would be protracted to a length unprecedented | Burke was deeply hurt. But his zeal for what in the annals of criminal law. he considered as the cause of justice and mer. In the following year, the Parliament was dissolved; and the friends of Hastings enter. tained a hope that the new House of Commons might not be disposed to go on with the im peachment. They began by maintaining that the whole proceeding was terminated by the dissolution. Defeated on this point, they made a direct motion that the impeachment should be dropped; but they were defeated by the com bined forces of the government and the oppo sition. It was, however, resolved that, for the sake of expedition, many of the articles should be withdrawn. In truth, had not some such measure been adopted, the trial would have lasted till the defendant was in his grave. In truth, it is impossible to deny that im-cy triumphed over his personal feelings. He peachment, though it is a fine ceremony, and received the censure of the House with dignity though it may have been useful in the seven- and meekness, and declared that no personal teenth century, is not a proceeding from which mortification or humiliation should induce hit much good can now be expected. Whatever to flinch from the sacred duty which he had confidence may be placed in the decisions of undertaken. the Peers on an appeal arising out of ordinary Litigation, it is certain that no man has the least confidence in their impartiality, when a great public functionary, charged with a great state crime, is brought to their bar. They are all politicians. There is hardly one among them, whose vote on an impeachment may not be confidently predicted before a witness has been examined; and even were it possible to rely on their justice, they would still be quite unfit to try such a cause as that of Hastings. They sit only during half the year. They have to transact much legislative and much judicial business. The law-lords, whose advice is required to guide the unlearned majority, are employed daily in administering justice elsewhere. It is impossible, therefore, that during a busy session, the Upper House should give more than a few days to an impeachment. To expect that their lordships would give up partridge-shooting, in order to bring the greatest delinquent to speedy justice, or to relieve accused innocence by speedy acquittal, would be unreasonable indeed. A well constituted tribunal, sitting regularly six days in the week, and nine hours in the day, would have finished the trial of Hastings in less than three months. The Lords had not finished their work in seven years. The result ceased to be a matter of doubt, from the time when the Lords resolved that they would be guided by the rules of evidence which are received in inferior courts of the realm. Those rules, it is well known, exclude much information which would be quite sufficient to determine the conduct of any reasonable man, in the most important transactions of private life. Those rules, at every assizes, save scores of culprits, whom judges, jury, and spectators, firmly believed to be guilty. But when those rules were rigidly applied to of fences committed many years before, at the distance of many thousand miles, conviction was, of course, out of the question. We do not blame the accused and his counsel for availing themselves of every legal advantage in order to obtain an acquittal. But it is clear .hat an acquittal so obtained cannot be pleaded in bar of the judgment of history. Several attempts were made by the friends of Hastings to put a stop to the trial. In 1789 they proposed a vote of censure upon Burke, for sor: violent language which he had used respecting the death of Nuncomar, and the conraction between Hastings and Impey. Burke was then unpopular in the last degree both with the House and with the coun!ry. The asperity and indecency of some expressions which he had used during the debates on the Regency had annoyed even his warmest friends. The vote of censure was carried, and those who had moved it hoped hat the managers would resign in disgust. At length, in the spring of 1795, the decision was pronounced, nearly eight years after Hastings had been brought by the sergeant-at-arms of the Commons to the bar of the Lords. On the last day of this great procedure, the public curiosity, long suspended, seemed to be revived. Anxiety about the judgment there could be none; for it had been fully ascer tained that there was a great majority for the defendant. But many wished to see the pa geant, and the hall was as much crowded as on the first day. But those who, having been present on the first day, now bore a part in the proceedings of the last, were few, and most of those few were altered men. As Hastings himself said, the arraignment had taken place before one generation, and the judgment was pronounced by another. The spectator could not look at the woolsack, or at the red benches of the peers, or at the green benches of the Commons, without seeing something that reminded him of the instability of all human things;-of the instability of power, and fame, and life, of the more lamentable instability of friendship. The great seal was borne before Lord Loughborough, who, when the trial commenced, was a fierce opponent of Mr. Pitt's government, and who was now a member of that government; while Thurlow, who presided in the court when it first sat, estranged from all his old allies, sal scowling among the junior barons. Of a hun dred and sixty nobles who walked in the pro cession on the first day, sixty had been laid in their family vaults. Still more affecting must have been the sight of the managers' box What had become of that fair fellowship, so closely bound together by public and private ties, so resplendent with every talent and ac complishment? It had been scattered by ca lamities more bitter than the bitterness death. The great chiefs were still living, and still in the full vigour of their genius. But their friendship was at an end. It had been violently and publicly dissolved with tears and stormy reproaches. If those men, once so deal to each other, were now compelled to meet for the purpose of managing the impeachment they met a strangers whom public business do not prove it to be true. For an English cor had brought together, and behaved to each lector or judge would have found it easy to in other with cold and distant civility. Burke duce any native who could write, to sign a had in his vortex whirled away Windham. panegyric on the most odious ruler that ever Fox had been followed by Sheridan and Grey. was in India. It was said that at Benares, the Only twenty-nine peers voted. Of these very place at which the acts set forth in the only six found Hastings guilty, on the charges first article of impeachment had been com. relating to Cheyte Sing and to the Begums. mitted, the natives had erected a temple to On other charges the majority in his favour Hastings; and this story excited a strong sen. was still greater. On some he was unani-sation in England. Burke's observations ca mously absolved. He was then called to the bar, informed from the woolsack that the Lords had acquitted him, and solemnly discharged. He bowed respectfully, and retired. We have said that the decision had been fully expected. It was also generally approved. At the commencement of the trial there had been a strong and indeed unreasonable feeling against Hastings. At the close of the trial, there was a feeling equally strong and equally unreasonable in his favour. One cause of the change was, no doubt, what is commonly called the fickleness of the multitude, but what seems to us to be merely the general law of human nature. Both in individuals and in masses violent excitement is always followed by remission, and often by reaction. We are all inclined to depreciate whatever we have overpraised; and, on the other hand, to show undue indulgence where we have shown undue rigour. It was thus in the case of Hastings. The length of his trial, moreover, made him an object of compassion. It was thought, and not without reason, that, even if he was guilty, he was still an ill-used man, and that an impeachment of eight years was more than a sufficient punishment. It was also felt that, though in the ordinary course of criminal law, a defendant is not allowed to set off his good actions against his crimes, a great political | cause should be tried on different principles; and that a man who had governed a great country during thirteen years might have done some very reprehensible things, and yet might be on the whole deserving of rewards and honours rather than of fine and imprisonment. The Press, an instrument neglected by the prosecutors, was used by Hastings and his friends with great effect. Every ship, too, that arrived from Madras or Bengal brought a cuddy full of his admirers. Every gentleman from India spoke of the late Governor-General as having deserved better, and having been treated worse, than any man living. The effect of this testimony, unanimously given by all persons who knew the East, was naturally very great. Retired members of the Indian services, civil and military, were settled in all corners of the kingdom. Each of them was, of course, in his own little circle regarded as an oracle on an Indian question; and they were, with scarcely one exception, the zealous advocates of Hastings. It is to be added, that the numerous addresses to the late GovernorGeneral, which his friends in Bengal obtained from the natives and transmitted to Engiand, nade a considerable impression. To these addresses we attach little or no importance. That Hastings was beloved by the people whom he governed is true; but the culogies of pundits, zemindars, Mohammedan doctors, the apotheosis were admirabic. He saw no reason for astonishment, he said, in the inci dent which had been represented as so strik ing. He knew something of the mythology of the Brahmins. He knew that, as they wor shipped some gods from love, so they wor shipped others from fear. He knew that they erected shrines, not only to the benignant dei ties of light and plenty, but also to the fiends who preside over smallpox and murder. Nor did he at all dispute the claim of Mr. Hastings to be admitted into such a Pantheon. This reply has always struck us as one of the finest that ever was made in Parliament. It is a grave and forcible argument, decorated by the most brilliant wit and fancy. Hastings was, however, safe. But, in every thing except character, he would have been far better off, if, when first impeached, he had at once pleaded guilty, and paid a fine of fifty thousand pounds. He was a ruined man. The legal expenses of his defence had been enormous. The expenses which did not appear in his attorney's bill were perhaps larger still. Great sums had been paid to Major Scott. Great sums had been laid out in bribing newspapers, rewarding pamphleteers, and circulat ing tracts. Burke, so early as 1790, declared in the House of Commons that twenty thousand pounds had been employed in corrupting the press. It is certain that no controversial weapon, from the gravest reasoning to the coarsest ribaldry, was left unemployed. Logan, in prose, defended the accused governor with great ability. For the lovers of verse, the speeches of the managers were burlesqued in Simpkin's letters. It is, we are afraid, indisputable that Hastings stooped so low as ta court the aid of that malignant and filthy baboon, John Williams, who called himself Anthony Pasquin. It was necessary to subsidize such allies largely. The private hoaràs of Mrs. Hastings had disappeared. It is said that the banker to whom they had been intrusted had failed. Still, if Hastings had practised strict economy, he would, after all his losses, have had a moderate competence; but in the ma nagement of his private affairs he was impru dent. The dearest wish of his heart had always been to regain Daylesford. At length, in the very year in which his trial commenced, the wish was accomplished; and the domain, alienated more than seventy years before, re turned to the descendant of its old lords. the manor-house was a ruin; and the grounds round it had, during many years, been utterly neglected. Hastings proceeded to build, to plant, to form a sheet of water, to excavate a grotto; and, before he was dismissed from the bar of the House of Lords, he had expendel more than 40,000l. in a lorning his sea.. But The general feeling both of the Directors and of the proprietors of the East India Company was, that he had great claims on them, that his services to them had been eminent, and that his misfortunes had been the effect of his zeal for their interests. His friends in Leadenhall street, proposed to reimburse him for the costs of his trial, and to settle on him an annuity of five thousan pounds a year. But the consent of the Board of Control was required; and at the head of the Board of Control was Mr. Dundas, who had himself been a party to the impeachment, who had, on that account, been reviled with great bitterness by the partisans of Hastings, and who, therefore, was not in a very complying mood. He refused to consent to what the Directors suggested. The Directors remonstrated. A long controversy followed. Hastings, in the mean time, was reduced to such distress that he could hardly pay his weekly bills. At length a compromise was made. An annuity of four thousand a year was settled on Hastings; and, in order to enable him to meet pressing demands, he was to receive ten years' annuity in advance. The Company was also permitted to lend him fifty thousand pounds, to be repaid by instalments, without interest. This relief, though given in the most absurd manner, was sufficient to enable the retired governor to live in comfort, and even in luxury, if he had been a skilful manager. But he was careless and profuse, and was more than once under the necessity cf applying to the Company for assistance, which was liberally given. with marked favour. Fox had bɛen a principa manager of the impeachment. To Pitt it was owing that there had been an impeachment; and Hastings, we fear, was on this occasion guided by personal considerations, rather than by a regard to the public interest. The last twenty-four years of his life were chiefly passed at Daylesford. He amused himself with embellishing his grounds, riding fine Arab horses, fattening prize-cattle, and trying to rear Indian animals and vegetables in Eng land. He sent for seeds of a very fine custardapple, from the garden of what had once been his own villa, among the green hedgerows of Allipore. He tried also to naturalize in Wor cestershire the delicious lecchee, almost the only fruit of Bengal, which deserves to be re gretted even amidst the plenty of Covent-Gar den. The Mogul emperors, in the time of their greatness, had in vain attempted to introduce into Hindostan the goat of the table-land of Thibet, whose down supplies the looms of Cashmere with the materials of the finest shawls. Hastings tried, with no better fortune, to rear a breed at Daylesford; nor does he seem to have succeeded better with the cattle of Bootan, whose tails are in high esteem as the best fans for brushing away the musquitoes. Literature divided his attention with his conservatories and his menagerie. He had always loved books, and they were now necessary to him. Though not a poet, in any high sense of the word, he wrote neat and polished lines with great facility, and was fond of exercising this talent. Indeed, if we must speak out, he seems to have been more of a Trissotin than was to be expected from the powers of his mind, and from the great part which he had played in life. We are assured in these Me He had security and affluence, but not the power and dignity, which, when he landed from India, he had reason to expect. He had then looked forward to a coronet, a red riband, a seat at the Council-board, an office at White-moirs, that the first thing which he did in the hall. He was then only fifty-two, and might hope for many years of bodily and mental vigour. The case was widely different when he left the bar of the Lords. He was now too old a man to turn his mind to a new class of studies and duties. He had no chance of receiving any mark of royal favour while Mr. Pitt remained in power; and, when Mr. Pitt retired, Hastings was approaching his seven-ment. Tastes differ widely. For ourselves tieth year.. Once, and only once, after his acquittal, he interfered in politics, and that interference was not much to his honour. In 1804, he exerted himself strenuously to prevent Mr. Addington, against whom Fox and Pitt had combined, from resigning the Treasury. It is difficult to believe that a man so able and energetic as Hastings, can have thought that, when Bonaparte was at Boulogne with a great army, the defence of our island could safely be intrusted to a ministry which did not contain a single person whom flattery could describe as a great statesraan. It is also certain that, on the important question which had raised Mr. Adding ton to power, and on which he differed from both Fox and Pitt, Hastings, as might nave been expected, agreed with Fox and Pitt. and was decidedly opposed to Addington. Religious intolerance has never been the vice of the India service, and certainly was not the vice of Hastings. But Mr. Addington had treated him morning was to compose a copy of verses. When the family and guests assembled, the poem made its appearance as regularly as the eggs and rolls; and Mr. Gleig requires us t believe that, if from any accident Hastings came to the breakfast-table without one of his charming performances in his hand, the omis sion was felt by all as a grievous disappoint we must say that, however good the breakfasts at Daylesford may have been-and we are as sured that the tea was of the most aromatic flavour, and that neither tongue nor venison. pasty was wanting-we should have thought the reckoning high, if we had been forced to earn our repast by listening every day to a new madrigal or sonnet composed by our host. We are glad, however, that Mr. Gleig has preserved this little feature of character, though we think it by no means a beauty. It is good to be often reminded of the inconsistency of human na ture; and to learn to look without wonder or disgust on the weaknesses which are found in the strongest minds. Dionysius in old times, Frederic in the last century, with capacity and vigour equal to the conduct of the greatest af fairs, united all the little vanities and affecta tions of provincial blue-stockings. These great examples may console the admirers of Hast ings for the affliction of seeing him reduced t the level of the Hayleys and the Sewards. When Hastings had passed many years in He lived about four years longer in the en retirement, and had long outlived the common joyment of good spirits, of faculties not im age of men, he again became for a short time paired to any painful or degrading extent, and an object of general attention. In 1813 the of health such as is rarely enjoyed by those charter of the East India Company was renew-who attain such an age. At length, on the 228 ed; and much discussion about Indian affairs of August, 1819, in the eighty-sixth year of his took place in Parliament. It was determined to age, he met death with the same tranquil and examine witnesses at the bar of the Commons, decorous fortitude which he had opposed to and Hastings was ordered to attend. He had all the trials of his various and eventful life. appeared at that bar before. It was when he With all his fa ilts-and they were neithe, read his answer to the charges which Burke few nor small-only one cemetery was worthy had laid on the table. Since that time twenty- to contain his remains. In that temple of s seven years had elapsed; public feeling had lence and reconciliation, where the enmities undergone a complete change; the nation had of twenty generations lie buried, in the Great now forgotten his faults, and remembered only Abbey which has for ages afforded a quiet his services. The reappearance, too of a man resting-place to those whose minds and bodies who had been among the most distinguished have been shattered by the contentions of the of a generation that had passed away, who now Great Hall, the dust of the illustrious accused belonged to history, and who seemed to have should have been mingled with the dust of the risen from the dead, could not but produce a illustrious accusers. This was not to be. Yet solemn and pathetic effect. The Commons the place of interment was not ill chosen. Bereceived him with acclamations, ordered a hind the chancel of the parish-church of chair to be set for him, and when he retired, Daylesford, in earth which already held the rose and uncovered. There were, indeed, a bones of many chiefs of the house of Hastings, few who did not sympathize with the general was laid the coffin of the greatest man who feeling. One or two of the managers of the has ever borne that ancient and widely extendimpeachment were present. They sat in the ed name. On that very spot probably, foursame seats which they had occupied when they score years before, the little Warren, meanly had been thanked for the services which they clan and scantily fed, had played with the chil had rendered in Westminster Hall; for, by the dren of ploughmen. Even then his young mind courtesy of the House, a member who has been had revolved plans which might be called rothanked in his place, is considered as having a mantic. Yet, however romantic, it is not like. right always to occupy that place. These gen- ly that they had been so strange as the truth. tlemen were not disposed to admit that they Not only had the poor orphan retrieved the nad employed several of the best years of their fallen fortunes of his line. Not only had he lives in persecuting an innocent man. They repurchased the old lands, and rebuilt the old accordingly kept their seats, and pulled their dwelling. He had preserved and extended an hats over their brows; but the exceptions only empire. He had founded a polity. He had made the prevailing enthusiasm more remark-administered government and war with more able. The Lords received the old man with similar tokens of respect. The University of Oxford conferred on him the degree of Doctor of Laws; and, in the Sheldonian theatre, the under-graduates welcomed him with tumultuous cheering. These marks of public esteem were soon followed by marks of the favour of the crown. 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 by the public 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 tar higher than a seat in the Privy Council were duc, and should 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 ngan disappointed. than the capacity of Richelieu; and 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 agein peace, after so many troubles; in honour, after so much obloquy. Those who look on his character without fa vour or malevolence, will pronounce that, in the two great elements of all social virtue-in respect for the rights of others, and in sympa thy for the sufferings of others-he was defi cient. His principles were somewhat lax. His heart was somewhat hard. But while we cannot with truth describe him either as a righteous or as a merciful ruler, we cannot regard without admiration the amplitude and fertility of his intellect-his rare talents for command, for administration, and for contro versy-his dauntless courage-his honourable poverty-his fervent zeal for the interests of the state-his noble equanimity, tried by both extremes of fortune, ard never disturbed by either. FREDERIC THE GREAT.* EDINBURGH REVIEW, APRIL, 1842.] This work, which has the high honour cftentatious and profuse, neg igent of his tru being introduced to the world by the author of interests and of his high duties, insatiably "Lochiel' and "Hohenlinden," is not wholly eager for frivolous distinctions, he added no unworthy of so distinguished a chaperon. It thing to the real weight of the state which he professes, indeed, to be no more than a compi- governed; perhaps he transmitted his inheri lation; but it is an exccedingly amusing com- tance to his children impaired rather than pilation, and we shall be glad to have more of augmented in value, but he succeeded in gain. it. The narrative comes down at present only ing the great object of his life, the title of king. the commencement of the Seven Years' In the year 1700 he assumed this new dignity. War, and therefore does not comprise the He had on that occasion to undergo all the most interesting portion of Frederic's reign. mortifications which fall to the lot of ambitious It may not be unacceptable to our readers upstarts. Compared with the other crowned that we should take this opportunity of pre-heads of Europe, he made a figure resembling senting them with a slight sketch of the life of the greatest king that has, in modern times, succeeded by right of birth to a throne. It may, we fear, be impossible to compress so long and eventful a story within the limits which we must prescribe to ourselves. Should we be compelled to break off, we shall, when the continuation of this work appears, return to the subject. that which a Nabob or a Commissary, who had bought a title, would make in the company of Peers whose ancestors had been at tainted for treason against the Plantagenets. The envy of the class which he quitted, and the civil scorn of the class into which he intruded himself, were marked in very signifi cant ways. The elector of Saxony at first refused to acknowledge the new majesty. Louis the Fourteenth looked down on his bro ther king with an air not unlike that with which the count in Molière's play regards Monsieur Jourdain, just fresh from the mummery of being made a gentleman. Austria exacted large sacrifice in return for her re cognition, and at last gave it ungraciously. The Prussian monarchy, the youngest of the great European states, but in population and in revenue the fifth amongst them, and in art, science, and civilization entitled to the third, if not the second place, sprang from an humble origin. About the beginning of the fifteenth century, the marquisate of Brandenburg was bestowed by the Emperor Sigismund on the noble family Hohenzollern. In the sixteenth century Frederic was succeeded by his son, Frederic that family embraced the Lutheran doctrines. William, a prince who must be allowed to Early in the seventeenth century it obtained have possessed some talents for administra. from the King of Poland the investiture of the tion, but whose character was disfigured by duchy of Prussia. Even after this accession the most odious vices, and whose eccentrici. of territory, the chiefs of the house of Hohen- ties were such as had never been seen out of a zollern hardly ranked with the Electors of Sax- madhouse. He was exact and diligent in the ony and Bavaria. The soil of Brandenburg transaction of business, and he was the first was for the most part sterile. Even round who fcrmed the design of obtaining for PrusBerlin, the capital of the province, and round sia a place among the European powers, altoPotsdam, the favourite residence of the Mar-gether out of proportion to her extent and graves, the country was a desert. In some tracts, the deep sand could with difficulty be forced by assiduous tillage to yield thin crops of rye and oats. In other places, the ancient forests, from which the conquerors of the Roman empire had descended on the Danube, remained untouched by the hand of man. Where the soil was rich it was generally marshy, and its insalubrity repelled the cultivators whom its fertility attracted. Frederic William, called the Great Elector, was the prince to whose policy his successors have agreed to ascribe their greatness. He acquired by the peace of Westphalia several valuable possessions, and among them the rich city and district of Magdeburg; and he left to his son Frederic a principality as considerable as any which was not called a kingdom. population, by means of a strong military or ganization. Strict economy enabled him to keep up a peace establishment of sixty thousand troops. These troops were disciplined in such a manner, that placed beside them, the household regiments of Versailles and St. James's would have appeared an awkward squad. The master of such a force could not but be regarded by all his neighbours as a for midable enemy, and a valuable aily. But the mind of Frederic William was se ill-regulated, that al. his inclinations became passions, and all his passions partook of the character of moral and intellectual disease. His parsimony degenerated into sordid ava rice. His taste for military pomp and order became a mania, like that of a Dutch burgo master for tulips; or that of a member of the Roxburgh club for Caxtons. While the en voys of the court of Berlin were in a state of such squalid poverty as moved the laughter of foreign capitals; while the food placed be |