"MY DEAR BROTHER,
"The day before yesterday I received the account of your glorious speech. Mr. Crauford was so good as to write a more particular and satisfactory one to Mr. Lefanu than we could have received from the papers. I have watched the first interval of ease from a cruel and almost incessant headache to give vent to my feelings, and tell you how much I rejoice in your success. May it be entire! May the God who fashioned you, and gave you powers to sway the hearts of men and control their wayward wills, be equally favorable to you in all your undertakings, and make your reward here and hereafter! Amen, from the bottom of my soul! My affection for you has been ever 'passing the love of women.' Adverse circumstances have deprived me of the pleasure of your society, but have had no effect in weakening my regard for you. I know your heart too well to suppose that regard is indifferent to you, and soothingly sweet to me is the idea that in some pause of thought from the important matters that occupy your mind, your earliest friend is sometimes recollected by you.
"I know you are much above the little vanity that seeks its gratification in the praises of the million, but you must be pleased with the applause of the discerning,—with the tribute I may say of affection paid to the goodness of your heart. People love your character as much as they admire your talents. My father is, in a degree that I did not expect, gratified with the general attention you have excited here: he seems truly pleased that men should say, 'There goes the father of Gaul.' If your fame has shed a ray of brightness over all so distinguished as to be connected with you, I am sure I may say it has infused a ray of gladness into my heart, deprest as it has been with ill health and long confinement…."
There is also another letter from this lady, of the same date, to Mrs.
Sheridan, which begins thus enthusiastically:—
"MY DEAR SHERI.
"Nothing but death could keep me silent on such an occasion as this. I wish you joy—I am sure you feel it: 'oh moments worth whole ages past, and all that are to come.' You may laugh at my enthusiasm if you please —I glory in it…."
In the month of April following, Mr. Sheridan opened the Seventh Charge, which accused Hastings of corruption, in receiving bribes and presents. The orator was here again lucky in having a branch of the case allotted to him, which, though by no means so susceptible of the ornaments of eloquence as the former, had the advantage of being equally borne out by testimony, and formed one of the most decided features of the cause. The avidity, indeed, with which Hastings exacted presents, and then concealed them as long as there was a chance of his being able to appropriate them to himself, gave a mean and ordinary air to iniquities, whose magnitude would otherwise have rendered them imposing, if not grand.
The circumstances, under which the present from Cheyte Sing was extorted shall be related when I come to speak of the great Speech in Westminster Hall. The other strong cases of corruption, on which Mr. Sheridan now dwelt, were the sums given by the Munny Begum (in return for her appointment to a trust for which, it appears, she was unfit), both to Hastings himself and his useful agent, Middleton. This charge, as far as regards the latter, was never denied—and the suspicious lengths to which the Governor-general went, in not only refusing all inquiry into his own share of the transaction, but having his accuser, Nuncomar, silenced by an unjust sentence of death, render his acquittal on this charge such a stretch of charity, as nothing but a total ignorance of the evidence and all its bearings can justify.
The following passage, with which Sheridan wound up his Speech on this occasion, is as strong an example as can be adduced of that worst sort of florid style, which prolongs metaphor into allegory, and, instead of giving in a single sentence the essence of many flowers, spreads the flowers themselves, in crude heaps, over a whole paragraph:—
"In conclusion (he observed), that, although within this rank, but infinitely too fruitful wilderness of iniquities—within this dismal and unhallowed labyrinth—it was most natural to cast an eye of indignation and concern over the wide and towering forest of enormities—all rising in the dusky magnificence of guilt; and to fix the dreadfully excited attention upon the huge trunks of revenge, rapine, tyranny, and oppression; yet it became not less necessary to trace out the poisonous weeds, the baleful brushwood, and all the little, creeping, deadly plants, which were, in quantity and extent, if possible, more noxious. The whole range of this far-spreading calamity was sown in the hot-bed of corruption; and had risen, by rapid and mature growth, into every species of illegal and atrocious violence."