s
all reasonable men now admit, a strong case against him. That there were
great public services to be set off against his great crimes is
perfectly true. But his services and his crimes were equally unknown to
the lady who so confidently asserted his perfect innocence and imputed
to his accusers, that is to say, to all the greatest men of all parties
in the state, not merely error, but gross injustice and barbarity.

She had, it is true, occasionally seen Mr. Hastings, and had found his
manners and conversation agreeable. But surely she could not be so weak
as to infer from the gentleness of his deportment in a drawing-room,
that he was incapable of committing a great state crime, under the
influence of ambition and revenge. A silly Miss, fresh from a boarding
school, might fall into such a mistake; but the woman who had drawn the
character of Mr. Monckton should have known better.

The truth is that she had been too long at Court. She was sinking into a
slavery worse than that of the body. The iron was beginning to enter
into the soul. Accustomed during many months to watch the eye of a
mistress, to receive with boundless gratitude the slightest mark of
royal condescension, to feel wretched at every symptom of royal
displeasure to associate only with spirits long tamed and broken in, she
was degenerating into something fit for her place. Queen Charlotte was a
violent partisan of Hastings, had received presents from him, and had so
far departed from the severity of her virtue as to lend her countenance
to his wife, whose conduct had certainly been as reprehensible as that
of any of the frail beauties who were then rigidly excluded from the
English Court. The King, it was well known, took the same side. To the
King and Queen all the members of the household looked submissively for
guidance. The impeachment, therefore, was an atrocious persecution; the
managers were rascals; the defendant was the most deserving and the
worst used man in the kingdom. This was the cant of the whole palace,
from Gold Stick in Waiting, down to the Table-Deckers and Yeomen of the
Silver Scullery; and Miss Burney canted like the rest, though in
livelier tones, and with less bitter feelings.

The account which she has given of the King's illness contains much
excellent narrative and description, and will, we think, be as much
valued by the historians of a future age as any equal portion of Pepys's
or Evelyn's Diaries. That account shows also