guilt--it is this that inflames the minds of those who watch his
transactions, and roots out all pity for a person who could act under
such an influence. We conceive of such tyrants as Caligula and Nero, bred
up to tyranny and oppression, having had no equals to control them--no
moment for reflection--we conceive that, if it could have been possible
to seize the guilty profligates for a moment, you might bring conviction
to their hearts and repentance to their minds. But when you see a cool,
reasoning, deliberate tyrant--one who was not born and bred to
arrogance,--who has been nursed in a mercantile line--who has been used
to look round among his fellow-subjects--to transact business with his
equals--to account for conduct to his master, and, by that wise system of
the Company, to detail all his transactions--who never could fly one
moment from himself, but must be obliged every night to sit down and hold
up a glass to his own soul--who could never be blind to his deformity,
and who must have brought his conscience not only to connive at but to
approve of it--_this_ it is that distinguishes it from the worst
cruelties, the worst enormities of those, who, born to tyranny, and
finding no superior, no adviser, have gone to the last presumption that
there were none above to control them hereafter. This is a circumstance
that aggravates the whole of the guilt of the unfortunate gentleman we
are now arraigning at your bar."

We now come to the Peroration, in which, skilfully and without appearance
of design, it is contrived that the same sort of appeal to the purity of
British justice, with which the oration opened, should, like the
repetition of a solemn strain of music, recur at its close,--leaving in
the minds of the Judges a composed and concentrated feeling of the great
public duty they had to perform, in deciding upon the arraignment of
guilt brought before them. The Court of Directors, it appeared, had
ordered an inquiry into the conduct of the Begums, with a view to the