I have done."

Though I have selected some of the most remarkable passages of this
Speech, [Footnote: I had selected many more, but must confess that they
appeared to me, when in print, so little worthy of the reputation of the
Speech, that I thought it would be, on the whole, more prudent to omit
them. Even of the passages, here cited, I speak rather from my
imagination of what they must have been, than from my actual feeling of
what they are. The character, given of such Reports, by Lord
Loughborough, is, no doubt, but too just. On a motion made by Lord
Stanhope, (April 29, 1794), that the short-hand writers, employed on
Hastings's trial, should be summoned to the bar of the House, to read
their minutes, Lord Loughborough, in the course of his observations on
the motion, said, "God forbid that ever their Lordships should call on
the short-hand writers to publish their notes; for, of all people,
short-hand writers were ever the farthest from correctness, and there
were no man's words they ever heard that they again returned. They were
in general ignorant, as acting mechanically; and by not considering the
antecedent, and catching the sound, and not the sense, they perverted the
sense of the speaker, and made him appear as ignorant as themselves."] it
would be unfair to judge of it even from these specimens. A Report,
_verbatim_, of any effective speech must always appear diffuse and
ungraceful in the perusal. The very repetitions, the redundancy, the
accumulation of epithets which gave force and momentum in the career of
delivery, but weaken and encumber the march of the style, when read.
There is, indeed, the same sort of difference between a faithful
short-hand Report, and those abridged and polished records which Burke
has left us of his speeches, as there is between a cast taken directly
from the face, (where every line is accurately preserved, but all the
blemishes and excrescences are in rigid preservation also,) and a model,