from a Cardinal of the Church of
Rome, full of urbanity and the wisdom of the world.

Your loving old
G.P.

[Footnote 1: Pp. 52-57.]

26

MY DEAR ANTONY,

I have in a former letter quoted a short but noble passage from Lord
Macaulay on the great Lord Chatham.

But I feel that the writer who was perhaps the greatest essayist that
England has ever produced must not in these letters be fobbed off with
so slight a notice and quotation.

What has always seemed to me the supremest passage that flowed
from his wonderful pen is to be found in his paper on Warren Hastings
which appeared originally in the _Edinburgh Review_.

His description in that essay of the opening of the great impeachment,
has given all succeeding generations a vision of one of the most
majestic scenes in the whole history of man.

"There have been spectacles more dazzling to the eye, more
gorgeous with jewellery and cloth of gold, more attractive to
grown-up children, than that which was then exhibited at
Westminster; but, perhaps, there never was a spectacle so well
calculated to strike a highly cultivated, a reflecting, an
imaginative mind. All the various kinds of interest which belong
to the near and to the distant, to the present and to the past,
were collected on one spot and in one hour. All the talents and
all the accomplishments which are developed by liberty and
civilisation were now displayed, with every advantage that could
be derived both from co-operation and from contrast. Every step in
the proceedings carried the mind either backward, through many
troubled centuries, to the days when the foundations of our
constitution were laid; or far away, over boundless seas and
deserts, to dusky nations living under strange stars, worshipping
strange gods, and writing strange characters from right to left.
The High Court of Parliament was to sit, according to forms handed
down from the days of the Plantagenets, on an Englishman accused
of exercising tyranny over the lord of the holy city of Benares,
and over the ladies of the princely house of Oude.

"The place was worthy of such a trial. It was the great hall of
William Rufus, the hall which had resounded with acclamations at
the inauguration of thirty kings, the hall which had witnessed the
just sentence of Bacon and the just absolution of Somers, the hall
where the eloquence of