deserved the
distinction; and no man would have thrown so permanent a lustre round
the councils in which he shared. There can be no doubt that Burke felt
this neglect, and that he was justified in feeling himself defrauded of
an honour conferred before his face on men who were not fit to be named
in the same breath.

But he has had his noble revenge. Posterity, of all tribunals the most
formidable, yet the most faithful, has done him Justice. While the
favourites of fortune have passed away into the forgetfulness for which
they were made, his services assume a higher rank in the records of
national preservation, and his genius continually fills a prouder place
among the intellectual triumphs of mankind.

In 1794 Burke closed his parliamentary career, by retiring from the
borough of Malton, for which his son became member. In this year, also,
closed the memorable trial of Warren Hastings, which had extended over
ten sessions of parliament, (from February 1788 to 5th April 1795)--the
actual trial lasting for seven years, two months, and ten days. The
legal expenses of the defence amounted to seventy-one thousand and
eighty pounds, which the proprietors of East India stock, by a majority
of three hundred, on a ballot, paid. What the expenses of the
prosecution were, is not told; probably twice the sum.

The whole holds forth an important lesson for the punishment of public
delinquency. If, instead of the masquerade of an impeachment before the
peers and king, Hastings had been called on to answer before the common
law courts, for any one of the hundred acts of personal injury alleged
against him, the decision would have been secured as soon as the
witnesses could have been brought from Calcutta. Of course the world
would have lost a great deal of parliamentary parade and some capital
speeches; all the _poetic_ pomp would have been wanting; and the
court-dresses would have been left at the tailors. But justice would
have been done, which no one now believes to have been done.

The obvious fact is, that the country had grown tired of a trial which
seemed likely to last for life. After the first sounding of trumpets,
the flourish excited curiosity no more. The topic had been a toy in the
great parliamentary nursery, and the children were grown weary of their
tinselled and painted doll. Even the horrors--and some of the details
had all the terrible atrocity of barbarism with its passions inflamed by
impunity--had ceased t