“But would he, if guilty, have waited its chance? Was not all the world before him? Could he not have chosen any other place of residence?”
“Yes—but the shame, the disgrace of a flight?”
“What is it all to the shame and disgrace of convicted guilt?” He made no answer.
“And now,” I continued, “shall I tell you, just in the same simple style, how I have been struck with the speakers and speeches I have yet heard?” He eagerly begged me to go on.
“The whole of this public speaking is quite new to me. I was never in the House of Commons. It is all a new creation to me.”
“And what a creation it is,” he exclaimed, “how noble, how elevating! and what an inhabitant for it!”
I received his compliment with great courtesy, as an encouragement for me to proceed. I then began upon Mr. Burke; but I must give you a very brief summary of my speech, as it could only be intelligible at full length from your having heard his. I told him that his opening had struck me with the highest admiration of his powers, from the eloquence, the imagination, the fire, the diversity of expression, and the ready flow of language, with which he seemed gifted, in a most superior manner, for any and every purpose to which rhetoric could lead. “And when he came to his two narratives,” I continued, “whence he related the particulars of those dreadful murders, he interested, he engaged, he at last overpowered me; I felt my cause lost. I Could hardly keep on my seat. My eyes dreaded a single glance towards a man so accused as Mr. Hastings; I wanted to sink on the floor, that they might be saved so painful a sight. I had no hope he could clear himself; not another wish in his favour remained. But When from this narration Mr. Burke proceeded to his own comments and declamation—when the charges of rapacity, cruelty, tyranny were general, and made with all the violence of personal detestation, and continued and aggravated without any further fact or illustration; then there appeared more of study than of truth, more of invective than of justice; and, in short, so little of proof to so much of passion, that in a very short time I began to lift up my head, my seat was no longer uneasy, my eyes were indifferent which way they looked, or what object caught them; and before I was myself aware of the declension of Mr. Burke’s powers over my feelings, I found myself a mere spectator in a public place, and looking all around it, with my opera-glass in my hand.”
His eyes sought the ground on hearing this, and with no other comment than a rather uncomfortable shrug of the shoulders, he expressively and concisely said—“I comprehend you perfectly!”
This was a hearing too favourable to stop me; and Mr. Hastings constantly before me was an animation to my spirits which nothing less could have given me, to a manager of such a committee.
I next, therefore, began upon Mr. Fox; and I ran through the general matter of his speech, with such observations as had occurred to me in hearing it. “His violence,” I said, “had that sort of monotony that seemed to result from its being factitious, and I felt less pardon for that than for any extravagance in Mr. Burke, whose excesses seemed at least to be unaffected, and, if they spoke against his judgment, spared his probity. Mr. Fox appeared 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. A display of talents in which the inward man took so little share could have no powers of persuasion to those who saw them in that light and therefore. however their brilliancy might be admired, they were useless to their cause, for they left the mind of the hearer in the same state that they found it.”