foremost amongst the courtiers in those adventures which we call the
excesses of gayety and folly, though too often leading to Solomon's
wisdom and his sadness. But profligacy with Hastings had the excuse
of ardent passions: he had loved deeply, and unhappily, in his earlier
youth, and he gave in to the dissipation of the time with the restless
eagerness common to strong and active natures when the heart is not at
ease; and under all the light fascination of his converse; or the
dissipation of his life, lurked the melancholic temperament of a man
worthy of nobler things. Nor was the courtly vice of the libertine
the only drawback to the virtuous character assigned to Hastings by
Comines. His experience of men had taught him something of the
disdain of the cynic, and he scrupled not at serving his pleasures or
his ambition by means which his loftier nature could not excuse to his
clear sense. [See Comines, book vi., for a curious anecdote of what
Mr. Sharon Turner happily calls "the moral coquetry" of Hastings,--an
anecdote which reveals much of his character.] Still, however, the
world, which had deteriorated, could not harden him. Few persons so
able acted so frequently from impulse; the impulses were for the most
part affectionate and generous, but then came the regrets of caution
and experience; and Hastings summoned his intellect to correct the
movement of his heart,--in other words, reflection sought to undo what
impulse had suggested. Though so successful a gallant, he had not
acquired the ruthless egotism of the sensualist; and his conduct to
women often evinced the weakness of giddy youth rather than the cold
deliberation of profligate manhood. Thus in his veriest vices there
was a spurious amiability, a seductive charm; while in the graver
affairs of life the intellectual susceptibility of his nature served
but to quicken his penetration and stimulate his energies, and
Hastings might have said, with one of his Italian contemporaries,
"That in subjection to the influences of women he had learned the