonstrances, they proceeded to exercise, in the most indiscreet manner, their new authority over the subordinate presidencies; threw all the affairs of Bombay into confusion; and interfered, with an incredible union of rashness and feebleness, in the intestine disputes of the Mahratta Government.  At the same time, they fell on the internal administration of Bengal, and attacked the whole fiscal and judicial system, a system which was undoubtedly defective, but which it was very improbable that gentlemen fresh from England would be competent to amend.  The effect of their reforms was that all protection to life and property was withdrawn, and that gangs of robbers plundered and slaughtered with impunity in the very suburbs of Calcutta.  Hastings continued to live in the Government-house, and to draw the salary of Governor-General.  He continued even to take the lead at the council-board in the transaction of ordinary business; for his opponents could not but feel that he knew much of which they were ignorant, and that he decided, both surely and speedily, many questions which to them would have been hopelessly puzzling.  But the higher powers of government and the most valuable patronage had been taken from him.

The natives soon found this out.  They considered him as a fallen man; and they acted after their kind.  Some of our readers may have seen, in India, a cloud of crows pecking a sick vulture to death, no bad type of what happens in that country, as often as fortune deserts one who has been great and dreaded.  In an instant, all the sycophants who had lately been ready to lie for him, to forge for him, to pandar for him, to poison for him, hasten to purchase the favour of his victorious enemies by accusing him.