[123] The trial of Warren Hastings began in Westminster Hall on February 13, 1788. Sheridan's speech on the Begums of Oudh was delivered on June 3, 6, 10, and 13. The trial was adjourned on June 14 till the following session. "Mr. Sheridan," writes Horace Walpole, June 5, 1788, "I hear, did not quite satisfy the passionate expectation that had been raised; but it was impossible he could, when people had worked themselves into an enthusiasm of offering fifty—ay, fifty guineas for a ticket to hear him." Macaulay's account of Sheridan's knowledge of stage-effect, and of his sinking back, "as if exhausted, into the arms of Burke," is based on this letter of Gibbon. Sir Gilbert Elliot, however (Life and Letters, vol. i. pp. 206-219), gives a different account. "Burke caught him in his arms as he sat down, which was not the least affecting part of the day to my feelings, and could not be the least grateful testimony of his merit received by Sheridan. I have myself enjoyed that embrace on such an occasion, and know its value." In his speech, as reported in the Morning Chronicle for June 14, 1788, Sheridan said that "nothing equal in criminality was to be traced either in ancient or modern history, in the correct periods of Tacitus or the luminous page of Gibbon." The story, told by Moore in his Memoirs of Sheridan, that the orator really used the word "voluminous," is repudiated by Mr. Fraser Rae (Sheridan, vol. ii. p. 69).
[124] C. J. Fox.
[125] In 1788, on a by-election caused by Lord Hood's acceptance of office as one of the Commissioners of the Admiralty, Lord John Townshend won the seat against Hood. In Bond Street there was a battle between Lord Hood's sailors and the Irish chairmen and butcher-boys. Several were killed and wounded.
[126] Charles James Fox married Elizabeth Bridget Cane, otherwise Mrs. Armitstead, at Wyton, Huntingdonshire, on September 28, 1795. She survived her husband. In 1799, on his fiftieth birthday (January 24), Fox addressed to her the following lines:—
"Of years I have now half a century past,
And none of the fifty so blessed as the last.
How it happens my troubles thus daily should cease,
And my happiness thus with my years should increase,
This defiance of nature's more general laws
You alone can explain, who alone are the cause."