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the 21st July. Two days afterwards, Hastings returned with his wife to Daylesford, not sorry to exchange the stir and glitter of the scenes in which he had lately figured, for the quieter attractions of his country home.

Before his departure, some of his friends had been trying to obtain for him the honour of a statue in the India House. Nothing, however, came of this project. When Hastings heard of it through his friend, Sir George Dallas, he refused his assent to every attempt of the kind, “except what should arise from the Court of Directors themselves, and from their own mere motion." Sir George assured him that nothing should be done in the matter that could hurt his feelings; but Hastings insisted that the whole business should be "put an end to altogether. 11*

* Gleig's "Warren Hastings," Vol. 3, Chap. xiv.

CHAPTER V.

1814-1818.

HASTINGS returned to Daylesford in good spirits and fair health. But the shadow of ccming fate was already falling on his path. In 1813, he had suffered from a numbness in his right side. During his stay in London in the following year, he found himself more than once deprived for a few minutes of the power of speech, by a seizure which affected the muscles of his mouth and of one hand. These atacks, however, soon passed by, leaving him apparently as well as ever. September, 1815, he described himself to Anderson, with whom he regularly corresponded, as much better than he had been for months past, "happy in witnessing the good health, good spirits, and good looks of Mrs. Hastings, still unabated," and his own, "of each kind, perfect in all points, but memory of the past and present recollection."

In

HASTINGS' THOUGHTS ON BONAPARTE. 367

He had now given up riding on horseback, but his strength was still equal to the old pursuits of farming and gardening, and he enjoyed as keenly as ever the society of his friends and his books. Nor did he relax from his old interest in the political movements of the day. In a letter to David Anderson, written soon after Bonaparte's triumphant return from Elba, Hastings looks upon the late events in France as falsifying Solomon's adage that there is nothing new under the sun, "for the imagination of man never conceived the invasion of a great empire by a mere adventurer at the head of six hundred men." Nor was he less amazed to contemplate the likelihood-erelong to prove the factof a foreign confederacy forcing "upon a whole people against their declared choice, a sovereign ruler, and that ruler the untainted blood of their own hereditary monarchs."* Like Fox, and a few other liberal-minded Englishmen of that day, he had always owned to a certain admiration of the great Corsican upstart, whose lurid genius and mad ambition were about to land him, a hopeless exile, on the lonely, well-guarded rock of St. Helena. He admired him much as one might

* Cleig's "Warren Hastings," Vol. 3, Chap. xiv.

admire a hurricane or a raging flood, or the fallen Archangel in Paradise Lost.

A few months later, we find his generous spirit vexed at "the miraculous transformation of the beautiful island of St. Helena into a state prison of a deposed emperor." He was "sorry for its degredation, and more so to contemplate the British nation in the character of the jailor of Europe." It was, no doubt, a disagreeable duty which fell to England, but in his sympathy with the famous prisoner Hastings seems to have overlooked the circumstances which justified the jailor's conduct. If Napoleon had been less closely guarded, would not the peace of Europe have soon been once more disturbed? The events that followed his return from Elba explain the sequel of his surrender to Captain Maitland.

Hastings watched the course of events in India with an interest heightened by his friendly relations with Lord Moira, the new GovernorGeneral, and by the memory of his own experiences in the same post. With pardonable pride, the old man compares the success of his own plans in 1781 for defeating the Rajah of Banáras, with the blunders that marked the first year's campaign in Nepal. Our reverses in

THE WAR IN NEPAL.

369

1814 he ascribes, not to "the superior skill and courage of our enemies," but to our ignorance of the country invaded, our neglect of the discipline which makes up for inferior numbers, and to the folly of sending three columns "by three undefined lines, through an unknown labyrinth of thickets and rocks, with a plan for their converging in the same point of attack." His fears that the war might end in a peace that would lower the credit of our arms, and proclaim our "abandonment of the principle to which we owe all our present greatness in India," were happily falsified by the victories of Ochterlony and the treaty of 1816.

Falsified also, perhaps for the best, were his expectations regarding the latter years of Lord Hastings' rule.* Looking at Lord Hastings as "a man of superior talents, steady of purpose, and determined," who had no wish to make new conquests, he reckoned that the Marátha Princes would not care to provoke, at the hands of such a ruler, the punishment they would else receive. "These," he writes, in the winter of 1817, "are my reasons for believing that we shall have peace

* Lord_ Moira was made Marquis of Hastings at the end of the Gurkha war.