Critical and Historical Essays — Volume 1 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 1,030 pages of information about Critical and Historical Essays — Volume 1.

Critical and Historical Essays — Volume 1 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 1,030 pages of information about Critical and Historical Essays — Volume 1.
were attacking the influence of the Crown, and calling for peace with the American republic.  It continued till Burke, alienated from Fox, and loaded with the favours of the Crown, died, preaching a crusade against the French republic.  We surely cannot attribute to the events of 1784 an enmity which began in 1781, and which retained undiminished force long after persons far more deeply implicated than Hastings in the events of 1784 had been cordially forgiven.  And why should we look for any other explanation of Burke’s conduct than that which we find on the surface?  The plain truth is that Hastings had committed some great crimes, and that the thought of those crimes made the blood of Burke boil in his veins.  For Burke was a man in whom compassion for suffering, and hatred of injustice and tyranny, were as strong as in Las Casas or Clarkson.  And although in him, as in Las Casas and in Clarkson, these noble feelings were alloyed with the infirmity which belongs to human nature, he is, like them, entitled to this great praise, that he devoted years of intense labour to the service of a people with whom he had neither blood nor language, neither religion nor manners in common, and from whom no requital, no thanks, no applause could be expected.

His knowledge of India was such as few, even of those Europeans who have passed many years in that country have attained, and such as certainly was never attained by any public man who had not quitted Europe.  He had studied the history, the laws, and the usages of the East with an industry, such as is seldom found united to so much genius and so much sensibility.  Others have perhaps been equally laborious, and have collected an equal mass of materials.  But the manner in which Burke brought his higher powers of intellect to work on statements of facts, and on tables of figures, was peculiar to himself.  In every part of those huge bales of Indian information which repelled almost all other readers, his mind, at once philosophical and poetical, found something to instruct or to delight.  His reason analysed and digested those vast and shapeless masses; his imagination animated and coloured them.  Out of darkness, and dulness, and confusion, he formed a multitude of ingenious theories and vivid pictures.  He had, in the highest degree, that noble faculty whereby man is able to live in the past and in the future, in the distant and in the unreal.  India and its inhabitants were not to him, as to most Englishmen, mere names and abstractions, but a real country and a real people.  The burning sun, the strange vegetation of the palm and the cocoa-tree, the rice-field, the tank, the huge trees, older than the Mogul empire, under which the village crowds assemble, the thatched roof of the peasant’s hut, the rich tracery of the mosque where the imaum prays with his face to Mecca, the drums, and banners, and gaudy idols, the devotee swinging in the air, the graceful maiden, with the pitcher on her head, descending the steps to the riverside,

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Critical and Historical Essays — Volume 1 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.