shone around Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire.

The sergeants made proclamation. Hastings advanced to the bar and bent
his knee. The culprit was indeed not unworthy of that great presence.
He had ruled an extensive and populous 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 picture in the council-chamber at
Calcutta, _Mens aequa in arduis_: such was the aspect with which the
great proconsul presented himself to his judges.

His counsel accompanied him--men all of whom were afterward raised by
their talents and learning to the highest posts in their profession:
the bold and strong-minded Law, afterward Chief Justice of the King's
Bench; the more humane and eloquent Dallas, afterward Chief Justice of
the Common Pleas; and Plomer, who, near 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 arr