ected morsels plucked from the famished mouths of
hundreds of decayed, indigent, and starving nobility, he gorged his
ravenous maw with 200_l._ a day for his entertainment. In the course of
all this proceeding your Lordships will not fail to observe he is never
corrupt, but he is cruel; he never dines with comfort, but where he is
sure to create a famine. He never robs from the loose superfluity of
standing greatness; he devours the fallen, the indigent, the
necessitous. His extortion is not like the generous rapacity of the
princely eagle, who snatches away the living, struggling prey; he is a
vulture, who feeds upon the prostrate, the dying, and the dead. As his
cruelty is more shocking than his corruption, so his hypocrisy has
something more frightful than his cruelty; for whilst his bloody and
rapacious hand signs proscriptions, and now sweeps away the food of the
widow and the orphan, his eyes overflow with tears, and he converts the
healing balm that bleeds from wounded humanity into a rancorous and
deadly poison to the race of man.

Well, there was an end to this tragic entertainment, this feast of
Tantalus. The few left on the pension-list, the poor remnants that had
escaped, were they paid by his administratrix and deputy, Munny Begum?
Not a shilling. No fewer than forty-nine petitions, mostly from the
widows of the greatest and most splendid houses of Bengal, came before
the Council, praying in the most deplorable manner for some sort of
relief out of the pittance assigned them. His colleagues, General
Clavering, Colonel Monson, and Mr. Francis, men who, when England is
reproached for the government of India, will, I repeat it, as a shield
be held up between this nation and infamy, did, in conformity to the
strict orders of the Directors, appoint Mahomed Reza Khan to his old
offices, that is, to the general superintendency of the household and
the administration of justice, a person who by his authority might keep
some order in the ruling family and in the state. The Court of Directors
authorized them to assure those offices to him, with a salary reduced
indeed to 30,000_l._ a year, during his good behavior. But Mr. Hastings,
as soon as he obtained a majority by the death of the two best men ever
sent to India, notwithstanding the orders of the Court of Directors, in
spite of the public faith solemnly pledged to Mahomed Reza Khan, without
a shadow of complaint, had the audacity to dispossess him of all his
off