These marks of public esteem were soon followed by marks of royal favour.  Hastings was sworn of the Privy Council, and was admitted to a long private audience of the Prince Regent, who treated him very graciously.  When the Emperor of Russia and the King of Prussia visited England, Hastings appeared in their train both at Oxford and in the Guildhall of London, and, though surrounded by a crowd of princes and great warriors, was everywhere received with marks of respect and admiration.  He was presented by the Prince Regent both to Alexander and to Frederic William; and his Royal Highness went so far as to declare in public that honours far higher than a seat in the Privy Council were due, and would soon be paid, to the man who had saved the British dominions in Asia.  Hastings now confidently expected a peerage; but, from some unexplained cause, he was again disappointed.

He lived about four years longer, in the enjoyment of good spirits, of faculties not impaired to any painful or degrading extent, and of health such as is rarely enjoyed by those who attain such an age.  At length, on the twenty-second of August, 1818, in the eighty-sixth year of his age, he met death with the same tranquil and decorous fortitude which he had opposed to all the trials of his various and eventful life.

With all his faults,—­and they were neither few nor small—­only one cemetery was worthy to contain his remains.  In that temple of silence and reconciliation where the enmities of twenty generations lie buried, in the Great Abbey which has during many ages afforded a quiet resting-place to those whose minds and bodies have been shattered by the contentions of the Great Hall, the dust of the illustrious accused should have mingled with the dust of the illustrious accusers.  This was not to be.  Yet the place of interment was not ill chosen.  Behind the chancel of the parish church of Daylesford, in earth which already held the bones of many chiefs of the house of Hastings, was laid the coffin of the greatest man who has ever borne that ancient and widely extended name.  On that very spot probably, four-score years before, the little Warren, meanly clad and scantily fed, had played with the children of ploughmen.  Even then his young mind had revolved plans which might be called romantic.  Yet, however romantic, it is not likely that they had been so strange as the truth.  Not only had the poor orphan retrieved the fallen fortunes of his line—­not only had he repurchased the old lands, and rebuilt the old dwelling—­he had preserved and extended an empire.  He had founded a polity.  He had administered government and war with more than the capacity of Richelieu.  He had patronised learning with the judicious liberality of Cosmo.  He had been attacked by the most formidable combination of enemies that ever sought the destruction of a single victim; and over that combination, after a struggle of ten years, he had triumphed.  He had at length gone down to his grave in the fulness of age, in peace, after so many troubles, in honour, after so much obloquy.