It was with the same violence, excessive and unjust in the passion of its justice, that Burke pursued the public prosecution against Warren Hastings. The trial lasted ten years. Proclaimed from 1785 in the House of Commons, sometimes ardently, sometimes languidly, sustained before the House of Lords since 1788, it was only in 1795, and when national attention was directed elsewhere upon the actual and neighboring dramas of the French revolution, that Warren Hastings, old and almost ruined, was finally acquitted by the House of Lords, the greater portion of whose members had not assisted at the beginning of the trial. "The impeachment has taken place before one generation," said Hastings himself, "the sentence has been pronounced by its children." The accusers, like the judges, were scattered, drawn into various paths by political passion. { 336} Burke no longer fought with Fox, nor Wyndham with Lord Grey and Sheridan. Public opinion, formerly severe on the accused, had softened. The length of the trial had placed the crimes of Hastings among the facts belonging to history; it had brought to light the eminent services which he had rendered to the country. When he entered the retreat from which he was only to emerge at rare intervals, Hastings was accompanied there by public favor. It remained faithful to him even to the end of his long life. After having struggled, governed and suffered with the same calmness and the same evenness of mind which he brought towards the end of his career to the peaceful study of literature, Warren Hastings died at Daylesford, the ancient manor of his fathers, which he had formerly bought and embellished, on the 22nd of August [1818], at the age of eighty-five years.
Warren Hastings was yet alive, and America had long become an independent and free nation. India was conquered and henceforth submissive to English law. Hereafter it was on the European scene exclusively that great dramas and great actors were to appear.
George III. Pitt And The French Revolution. (1783-1801).
I have endeavored to analyze the far distant questions, which for a long time agitated the English nation, and I now return to the events more directly bearing on its internal life and policy. I encounter at the outset, with profound satisfaction, that wise, able, and powerful minister, who has ever remained the type of a great statesman in a free country. His history is that of his country, of her glory as well as of her misfortunes; he lived for her, and died when he believed her vanquished, without carrying into the tomb any presentiment of final victory and noble reward of his indefatigable efforts.