vor.
Hastings was sworn of the Privy Council, and was admitted to a long
private audience of the Prince Regent, who treated him very graciously.
When the Emperor of Russia and the King of Prussia visited England,
Hastings appeared in their train both at Oxford and in the Guildhall of
London, and, though surrounded by a crowd of princes and great warriors,
was everywhere received with marks of respect and admiration. He was
presented by the Prince Regent both to Alexander and to Frederic
William; and his Royal Highness went so far as to declare in public that
honors far higher than a seat in the Privy Council were due, and would
soon be paid, to the man who had saved the British dominions in Asia.
Hastings now confidently expected a peerage; but, from some unexplained
cause, he was again disappointed.

He lived about four years longer, in the enjoyment of good spirits, of
faculties not impaired to any painful or degrading extent, and of health
such as is rarely enjoyed by those who attain such an age. At length, on
the twenty-second of August, 1818, in the eighty-sixth year of his age,
he met death with the same tranquil and decorous fortitude which he had
opposed to all the trials of his various and eventful life.

With all his faults,--and they were neither few nor small,--only one
cemetery was worthy to contain his remains. In that temple of silence
and reconciliation where the enmities of twenty generations lie buried,
in the Great Abbey which has during many ages afforded a quiet
resting-place to those whose minds and bodies have been shattered by the
contentions of the Great Hall, the dust of the illustrious accused
should have mingled with the dust of the illustrious accusers. This was
not to be. Yet the place of interment was not ill chosen. Behind the
chancel of the parish church of Daylesford, in earth which already held
the bones of many chiefs of the House of Hastings, was laid the coffin
of the greatest man who has ever borne that ancient and widely extended
name. On that very spot probably, fourscore years before, the little
Warren, meanly clad and scantily fed, had played with the children of
ploughmen. Even then his young mind had revolved plans which might be
called romantic. Yet, however romantic, it is not likely that they had
been so strange as the truth. Not only had the poor orphan retrieved the
fallen fortunes of his line. Not only had he repurchased the old lands,
and rebuilt the old dwelling. He