ed him with despondency. Having suffered many inconveniences
through this weakness, he besought his courtiers to devise a sentence,
short enough to be engraved upon a ring, which should suggest a remedy
for his evil. Many phrases were proposed; none were found acceptable
until his daughter offered him an emerald on which were graven two
Arabic words, the literal translation of which is, "This, too, will
pass." The King embraced his daughter and declared that she was wiser
than all his wise men. "Now," said Hastings, "when I appear at the Bar
and hear the violent invectives {284} of my enemies, I arm myself with
patience. I reflect upon the mutability of human life, and I say to
myself, 'This, too, will pass.'"

It did pass, but it took its long time to pass. The trial lasted seven
years. Begun in the February of 1788, it ended in the April of 1795.
In that long space of time men might well be excused if they had grown
weary of it. Had its protracted course been even pursued in colorless,
eventless times it would have been hard to preserve the public interest
in the trial so terribly drawn out. But it was one of the curious
fortunes of the trial to embrace within its compass some of the most
thrilling and momentous years that have been recorded in the history of
mankind. In the year after the trial began the Bastille fell. In the
year before the trial closed the Reign of Terror came to an end with
the deaths of Robespierre and St. Just. The interval had seen the
whole progress of the French Revolution, had applauded the
constitutional struggle for liberty, had shuddered at the September
massacres, had seen the disciplined armies of the great European Powers
reel back dismayed before the ragged regiments of the Republic, had
seen France answer Europe with the head of a king, with the head of a
queen, had observed how the Revolution, like Saturn, devoured its own
children, had witnessed with fear as well as with fury the apotheosis
of the guillotine. While the events in France were shaking every
European State, including England, to its centre, it was hard for the
public mind to keep itself fixed with any degree of intentness upon the
trial of Warren Hastings.

The events of that interval had affected too, profoundly, the chief
actor in the trial. Burke entered upon the impeachment of Warren
Hastings at the zenith of his great career, at the moment of his
greatest glory. The rise and progress of the French