the black faces, the long beards, the yellow streaks of sect, the turbans and the flowing robes, the spears and the silver maces, the elephants with their canopies of state, the gorgeous palanquin of the prince, and the close litter of the noble lady, all these things were to him as the objects amidst which his own life had been passed, as the objects which lay on the road between Beaconsfield and St. James’s Street.  All India was present to the eye of his mind, from the hall where suitors laid gold and perfumes at the feet of sovereigns to the wild moor where the gipsy camp was pitched, from the bazar, humming like a bee-hive with the crowd of buyers and sellers, to the jungle where the lonely courier shakes his bunch of iron rings to scare away the hyaenas.  He had just as lively an idea of the insurrection at Benares as of Lord George Gordon’s riots, and of the execution of Nuncomar as of the execution of Dr. Dodd.  Oppression in Bengal was to him the same thing as oppression in the streets of London.

He saw that Hastings had been guilty of some most unjustifiable acts.  All that followed was natural and necessary in a mind like Burke’s.  His imagination and his passions, once excited, hurried him beyond the bounds of justice and good sense.  His reason, powerful as it was, became the slave of feelings which it should have controlled.  His indignation, virtuous in its origin, acquired too much of the character of personal aversion.  He could see no mitigating circumstance, no redeeming merit.  His temper, which, though generous and affectionate, had always been irritable, had now been made almost savage by bodily infirmities and mental vexations, Conscious of great powers and great virtues, he found himself, in age and poverty, a mark for the hatred of a perfidious Court and a deluded people.  In Parliament his eloquence was out of date.  A young generation, which knew him not, had filled the House.  Whenever he rose to speak, his voice was drowned by the unseemly interruption of lads who were in their cradles when his orations on the Stamp Act called forth the applause of the great Earl of Chatham.  These things had produced on his proud and sensitive spirit an effect at which we cannot wonder.  He could no longer discuss any question with calmness, or make allowance for honest differences of opinion.  Those who think that he was more violent and acrimonious in debates about India than on other occasions, are ill-informed respecting the last years of his life.  In the discussions on the Commercial Treaty with the Court of Versailles, on the Regency, on the French Revolution, he showed even more virulence than in conducting the impeachment.  Indeed it may be remarked that the very persons who called him a mischievous maniac, for condemning in burning words the Rohilla war and the spoliation of the Begums, exalted him into a prophet as soon as he began to declaim, with greater vehemence, and not with greater reason, against the taking of the Bastile and the insults offered to Marie Antoinette.  To us he appears to have been neither a maniac in the former case, nor a prophet in the latter, but in both cases a great and good man, led into extravagance by a sensibility which domineered over all his faculties.