sources. After a vain appeal to Pitt to
{286} indemnify him for his legal expenses, an arrangement was come to
between the Government and the Company by which Hastings was enabled to
live at first in straitened, afterwards in moderate, circumstances for
the rest of his life.

[Sidenote: 1788-95--Effect of the impeachment trial]

It can scarcely be questioned but that Burke was in some degree
responsible for the result of the trial. His burning sense of
injustice, his passionate righteousness, and the perfervid strength of
his convictions betrayed him into an intemperance of language that
inevitably caused a reaction of sympathy in favor of the man so
violently assailed. It is impossible to read without regret the actual
ferocity of the epithets that Burke hurled against Warren Hastings. In
this he was followed, even exceeded, by Sheridan; but the utterances of
Sheridan, while they enraptured their hearers by their brilliancy, did
not carry with them the weight that attached to the utterances of
Burke. Burke's case was too strong to need an over-charged form of
expression. The plain statement of the misdeeds of Warren Hastings was
far more telling as an indictment than the abuse with which Burke
unhappily was tempted to overload his case. Those who were amazed and
sickened, with Macaulay, to think that in that age any one could be
found capable of calling the greatest of living public men, "that
reptile Mr. Burke," must reluctantly be compelled to admit that Burke
set his enemies a bad example by his own unlicensed use of opprobrium.
In justifying, for instance, the application to Warren Hastings of
Coke's savage description of Raleigh as a "spider of hell," Burke
allowed his fierce indignation to get the better of his tongue, to the
detriment of his own object, the bringing of an offender to justice.
Miss Burney in her memoirs affords a remarkable instance of the injury
which Burke did to his own object by the exuberance of his anger. She
tells us how, as she listened to Burke's arraignment of Hastings, and
went over the catalogue of his offences, she felt her sympathy for
Hastings slowly disappear, but that as Burke increased in the fury of
his assault, and passed from accusation to invective, the convincing
effect {287} of his oratory withered, and the effect which he had so
carefully created he himself contrived to destroy.

In spite of defects which in some degree brought their own punishment
with them, B