required, he could belie his own recorded assertions, turn hostilely
round upon his own expressed opinions, disclaim the proxies which he
himself had delegated, and, in short, get rid of all the inconveniences
of personal identity, by never acknowledging himself to be bound by any
engagement or opinion which himself had formed. To select the worst
features of his Administration is no very easy task; but the calculating
cruelty with which he abetted the extermination of the Rohillas--his
unjust and precipitate execution of Nuncomar, who had stood forth as his
accuser, and, therefore, became his victim,--his violent aggression upon
the Raja of Benares, and that combination of public and private rapacity,
which is exhibited in the details of his conduct to the royal family of
Oude;--these are acts, proved by the testimony of himself and his
accomplices, from the disgrace of which no formal acquittal upon points
of law can absolve him, and whose guilt the allowances of charity may
extenuate, but never can remove. That the perpetrator of such deeds
should have been popular among the natives of India only proves how low
was the standard of justice, to which the entire tenor of our policy had
accustomed them;--but that a ruler of this character should be held up to
admiration in England, is one of those anomalies with which England, more
than any other nation, abounds, and only inclines us to wonder that the
true worship of Liberty should so long have continued to flourish in a
country, where such heresies to her sacred cause are found.

I have dwelt so long upon the circumstances and nature of this Trial, not
only on account of the conspicuous place which it occupies in the
fore-ground of Mr. Sheridan's life, but because of that general interest
which an observer of our Institutions must take in it, from the clearness
with which it brought into view some of their best and worst features.
While, on one side, we perceive the weight of the popular scale, in the
lead taken, upon an occasion of such solemnity and importance, by two