is the more extraordinary that Mr. Larkins should
mistake this, because he is in an office which requires monthly
payments, and consequently great monthly exactness, and a continual
transfer from one month to another: we cannot suppose any accountant in
England can be more accurately acquainted with the succession of months
than Mr. Larkins must have been with the comparative state of Bengal and
English months. How are we to account for this gross inaccuracy? If you
have a poet, if you have a politician, if you have a moralist
inaccurate, you know that these are cases which, from the narrow bounds
of our weak faculties, do not perhaps admit of accuracy. But what is an
inaccurate _accountant_ good for? "Silly man, that dost not know thy own
silly trade!" was once well said: but the trade here is not silly. You
do not even praise an accountant for being accurate, because you have
thousands of them; but you justly blame a public accountant who is
guilty of a gross inaccuracy. But what end could his being inaccurate
answer? Why not name October as well as November? I know no reason for
it; but here is certainly a gross mistake: and from the nature of the
thing, it is hardly possible to suppose it to be a mere mistake. But
take it that it is a mistake, and to have nothing of fraud, but mere
carelessness; this, in a man valued by Mr. Hastings for being very
punctilious and accurate, is extraordinary.

But to return to the bonds. We find a bond taken in the month of Shawal,
1186, or 1779, but the receipt is said to be in Asin, 1780: that is to
say, there was a year and about three months between the collection and
the receipt; and during all that period of time an enormous sum of money
had lain in the hands of Gunga Govind Sing, to be employed when Mr.
Hastings should think fit. He employed it, he says, for the Mahratta
expedition. Now he began that letter on the 29th of November by telling
you that the bribe would not have been taken from Cheyt Sing, if it had
not been at the instigation of an exigency which it seems required a
supply of money, to be procured lawfully or unlawfully. But in fact
there was no exigency for it before the Berar army came upon the borders
of the country,--that army which he invited by his careless conduct
towards the Rajah of Berar, and whose hostility he was obliged to buy
off by a sum of money; and yet this bribe was taken from Cheyt Sing long
before he had this occasion for it. The fund lay in G