Company to a very low ebb. But the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle restored to the Company their ancient local capital, and, in some degree, forced upon them a change of policy. I am not going to repeat the thrice-told tale of the great war of succession in the Carnatic; far less to contrast with the magnificence of M. Dupleix's views the petty devices and ill-assorted schemes of his rival. My purpose is sufficiently served when I state that the treaty of concord was scarce ratified between them, when the French and the English Companies found themselves arrayed on opposite sides, in a struggle which, begun for the ostensible purpose of giving a nabob to the Carnatic, was, in point of fact, to decide by which of these two European nations the destinies of India were to be guided." So far as we are yet able to judge of Mr. Gleig's performance, we must characterize it as a very readable although not very philosophical work. His tone is manly; his industry has been exemplary, and his candour superior to that which could be expected on themes of such keen and protracted controversy, by an author less cool, honest, and well informed than the experienced and considerate one before us. The particular excellence, we think, in what has yet appeared, is the skill with which he combines personal history with the events and vicissitudes of a mighty empire, keeping one mastermind ever before the reader, and thereby lending a unity and progressive wholeness to the drama. In so doing, however, and while being mainly occupied with the Indian government of Hastings, it is still too much in the manner of an advocate that he writes. If the biographer be not a partisan, he is at least a defender; if not a hired apologist, he is a willing and sincere admirer; his admiration colouring his representations and even affecting his abstract views of political administration. Expediency is frequently put before justice and humanity- wrong before right-when the preservation and aggrandizement of British India are concerned. Hear him with regard to the Begum business, where money was to be extorted from the Princesses of Oude, and when two eunuchs, their principal agents, were thrown into prison, and ordered to be kept without food until the treasures of which they had knowledge were to be given up. Says the biographer :— "The eunuchs, like the majority of their countrymen, loved money more than they loved their own persons: and stoutly held out against imprisonment and the privation of food till the uneasiness occasioned by the latter became insupportable. I really must be pardoned if I venture to characterise as something pre-eminently ridiculous and wicked, the sensibility which would strive to balance the well-merited sufferings of those usurpers against the preservation of British India. The eunuchs deserved death for having advised their mistresses in the line of crooked and unwise policy which they followed. They escaped with a little personal suffering, which was applied only so long as they refused to surrender up a portion of that wealth, the whole of which their own and their mistresses' treason had forfeited." According to our author's code of political morality, there is permitted in it much of a gambling character. Witness, with hardly an exception, his view of the entire government of his hero, following up as it did the unjustifiable and unscrupulous policy which the genius of Clive commenced, so as, no doubt, to lay the foundations of our colossal empire in the East, but upon no better abstract grounds than that the end justifies the means. In this way the shuffling, the intrigues, the foreseen advantages, and the stronghanded measures which, in one shape or another, were employed to supply the coffers of a mercantile company, and the still greater necessities connected with our retention of India, are not only extenuated but defended. The violations of treaties are excused when provinces are obtained and sovereignties seized; until a system of aggression was originated that has hardly known any bounds, and which is continually calling for new encroachments or usurpations, in order to preserve that which had been already possessed. Just let the reader peruse Mr. Gleig's perspicuous narrative, and pay attention to his avowed principles of construction, with regard to the treaties of Allahabad and Benares, the Mahratta wars, the Rohilla expedition, the fate of Nuncomar, who certainly was murdered under the guise of a fair trial, and the many grounds of charge and impeachment which were urged with unparalleled eloquence before supreme British tribunals; charges which, although exaggerated (and hence mainly was the acquittal of the Governor-General), are not all to be explained away, to the utter white-washing of that celebrated personage, with one exception, viz., his request in connexion with certain lacs of rupees. The author's account and concluding apology upon this affair are curious and extremely convenient. He says: "The truth is, that while Mr. Hastings and the Nabob were together at Chunar, the latter, acting on the recognised policy of all eastern chiefs, offered to the former a gift of ten lacs of rupees. Mr. Hastings was then absolutely penniless. Neither in his own escritoir nor in the public treasury was there an available rupee wherewith to meet the current expenses of the hour, while the troops were all in arrears-some, and these actually engaged in supressing Cheyt Sing's rebellion, to the extent of six months. The offer of ten lacs, even though it came in bills, was not by a man so circumstanced to be rejected, and Mr. Hastings did not scruple to avail himself of it. But he committed, at the same time, the only act throughout the whole of his political career, of which it is impossible to deny that it was, at least, injudicious. He communicated to the Court of Directors the fact of the present having been made, and while he set forth his mode of applying it to the public service, he hazarded a request that by the Court it might be given back to himself as a token of their approval of his conduct. What can I cay but this? It was clearly not the act of a dishonest man-for such an one would have pocketed the money without so much as alluding to it in his communications with the India House. It was not the act of a merce nary man-for Mr. Hastings's character was the reverse of mercenary. It could not be the result of weakness-for of weakness no one will accuse him. And, which is more extraordinary still, it was a proceeding of which, almost to his dying day, he used to speak as if there could be but one opinion respecting both the justice of his claim, and the hardship of having it rejected. I am inclined to think, therefore, that he must have entertained on the subject views peculiar to himself, of which, never having heard them discussed, I can give no account." We are unwilling to go at any length into questions which admit of contesting opinions, and which have been so long the topics of hot discussion, especially until we see how the author treats of the impeachment. Let us therefore for a moment return to some of the points known or conjectured of the private history of Hastings from the time at which he arrived in India. He got employment in the Secretary's office; he married in 1756 the widow of Captain Campbell, who bore him two children; but she and they died at an early period. He was appointed resident at the court of Moorshedabad, and was in time elected a member of council. But what more, or what of some of these vicissitudes and changes, than what we have stated? Let Mr. Gleig be heard in reply: "I exceedingly regret that of the tenor of Mr. Hastings's private life I am unable, during this interesting period, to give any detailed account. Of his familiar correspondence, not a shred, as far as I know, has been preserved; and as all his contemporaries have long ago been gathered to their fathers, even tradition is silent on the subject. I find myself, therefore, without authority to say more than that in addition to the death of his daughter he lost his wife, where, or under what circumstances, I know not, in 1759; and that in 1761 he sent his son George to Europe, for the purpose of prosecuting his education. So complete, however, and so impenetrable is the mystery which has enveloped the early career of this great man, that I have not been able to ascertain so much as the name of the parties to whom this precious charge was intrusted. It is probable, indeed, that he committed him to the care of his sister, Mrs. Woodman, and her husband; and it cannot be doubted that, if the case were so, they disposed of the child where they believed that he would be rightly dealt by. Yet all this is mere conjecture. I must therefore content myself with stating, that after fifteen years of laborious service in India, Mr. Hastings resigned his seat as a member of council in the month of November, 1764, and returned, master of a very moderate fortune, in his Majesty's ship the Medway, together with his friend Mr. Vansittart, to England.' At the period of this return he could hardly have better expectations of rising to a supreme station in the government of India, than when he first set foot upon its territories. He appears, indeed, not to have been avaricious of money, or at least he was far from being parsimonious and provident; for we are told, "A fourteen years' residence in the golden province of Bengal, during which more than the usual opportunities of amassing wealth were afforded him, had not, in Mr. Hastings's case, produced the results on which it was customary in those days to calculate. Not once can I find his name included in the list of those, to whom nabob, or vizier, or native agent of either, had offered a gift; nor in a solitary instance was the suspicion excited towards him, that he might have accepted presents, yet kept the secret to himself. I do not mean to assert that he received no mark of the good will of the prince at whose court he so long resided or that the nobles of Moorshedabad withheld from him the keilat, or gift of ceremony, which it was their custom to extend to the rest of their guests. But in the legitimate fruits, or what were so accounted, of the various revolutions which he contributed to bring about, it is clear that, for some reason or another, he was not a partaker. Of Drake, Clive, Vansittart, Carnac, Munro, Spencer, and indeed of all who from 1757 down to 1764, had acted as governor, commander of troops, or member of council, in the Company's service, it is officially on record that they extorted sums, always considerable, in various instances enormous, out of the gratitude, or it may be the necessities, of the native princes. But in the catalogue of persons so honoured, I have not been able, after the most diligent search, to discover that the name of Hastings is any where included. I may, perhaps, be permitted to add, that the fact, for such it is, reflects immortal honour on his memory. I am sure that men's knowledge of it ought to have screened him, in a later stage of his career, from some of the calumnies with which party malice sought to overwhelm him; yet is it past dispute, that the consequences of his own moderation were in the meanwhile extremely inconvenient to himself. Mr. Hastings returned to the land of his birth comparatively a poor man, and so extreme had been his carelessness in the adjustment of his personal affairs, that he soon became a needy one. I have been told by those who enjoyed the advantages of his intimacy, and heard him converse, which he could seldom be induced to do, upon the events of his early life, that he brought with him only a small portion of his savings to England, and that the bulk of them was left in Bengal on security which failed him. Though I cannot, on such authority, give the statement as a fact, I see no just reason why it should be questioned, because it was from first to last a conspicuous trait in Mr. Hastings's character, that he never put the smallest value upon money. But there is now lying before me a letter from Mr., afterwards Sir Francis Sykes, bearing date Muxadabad, 24th November, 1768, which seems to establish the truth of the rumour beyond dispute: I hope our friend Hastings,' says he, will before this have, by the interest of his friends, secured an appointment in the service. He has managed his cards very ill, and between you and me, I never saw such confused accounts as he left behind him.' Whether the property which he had failed to realise ere quitting the scene of his labours was or was not lost I know not; but the short extract just transcribed clearly proves that he was the reverse of cautious respecting the means that were adopted to secure it." He got reappointed to the Company's service; went out again to India, meeting with Baroness Imhoff in the voyage, whom he afterwards married; and renewed a career of amore public and influential nature than ever, which Mr. Gleig brings down to 1782. ART. IV.-The Crisis. France in face of the Four Powers. By D. URQU- Paris. MR. URQUHART appears to have passed over into France in order to wage war against Lord Palmerston, and to vent his spleen upon that functionary, still smarting under what he considers to have been personal affronts or unhandsome treatment. Accordingly the author of the present pamphlet, which forms No. VI., it seems, of a series of papers on Diplomacy and Commerce, has for a course of years been writing bitterly in opposition to the Foreign Secretary, having recently been throwing all his weight, whatever that may be, into the French scale of animosity towards him, whom he characterizes as an arch and a bribed traitor to his country, and relentless enemy to the peace and civilization of Europe. In short, and in as far as the recent misunderstanding between the Cabinets of England and France is concerned, or our policy with regard to Turkey and Egypt, and our relations with Russia are involved, Mr. Urquhart is a hearty coadjutor of Mr. Attwood, who has been so loudly denouncing on both sides of the Channel, one of the principal ministers of the British crown. Judging from some of the reported inflammatory speeches of the one gentleman, and the production before us of the other, which "some Frenchmen, desirous of co-operating in the attempt to save Europe from the dangers with which ignorance and treason threaten it, have undertaken to republish for distribution in England," we should say that the grounds for the grave allegations contained in them are either slight or feebly urged. Time too is a severe mocker of strong and sweeping predictions; so that when foretold discoveries fail, or are contradicted by real, recent and unquestioned occurrences, the public will lend a duller and duller ear to further unmeasured accusations and alarming prophecies by the same par ties. It is not altogether unamusing, and certainly it may be profitable to notice what are some of Mr. Urquhart's foretellings, most positively and unhesitatingly put forward, contrasted with the actual events which have astonished Europe since the moment that he wrote and prophesied. For, be it observed, that he lays claim to extraordinary and special knowledge of the policy and diplomacy of all the great powers, pronouncing upon their wisdom or their foily, their strength |