managers—Burke's reply, extending over nine days, forming an appropriate finale. Then came the rejoinder

from Law, the prisoner's counsel (afterwards Lord Ellenborough). Eventually, the Peers acquitted Hastings by a large majority, whose verdict did but confirm the opinion of the nation.

As to the chief prosecutor, the highest tribute to the force and splendour of his eloquence was paid by Hastings himself, who, in reference to his opening speech, exclaimed, "For the first half hour I looked up to the orator in a reverie of wonder, and during that time I felt myself the most culpable man on earth; but then I recurred to my own bosom, and there found a consciousness that consoled me under all I heard and all I suffered."

England has long ago decided that this great trial ended exactly as it was desirable that it should end. It was right and fitting that a man who had rendered such vast services to his country, in a remote sphere, and under novel conditions, without example or precedent to guide him—should escape the punishment of the law, even though he had been guilty of some grievous errors. But it is felt that the object of the impeachment was, after all, secured; that it conveyed a very significant warning to future " proconsuls." It taught the great lesson, "that Asiatics have rights, and that companies have obligations; and that the authority of the English Legislature is not more entirely a trust for the benefit of this country, than the dominion of the English in India is a trust for the benefit of the inhabitants of India."

In a well-known passage of his brilliant essay on "Warren Hastings," Macaulay comments on the striking changes which had occurred in the long interval between

the opening and the close of the great trial. Of all these, the most momentous, as it was the most melancholy, was that which had passed over the relations between Burke and his former colleagues. Their friendship, their It had been dissolved

close confidence, was at an end. publicly and violently, with tears and reproaches, and outbursts of wrath and indignation. They no longer stood together on the same platform contending for the same object. Fox had gone in one direction, followed by Sheridan and Charles Grey; Burke in another, accompanied by William Windham. The causes of this separation, which so greatly influenced the political history of our country for a quarter of a century, I shall now proceed to trace with as much brevity as the importance of the subject will admit.*

II.

It was in July, 1789, that the Bastille of Paris, which history seems to have accepted as the symbol of uncontrolled power and despotic cruelty, was attacked and captured by an infuriated multitude. Its downfall, by most lovers of freedom, was hailed with delight, as foreshadowing the advent in France of an era of law and order and constitutional government; and it might well be imagined that in England, at all events, the adherents. to the principles of the "glorious Revolution of 1688" would rejoice at so direct a blow to the cause of tyranny. Yet were there many who either regarded it with timid feelings, or looked on with surprise and hesitation, not

* W. Massey, "History of England During the Reign of George the Third;" J. Prior, "Life of Edmund Burke;" John Morley, "Edmund Burke: a Biographical Study," etc.

knowing (as Burke remarked) whether to blame or approve. "For whenever a separation," he wrote, "is made between liberty and justice, neither is safe." As the great revolt in France against the privileged classes took shape, as it daily assumed larger and more formidable proportions, the generous heart of Fox glowed with enthusiasm ; while Burke, with his Conservative sympathies and orthodox reverence for prudence and tradition, grew more and more alarmed. He lost his intellectual balance; his imagination prevailed over his judgment; and the night of the fourth of August, when all class interests were ruthlessly swept away, and the gaunt figure of the Revolution seemed to menace the supremacy of the law and the preservation of social order, he denounced, in strains of the most fiery invective. His apprehensions, sharpened by his intellectual repugnance to all uncontrolled power, whether that of the one or the many, seemed to detect the drift of the revolutionary current, and he declared that it was hurrying the people unawares to a sea of blood. While even the calm and sagacious Pitt was praising the new constitution which the French deputies had constructed, Burke was crying aloud that they had shown themselves the ablest architects of ruin who had ever existed in the world. In a short space of time, he exclaimed with exaggerated passion, they had pulled to the ground their army, their navy, their commerce, their arts, and their manufactures; in a word, wherever he looked he saw-chaos!

At first Burke stood almost alone in his fear and his wrath. The Tories followed Pitt, who had not yet thrown off his early Liberalism, and was cordial in his relations with the new French Government. The Whigs, who acknowledged the leadership of Fox, naturally hailed

with satisfaction the apparent adoption by the French of the constitutional principles they had so steadfastly advocated. The course of events strengthened the general confidence, so that Burke, like another Cassandra, shouted his prophecies to the winds. When, in its jealous anger at the foundation of an English settlement at Nootka Sound, Spain sought the assistance of France, the Revolutionary party warmly opposed, and eventually prevented, the war in which the ministers of Louis XVI. were anxious

to engage. Pitt was led to enunciate a maxim of policy, unhappily not accepted as a fundamental principle until our own times-that changes of government in France afforded no reason for distrust or interference on the part of Great Britain. This was a maxim which, a few years before, Burke would eagerly have endorsed and confirmed by the abundant illustration he had always at his command; but now he chose to put it aside as a fallacy, in the distempered view he had conceived of the Revolution as the enemy of all he loved and valued; the enemy of the landmarks of the past; the enemy of a well-ordered fabric of social organisation, with "respectability" as its corner-stone; the enemy of the traditional graduation of ranks and nicety of class distinctions; the enemy of the Church and the old nobility. He refused to keep any terms with a people who had overthrown the associations and conventionalities of the past.

We have seen in our own generation what may be accomplished by the genius and enthusiasm of one man when he has, as he believes, a noble and righteous cause to advocate. But the work which at this time Burke undertook was infinitely greater and more laborious than Mr. Gladstone's, because he had no personal following, had lost the ear of the House, and had never had

any strong hold upon the nation. It is strange how completely his influence in Parliament had perished. His speeches were too redundant, too protracted; his arguments too subtle and complex; and while his earnestness wearied an audience of broad-acred squires and wealthy merchants, his want of discretion and his extravagance of language disgusted them. Yet even this is scarcely sufficient to explain the fact that, at his rising the crowded benches would thin rapidly, and that his splendid perorations were generally wasted on an almost empty House. The impeachment of Hastings had been the occasion of some noble orations which, for a while, had retrieved his reputation; but as the trial drew its slow length along, he sank again into the sere and yellow leaf of a statesman's decay. But the French Revolution came, like the sound of a trumpet, to awaken all his best energies. A new fervour inspired him; a new, if mistaken, spirit of enthusiasm. With all his old vigour he rose in defence of the things he most loved and revered; of the old order against the new, of conservatism and orthodoxy against speculative boldness in politics and religion.

On the 9th of February, 1790, Burke went down to the House prepared to deliver a solemn protest against the sympathy which Fox, the leader of his party, had avowed with what seemed to him an outrageous defiance of law and authority. The speech was in his best manner; absolutely free from the exaggeration and vulgar rant which had disfigured his latter orations; noble, pathetic, eloquent, replete with vigorous thought. It embodied a dignified and not unmerited rebuke of Fox's hasty panegyric on the French generals who had proved false to their colours and their allegiance. It contained