e execution of Dr. Dodd.
Oppression in Bengal was to him the same thing as oppression in the
streets of London.

He saw that Hastings had been guilty of some most unjustifiable acts.
All that followed was natural and necessary in a mind like Burke's. His
imagination and his passions, once excited, hurried him beyond the
bounds of justice and good sense. His reason, powerful as it was, became
the slave of feelings which it should have controlled. His indignation,
virtuous in its origin, acquired too much of the character of personal
aversion. He could see no mitigating circumstance, no redeeming merit.
His temper, which, though generous and affectionate, had always been
irritable, had now been made almost savage by bodily infirmities and
mental vexations. Conscious of great powers and great virtues, he found
himself, in age and poverty, a mark for the hatred of a perfidious court
and a deluded people. In Parliament his eloquence was out of date. A
young generation, which knew him not, had filled the House. Whenever he
rose to speak, his voice was drowned by the unseemly interruption of
lads who were in their cradles when his orations on the Stamp Act called
forth the applause of the great Earl of Chatham. These things had
produced on his proud and sensitive spirit an effect at which we cannot
wonder. He could no longer discuss any question with calmness, or make
allowance for honest differences of opinion. Those who think that he was
more violent and acrimonious in debates about India than on other
occasions are ill informed respecting the last years of his life. In the
discussions on the Commercial Treaty with the Court of Versailles, on
the Regency, on the French Revolution, he showed even more virulence
than in conducting the impeachment. Indeed, it may be remarked that the
very persons who called him a mischievous maniac, for condemning in
burning words the Rohilla war and the spoliation of the Begums, exalted
him into a prophet as soon as he began to declaim, with greater
vehemence, and not with greater reason, against the taking of the
Bastile and the insults offered to Marie Antoinette. To us he appears to
have been neither a maniac in the former case nor a prophet in the
latter, but in both cases a great and good man, led into extravagance by
a sensibility which domineered over all his faculties.

It may be doubted whether the personal antipathy of Francis, or the
nobler indignation of Burke, would have led thei