rebellions which menaced the very existence of the Protestant dynasty in England.

The economical and moral effects of the penal laws were profoundly disastrous. The productive energies of the nation were fatally diminished. Almost all Catholics of energy and talent who refused to abandon their faith emigrated to foreign lands. The relation of classes was permanently vitiated, for almost all of the land-holders of the country belonged to one religion, while the great majority of their tenants were of another. The Catholics, excluded from almost every possibility of eminence, and consigned by the Legislature to utter ignorance, soon sank into the condition of broken and dispirited helots. A total absence of industrial virtues, a cowering and abject deference to authority, a recklessness about the future, a love of secret illegal combinations, became general among them. Above all, they learned to regard law as merely the expression of force, and its moral weight was utterly destroyed. For the greater part of a century the main object of the Legislature was to extirpate a religion by the encouragement of some of the worst and the punishment of some of the best qualities of our nature. Its rewards were reserved for the informer, for the hypocrite, for the undutiful son, or for the faithless wife. Its penalties were directed against religious constancy and the honest discharge of ecclesiastical duty. It would, indeed, be scarcely possible to conceive a more infamous system of legal tyranny than that which in the middle of the eighteenth century crushed every class and almost every interest in Ireland.

The history of the penal laws should furnish a lasting warning to persecutors of all religions. Arthur Young asserts that the numerical proportion of the Roman Catholics in Ireland was not even diminished, if any thing, the reverse; and that it was admitted, by those who asserted the contrary, that it would take four thousand years, according to the then rate of progress, to convert them. It was stated in Parliament that

only four thousand and fifty-five had conformed in seventyone years under the system; and what little the religion may have lost in number it gained in intensity. The poorer classes in Ireland emerged from their long ordeal, penetrated with an attachment to their religion almost unparalleled in Europe. With the exception of the inhabitants of Bavaria and the Tyrol, there is, perhaps, no nation in Europe whose character has been so completely molded and permeated by it, or in which skeptical doubts are more completely unknown.

The code perished at last by its own atrocity. It became, after a time, so out of harmony with the prevailing tone of Irish opinion that it ceased to be enforced, and the Irish. Protestants took the initiative in obtaining its mitigation.

LVI.

IMPEACHMENT OF HASTINGS.-MACAULAY.

[Ireland was still in a state of agitation when the attention of the English Parliament became absorbed in one of the most remarkable of modern criminal trials. In 1773 Warren Hastings was made the first governor-general of India. During the twelve years of his administration he rendered inestimable service in extending and consolidating England's power in the East, but his glory was sullied by many crimes. Soon after his retirement from office he was impeached (1788) by the House of Commons, before the bar of the Lords, on charges of misgovernment in India. The trial dragged on for eight years, and, in the end, Hastings was acquitted; but the object for which the impeachment had been begun was attained. The crimes of Hastings have never been repeated, even by the worst of his successors.]

In the mean time the preparations for the trial had proceeded rapidly, and, on the 13th of February, 1788, the sittings of the court commenced. There have been spectacles more dazzling to the eye, more gorgeous with jewelry and

cloth of gold, more attractive to grown-up children than that which was then exhibited at Westminster; but, perhaps, there never was a spectacle so well calculated to strike a highly cultivated, a reflecting, an imaginative mind. All the various kinds of interest which belong to the near and to the distant, to the present and to the past, were collected on one spot, and in one hour. All the talents and all the accomplishments which are developed by liberty and civilization were now displayed, with every advantage that could be derived from co-operation and from contrast. Every step in the proceedings carried the mind either backward, through many troubled centuries, to the days when the foundations of our constitution were laid, or far away, over boundless seas and deserts, to dusky nations living under strange stars, worshiping strange gods, and writing strange characters from right to left. The High Court of Parliament was to sit, according to forms handed down from the days of the Plantagenets, on an Englishman accused of exercising tyranny over the lord of the holy city of Benares, and over the ladies of the princely house of Oude.

The place was worthy of such a trial. It was the great hall of William Rufus, the hall which had resounded with acclamations at the inauguration of thirty kings, the hall which had witnessed the just sentence of Bacon and the just absolution of Somers, the hall where the eloquence of Strafford had for a moment awed and melted a victorious party inflamed with just resentment, the hall where Charles had confronted the High Court of Justice with the placid courage which has half-redeemed his fame. Neither military nor civil pomp was wanting. The avenues were lined with grenadiers. The streets were kept clear by cavalry. The peers, robed in gold and ermine, were marshaled by the heralds under garter king-at-arms. The judges, in their vestments of state, attended to give advice on points of law. Near a hundred and seventy lords, three fourths of the Upper House,

as the Upper House then was, walked in solemn order from their usual place of assembling to the tribunal. The junior baron present led the way, George Eliott, Lord Heathfield, recently ennobled for his memorable defense of Gibraltar against the fleets and armies of France and Spain. The long procession was closed by the duke of Norfolk, earl-marshal of the realm, by the great dignitaries, and by the brothers and sons of the king. Last of all caine the prince of Wales, conspicuous by his fine person and noble bearing. The gray old walls were hung with scarlet. The long galleries were crowded by an audience such as has rarely excited the fears or the emulation of an orator. There were gathered together, from all parts of a great, free, enlightened, and prosperous empire, grace and female loveliness, wit and learning, the representatives of every science and of every art. There were seated round the queen the fair-haired young daughters of the house of Brunswick. There the embassadors of great kings and commonwealths gazed with admiration on a spectacle which no other country in the world could present. There Siddons, in the prime of her majestic beauty, looked with emotion on a scene surpassing all the imitations of the stage. There the historian of the Roman Empire thought of the days when Cicero pleaded the cause of Sicily against Verres, and when, before a senate which still retained some show of freedom, Tacitus thundered against the oppressor of Africa. There were seen, side by side, the greatest painter and the greatest scholar of the age. The spectacle had allured Reynolds from that easel which has preserved to us the thoughtful foreheads of so many writers and statesmen, and the sweet smiles of so many noble matrons. It had induced Parr to suspend his labors in that dark and profound mine from which he had extracted a vast treasure of erudition, a treasure too often buried in the earth, too often paraded with injudicious and inelegant ostentation, but still precious, massive, and splendid. There appeared the voluptuous charms

*

of her to whom the heir of the throne had in secret plighted his faith. There, too, was she, † the beautiful mother of a beautiful race, the St. Cecilia, whose delicate features, lighted up by love and music, art has rescued from the common decay. There were the members of that brilliant society which quoted, criticized, and exchanged repartees under the rich peacock-hangings of Mrs. Montague. And there the ladies -whose lips, more persuasive than those of Fox himself, had carried the Westminster election against palace and treasury. -shone round Georgiana, duchess of Devonshire.

The sergeants made proclamation. Hastings advanced to the bar and bent his knee. The culprit was, indeed, not unworthy of that great presence. He had ruled an extensive and populous country, had made laws and treaties, had sent forth armies, had set up and pulled down princes. And in his high place he had so borne himself that all had feared him, that most had loved him, and that hatred itself could deny him no title to glory, except virtue. He looked like a great man, and not like a bad man. A person small and emaciated, yet deriving dignity from a carriage which, while it indicated deference to the court, indicated also habitual self-possession and self respect; a high and intellectual forehead; a brow pensive, but not gloomy; a mouth of inflexible decision; a face pale and worn, but serene, on which was written, as legibly as under the picture in the council-chamber at Calcutta, Mens acqua in arduis ; such was the aspect with which the great pro-consul presented himself to his judges.

His counsel accompanied him—men all of whom were afterward raised, by their talents and learning, to the highest posts in their profession-the bold and strong-minded Law, afterward chief-justice of the King's Bench; the more humane and eloquent Dallas, afterward chief-justice of the Common Pleas; and Plomer, who, near twenty years later, successfully conducted, in the same high court, the defense Mrs. Sheridan.

*Mrs. Fitzherbert.