“‘No, I never saw him; pray show him me.’
“‘There he is, in green; just now by the Speaker, now moved by the Committee; in two minutes more he will be somewhere else, skipping backwards and forwards; what a grasshopper it is!’
“‘I cannot look at him,’ cried I, ‘without recollecting a very extraordinary letter from him, that I read last summer in the newspaper, where he answers some attack that he says has been made upon him, because the term is used of “a very insignificant fellow;” and he printed two or three letters in the Public Advertiser, in following days, to prove, with great care and pains, that he knew it was all meant as an abuse of himself, from those words!’
“‘And what,’ cried he, laughing, ‘do you say to that notion now you see him?’
“‘That no one,’ cried I, examining him with my glass, ‘can possibly dispute his claim!’
“What pity that Mr. Hastings should have trusted his cause to so frivolous an agent! I believe, and indeed it is the general belief, both of foes and friends, that to his officious and injudicious zeal the present prosecution is wholly owing.”
A long conversation—or rather several conversations, for the talk was interrupted more than once—ensued, in the course of which Miss Burney, much to the astonishment of Windham, who knew her friendship for Burke, declared herself a partisan of Hastings, while at the same time she admitted that she knew nothing of the merits of the case—had not even read the charges against the late Governor-General. “I had afterwards,” she writes, “to relate a great part of this to the Queen herself. She saw me engaged in such close discourse, and with such apparent interest on both sides, with Mr. Windham, that I knew she must else form conjectures innumerable. So candid, so liberal is the mind of the Queen, that she not only heard me with the most favourable attention towards Mr. Windham, but was herself touched even to tears by the relation. We stayed but a short time after this last conference; for nothing more was attempted than reading over the charges and answers, in the same useless manner.”
Miss Burney went again to Westminster Hall on the second day of Burke’s opening speech:
“All I had heard of his eloquence, and all I had conceived of his great abilities, was more than answered by his performance. Nervous, clear, and striking was almost all that he uttered: the main business, indeed, of his coming forth was frequently neglected, and not seldom wholly lost; but his excursions were so fanciful, so entertaining, and so ingenious, that no miscellaneous hearer, like myself, could blame them. It is true he was unequal, but his inequality produced an effect which, in so long a speech, was perhaps preferable to greater consistency, since, though it lost attention in its falling off, it recovered it with additional energy by some ascent unexpected and wonderful. When he narrated, he was easy, flowing, and natural; when he declaimed, energetic, warm, and brilliant. The sentiments he interspersed were as nobly conceived as they were highly coloured; his satire had a poignancy of wit that made it as entertaining as it was penetrating; his allusions and quotations, as far as they were English and within my reach, were apt and ingenious; and the wild and sudden flights of his fancy, bursting forth from his creative imagination in language fluent, forcible, and varied, had a charm for my ear and my attention wholly new and perfectly irresistible.”
She was again visited in her box by Windham, who, on Hastings happening to look up, remarked that he did not like his countenance. “I could have told him,” says Fanny, “that he is reckoned extremely like himself; but after such an observation I would not venture, and only said: ‘Indeed, he is extremely altered: it was not so he looked when I conceived for him that prepossession I have owned to you.’” The Queen’s reporter, for such she was, attended a third time on the day after the Lords had enraged the Managers by deciding that they must complete their case upon all the charges before the accused was called on for any defence. She heard Mr. Fox speak for five hours with a violence that did not make her forget what she was told of his being in a fury. His eloquence was not nearly so much to her taste as Burke’s. Fox’s countenance struck her as hard and callous; his violence, she thought, had that sort of monotony that seemed to result from its being factitious, and she felt less pardon for that than for any extravagance in Mr. Burke, whose excesses seemed at least to be unaffected and sincere. Mr. Fox appeared to her to have no such excuse; ‘he looked all good-humour and negligent ease the instant before he began a speech of uninterrupted passion and vehemence, and he wore the same careless and disengaged air the very instant he had finished.’ After other attendances at the trial, Miss Burney’s mind was withdrawn from the subject in which she took so much interest by the last illness and death of Mrs. Delany. The old lady, who died on the 15th of April, 1788, left some small remembrances to the friend whose companionship had soothed her latter days.