it did not require an Œdipus or a Sphinx to answer it. Says he, "I
asked Sir Elijah Impey." What? a question on the title between the Nabob
and his mother? No such thing. He puts an hypothetical question.
"Supposing," says he, "a rebellion to exist in that country; will the
Nabob be justified in seizing the goods of the rebels?" That is a
question decided in a moment; and I must have a malice to Sir Elijah
Impey of which I am incapable, to deny the propriety of his answer. But
observe, I pray you, my Lords, there is something peculiarly good and
correct in it. He does not take upon him to say one word of the actual
existence of a rebellion, though he was at the time in the country, and,
if there had been any, he must have been a witness to it; but, so chaste
was his character as a judge, that he would not touch upon the juries'
office. "I am chief-justice here," says he, "though a little wandering
out of my orbit; yet still the sacred office of justice is in me. Do you
take upon you the fact; I find the law." Were it not for this sacred
attention to separate jurisdictions, he might have been a tolerable
judge of the fact,--just as good a judge as Mr. Hastings: for neither of
them knew it any other way, as it appears afterwards, but by rumor and
reports,--reports, I believe, of Mr. Hastings's own raising; for I do
not know that Sir Elijah Impey had anything to do with them.

But to proceed. With regard to the title of these ladies, according to
the Mahometan law, you have nothing laid before you by the prisoner's
counsel but a quotation cut out with the scissors from a Mahometan
law-book, (which I suspect very much the learned gentlemen have never
read through,) declaring how a Mahometan's effects are to be
distributed. But Mr. Hastings could not at the time have consulted that
learned counsel who now defends him upon the principles of the Hedaya,
the Hedaya not having been then published in English; and I will venture
to say, that neither Sir Elijah Impey nor Ali Ibrahim Khân, nor any