to make a successful merchant. It is even said that he had to
borrow the money to pay his passage home, and it seems certain that
when he was home, the generous way in which he endeavored to assist his
relations sorely taxed his meagre means.

Hastings seems to have sought for distinction in the career of a man of
letters and not to have found it. The ability which he displayed in
administration and the writing of State papers and political
correspondence vanished whenever he attempted to produce work that made
a more ambitious claim to be considered literature. The clearness of
statement, the width of view, the logical form, the firm grasp and
profound knowledge which were characteristic of the evidence he gave
before the House of {254} Commons Committee in 1766, gave place to a
thin and niggling pedantry of style when he turned his pen to the
essays and the verses of a man of letters. Yet there were some topics
on which he was eminently qualified to write, and by which, under
happier conditions, he might have earned distinction. While he was in
India he had not allowed his active mind to be entirely occupied with
the duties of his official career. That love of literature, that
marvellous capacity for acquiring knowledge, which had characterized
him in his Westminster school-days, remained with him at the desk of
the East India Company and in the courts of Indian princes. He gave
great attention to the languages and the literatures of the East. Most
of those English who served their term in India contented themselves,
when they troubled themselves at all about the matter, with learning as
much of the native vernaculars with which they were brought into
contact as was necessary for the carrying on of a conversation and the
giving of an order. With such a measure of knowledge Warren Hastings
was not content. He studied Persian, the courtly language of India,
closely; he read much in its enchanting literature. When he came back
to England in 1765 he was possessed of a knowledge of the most
beautiful of the Eastern languages, as rare as it was useless then for
an English man of letters to possess.

[Sidenote: 1769--Warren Hastings as an Oriental scholar]

Almost a century later the great American transcendentalist, Emerson,
prophesied a rise of Orientalism in England, and he lived to see his
words come true. But in the days when Warren Hastings was striving to
make his way in London as an author, the influenc