a proceeding that could not bear the light.
Charity is the only virtue that I ever heard of that derives from its
retirement any part of its lustre; the others require to be spread
abroad in the face of day. Such candles should not be hid under a
bushel, and, like the illuminations which men light up when they mean to
express great joy and great magnificence for a great event, their very
splendor is a part of their excellence. We upon our feasts light up this
whole capital city; we in our feasts invite all the world to partake
them. Mr. Hastings feasts in the dark; Mr. Hastings feasts alone; Mr.
Hastings feasts like a wild beast; he growls in the corner over the
dying and the dead, like the tigers of that country, who drag their prey
into the jungles. Nobody knows of it, till he is brought into judgment
for the flock he has destroyed. His is the entertainment of Tantalus; it
is an entertainment from which the sun hid his light.

But was it an entertainment upon a visit? Was Mr. Hastings upon a visit?
No: he was executing a commission for the Company in a village in the
neighborhood of Moorshedabad, and by no means upon a visit to the Nabob.
On the contrary, he was upon something that might be more properly
called a _visitation_. He came as a heavy calamity, like a famine or a
pestilence on a country; he came there to do the severest act in the
world,--as he himself expresses, to take the bread, literally the bread,
from above a thousand of the nobles of the country, and to reduce them
to a situation which no man can hear of without shuddering. When you
consider, that, while he was thus entertained himself, he was famishing
fourteen hundred of the nobility and gentry of the country, you will not
conceive it to be any extenuation of his crimes, that he was there, not
upon a visit, but upon a duty, the harshest that could be executed, both
to the persons who executed and the people who suffered from it.

It is mentioned and supposed in the observations upon this case, though
no circumstances relative to the persons or the nature of the visit are
stated, that this expense was something which he might have charged to
the Company and did not. It is first supposed by the learned counsel who
made the observation, that it was a public, allowed, and acknowledged
thing; then, that he had not charged the Company anything for it. I have
looked into that business. In the first place, I see no such custom; and
if there was such a cust