to expiate the ignoble noonday of his existence by
an honorable evening. These were such men as the queer gang of
blackguards, ruffians, and rowdies who haunted Brighthelmstone, the bad
and brutal Richard Barry, the "Hellgate" Lord Barrymore; the Jockey of
Norfolk, with his hair grown gray in iniquities; Sir John Lade, whose
wife had been the mistress of a highwayman; and the worst and basest
spirit of the gang, the Duke of Queensberry. Such were the men whom the
Prince delighted to make his companions; such were the men who, if the
King's madness had persisted, would have hailed with satisfaction the
overthrow of Mr. Pitt.

It were needless to dwell further for the present upon the adventures of
the Prince of Wales, his amours, his debts, his friendships, his
fantastic pavilion at Brighton, or his unhappy marriage in April, 1795,
to his cousin, the Princess Caroline Amelia Elizabeth of Brunswick.
Twenty years were to pass away before the recurrence of the King's malady
was to give his eldest son the show of power, and in those twenty years
the two political rivals--one of whom was the greatest of his allies, and
the other the greatest of his adversaries--had passed away.

{245}

CHAPTER LVIII.

WARREN HASTINGS.

[Sidenote: 1732--The birth of Warren Hastings]

In the days when Clive was first winning his way to fame in India there
was another young Englishman serving John Company, whose ability
attracted the notice and gained the esteem of the conqueror of Dupleix.
It is one of the privileges of genius to discern the genius of others.
But even Clive, when he noted a young volunteer at Falta, who seemed
destined for better things than the handling of a musket, cannot have
dreamed that he was giving an opportunity to a man whose name was to
take as high a rank in the history of India as his own, whose deeds
were to be no less fiercely battled over, whose part in the creation of
a great Indian Empire was to be as illustrious. All that India had
been to Clive--a refuge, a battleground, a theatre of great deeds, and
unfortunately also of great offences, the cause of almost unbearable
triumph and almost intolerable humiliation, all that in as great a
degree India was to be to Warren Hastings.

Warren Hastings was born in the December of 1732, in Churchill,
Oxfordshire, near Daylesford in Worcestershire. His family had been a
good as it was an old family. But it had come down in the world. It
had grown po