rkable, because he had already received ample notice of the
attack which was in preparation. Within a week after he landed at
Plymouth, Burke gave notice in the House of Commons of a motion
seriously affecting a gentleman lately returned from India. The session,
however, was then so far advanced that it was impossible to enter on so
extensive and important a subject.

Hastings, it is clear, was not sensible of the danger of his position.
Indeed that sagacity, that judgment, that readiness in devising
expedients, which had distinguished him in the East, seemed now to have
forsaken him; not that his abilities were at all impaired; not that he
was not still the same man who had triumphed over Francis and Nuncomar,
who had made the Chief Justice and the Nabob Vizier his tools, who had
deposed Cheyte Sing, and repelled Hyder Ali. But an oak, as Mr. Grattan
finely said, should not be transplanted at fifty. A man who, having left
England when a boy, returns to it after thirty or forty years passed in
India, will find, be his talents what they may, that he has much both to
learn and to unlearn before he can take a place among English statesmen.
The working of a representative system, the war of parties, the arts of
debate, the influence of the press, are startling novelties to him.
Surrounded on every side by new machines and new tactics, he is as much
bewildered as Hannibal would have been at Waterloo, or Themistocles at
Trafalgar. His very acuteness deludes him. His very vigor causes him to
stumble. The more correct his maxims, when applied to the state of
society to which he is accustomed, the more certain they are to lead him
astray. This was strikingly the case with Hastings. In India he had a
bad hand; but he was master of the game, and he won every stake. In
England he held excellent cards, if he had known how to play them; and
it was chiefly by his own errors that he was brought to the verge of
ruin.

Of all his errors the most serious was perhaps the choice of a champion.
Clive, in similar circumstances, had made a singularly happy selection.
He put himself into the hands of Wedderburn, afterwards Lord
Loughborough, one of the few great advocates who have also been great in
the House of Commons. To the defence of Clive, therefore, nothing was
wanting, neither learning nor knowledge of the world, neither forensic
acuteness nor that eloquence which charms political assemblies. Hastings
entrusted his interests to a very