of his hearers; some of the ladies "swooned away"; and Hastings himself, though he had protested his innocence, was utterly overwhelmed. "For half an hour," he said afterwards, in describing the scene, "I looked on the orator in a reverie of wonder, and actually thought myself the most culpable man on earth."

That the ability to produce this profound impression on others was not merely intellectual but constitutional with Burke, we know from his defense of himself when his 'Reflections on the French Revolution' alienated many who had been his friends,- among them Philip Francis, who, seeing the proof sheets of the work, tried to dissuade Burke from publishing it.

Speaking of Marie Antoinette, Burke had written the memorable comparison: "And surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like the morning star, full of life and splendor and joy."

When Francis called this a piece of foppery, asking Burke if Marie Antoinette were not a jade, a mere Messalina, Burke replied indignantly: "I know nothing of your Messalinas. Am I obliged to prove judicially the virtues of those I see suffering every kind of wrong? I tell you again that the recollection of the manner in which I saw the Queen of France in 1774 and the contrast between that brilliancy, splendor, and beauty, with the prostrate homage of a nation to her, and the abominable scene of 1789, which I was describing, did draw tears from me and wetted the paper. Those tears came again into my eyes almost as often as I looked at the description. They may again. You do not believe this fact nor that these are my real feelings, but that the whole is affected or, as you express it, 'downright foppery.' My friend, I tell you it is truth and that it is true and will be true when you and I are no more, and will exist as long as men with their natural feelings shall exist."

Undoubtedly it was this deep emotional earnestness which gave Burke's magnificent intellect its effectiveness. We can see what this effectiveness means and how completely it depends on his sympathies when we undertake to read those speeches where, without being "keyed up" to his highest nervous possibilities, he is using his intellect merely. Such passages are frequent in his speeches; often when he is reasoning well and consecutively, they are prosy; and sometimes when he is relaxed after the strain of intellectual and emotional exaltation, they are dull. Reading them and searching for the secret of the power which has gone out from them and left them thus lifeless, we see that it is the same which controlled Burke when he wetted his paper with tears for Marie Antoinette. No man who attains the sublime as often as he did can keep his

position of costly eminence, and in his reactions he must pay the price for it Burke paid in acquiring habits through which he won the ability to make the most wonderful speeches ever made in Engiand, and joined with it a more extraordinary faculty for emptying benches under the sound of his voice than any other great orator had ever demonstrated. This seems largely due to his very greatness. His own intellectual strength made him forget the intellectual weaknesses of others. Standing unwearied before people of ordinary minds, pouring out not one oration, a perfect whole, but one after another, each dealing with some thought which, for the time, mastered him,-each with its own perfection of art, its own rapid development of thought,- he could not carry his audience with him, because he alone had the intellectual strength to keep the thread of the argument so as to be able to join the splendid parts into an intelligible and concordant whole. His speeches at the trial of Hastings are as Homeric in quantity as in quality. Few will even attempt to keep the connection from their beginning to the end. But no one could be so obtuse as to miss the point of the fiery periods in which his immortal indignation blazed out against Hastings and conquest as a commercial method, when he came to describe the atrocities of Debi Sing.

Burke was born in Dublin, January 12th, 1729 N. S.,- the second of the fifteen children of an Irish attorney, most of whom were delicate and died young. Burke himself was never strong, and the great results he achieved were in spite of physical weakness. His education which received its greatest impetus at Trinity College, Dublin, never ceased during his lifetime. He seems to have had one of those peculiar minds which retain in mature life the childish ability to learn easily, the puerile habit, so soon lost and with most never regained, of welcoming information regardless of the quarter it comes from.

Burke's biography is the history of the most important period in modern politics. It would be presumption to attempt it here. It is enough to add that when he died, July 9th, 1797, he left a world which his genius and his sympathy for the suffering he saw everywhere around him had made more fit for his successor, when he comes to pay with his own emotion the price of the sympathy every great mind feels as the secret of its ability to champion the weak and to win the battles of helplessness against power. But his successor has not yet come nor do those who would welcome him most, expect him soon. W. V. B.

As the most nearly adequate introduction possible for Burke's unapproachable oration of February 18th and 19th, 1788, opening the charge of bribery against Hastings, Macaulay's description of the trial is subjoined.

THE TRIAL OF WARREN HASTINGS

(From Macaulay's 'Essay on Warren Hastings,' Edinburgh Review, October

THER

1841)

HERE have been spectacles more dazzling to the eye, more gorgeous with jewelry and cloth of gold, more attractive to grown-up children, than that which was exhibited at Westminster; but, perhaps, there never was a spectacle so well calculated to strike a highly cultivated, a reflecting, an imaginative mind. All the various kinds of interest which belong to the near and to the distant, to the present and to the past, were collected on one spot and in one hour. All the talents and all the accomplishments which are developed by liberty and civilization were now displayed, with every advantage that could be derived both from co-operation and from contrast. Every step in the proceedings carried the mind either backward, through many troubled centuries, to the days when the foundations of the Constitution were laid; or far away over boundless seas and deserts, to dusky nations living under strange stars, worshiping strange gods, and writing strange characters from right to left. The High Court of Parliament was to sit, according to forms handed down from the days of the Plantagenets, on an Englishman accused of exercising tyranny over the lord of the holy city of Benares, and the ladies of the princely house of Oude.

The place was worthy of such a trial. It was the great hall of William Rufus; the hall which had resounded with acclamations at the inauguration of thirty kings; the hall which had witnessed the just sentence of Bacon and the just absolution of Somers; the hall where the eloquence of Strafford had for a moment awed and melted a victorious party inflamed with just resentment; the hall where Charles had confronted the High Court of Justice with the placid courage which has half redeemed his fame. Neither military nor civil pomp was wanting. The avenues were lined with grenadiers. The streets were kept clear by cavalry. The peers, robed in gold and ermine, were marshaled by the heralds under Garter-King-at-Arms. The judges, in their vestments of state, attended to give advice on points of law. Nearly a hundred and seventy lords, three-fourths of the Upper House, as the Upper House then was, walked in solemn order from their

usual place of assembling to the tribunal. The junior baron present led the way,- Lord Heathfield, recently ennobled for his memorable defense of Gibraltar against the fleets and armies of France and Spain. The long procession was closed by the Duke of Norfolk, earl marshal of the realm, by the great dignitaries, and by the brothers and sons of the king. Last of all came the Prince of Wales, conspicuous by his fine person and noble bearing. The gray old walls were hung with scarlet. The long galleries were crowded by such an audience as had rarely excited the fears or the emulation of an orator. There were gathered together, from all parts of a great, free, enlightened, and prosperous realm, grace and female loveliness, wit and learning, the representatives of every science and of every art. There were seated around the Queen the fair-haired young daughters of the house of Brunswick. There the ambassadors of great kings and commonwealths gazed with admiration on a spectacle which no other country in the world could present. There Siddons, in the prime of her majestic beauty, looked with emotion on a scene surpassing all the imitations of the stage. There the historian of the Roman Empire thought of the days when Cicero pleaded the cause of Sicily against Verres, and when, before a senate which had still some show of freedom, Tacitus thundered against the oppressor of Africa. There were seen, side by side, the greatest painter and the greatest scholar of the age. The spectacle had allured Reynolds from that easel which has preserved to us the thoughtful foreheads of so many writers and statesmen and the sweet smiles of so many noble matrons. It had induced Parr to suspend his labors in that dark and profound mine from which he had extracted a vast treasure of erudition,-a treasure too often buried in the earth, too often paraded with injudicious and inelegant ostentation, but still precious, massive, and splendid. There appeared the voluptuous charms of her to whom the heir of the throne had in secret plighted his faith. There, too, was she, the beautiful mother of a beautiful race, the Saint Cecilia, whose delicate features, lighted up by love and music, art has rescued from the common decay. There were the members of that brilliant society which quoted, criticized, and exchanged repartees, under the rich peacock hangings of Mrs. Montague. And here the ladies, whose lips, more persuasive than those of Fox himself, had carried the Westminster election against palace and treasury, shone round Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire.

The Sergeants made proclamation. Hastings advanced to the bar and bent his knee. The culprit was indeed not unworthy of He had ruled an extensive and populous

that great presence. country, had made laws and treaties, had sent forth armies, had set up and pulled down princes. And in his high place he had so borne himself, that all had feared him, that most had loved him, and that hatred itself could deny him no title to glory, except virtue. He looked like a great man and not like a bad man. A person small and emaciated, yet deriving dignity from a carriage which, while it indicated deference to the court, indicated also habitual self-possession and self-respect; a high and intellectual forehead; a brow pensive, but not gloomy; a mouth of inflexible decision; a face pale and worn, but serene, on which was written, as legibly as under the great picture in the council chamber at Calcutta, Mens æqua in arduis. Such was the aspect with which the great proconsul presented himself to the judges.

His counsel accompanied him, men all of whom were afterwards raised by their talents and learning to the highest posts in their profession,-the bold and strong-minded Law, afterwards chief-justice of the king's bench; the more humane and eloquent Dallas, afterwards chief-justice of the common pleas; and Plomer, who, nearly twenty years later, successfully conducted in the same high court the defense of Lord Melville, and subsequently became vice-chancellor and master of the rolls.

But neither the culprit nor his advocates attracted so much notice as the accusers. In the midst of the blaze of red drapery, a space had been fitted up with green benches and tables for the Commons. The managers, with Burke at their head, appeared in full dress. The collectors of gossip did not fail to remark that even Fox, generally so regardless of his appearance, had paid to the illustrious tribunal the compliment of wearing a bag and sword. Pitt had refused to be one of the conductors of the impeachment; and his commanding, copious, and sonorous eloquence was wanting to that great muster of various talents. Age and blindness had unfitted Lord North for the duties of a public prosecutor, and his friends were left without the help of his excellent sense, his tact, and his urbanity. But, in spite of the absence of these two distinguished members of the Lower House, the box in which the managers stood contained an array. of speakers such as perhaps had not appeared together since the great age of Athenian eloquence. There stood Fox and Sheridan,