The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay — Volume 1 eBook

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ing is lively and Picturesque.  Yet we read it, we own, with pain; for it seems to us to prove that the fine understanding of Frances Burney was beginning to feel the pernicious influence of a mode of life which is as incompatible with health of mind as the air of the Pomptine marshes with health of body.  From the first day, she espouses the cause of Hastings with a presumptuous vehemence and acrimony quite inconsistent with the modesty and suavity of her ordinary deportment.  She shudders when Burke enters the Hall at the head of the Commons.  She pronounces him the cruel oppressor of an innocent man.  She is at a loss to conceive how the managers can look at the defendant and not blush.  Windham comes to her from the managers’ box, to offer her refreshment.  “But,” says she, “I could not break bread with him.”  Then again, she exclaims, “Ah, Mr. Windham, how come you ever engaged in so cruel, so unjust a cause?” “Mr. Burke saw me,” she says, “and he bowed with the most marked civility of manner.”  This, be it observed, was just after his opening speech, a speech which had produced a mighty effect, and which certainly, no other orator that ever lived could have made.  “My curtsy,” she continues, “was the most ungrateful, distant and cold; I could not do otherwise; so hurt I felt to see him the head of such a cause.”  Now, not only had Burke treated her with constant kindness, but the very last act which he performed on the day on which he was turned out of the Pay office, about four years before this trial, was to make Dr. Burney organist of Chelsea hospital.  When, at the Westminster election, Dr.

Burney was divided between his gratitude for this favour and his Tory opinions, Burke in the noblest manner disclaimed all right to exact a sacrifice of principle.  “You have little or no obligations to me,” he wrote; “but if you had as many as I really wish it were in my power, as it is certainly in my desire, to lay on you, I hope you do not think me capable of conferring them in order to subject your mind or your affairs to a painful and mischievous servitude.”  Was this a man to be uncivilly treated by a daughter of Dr. Burney because she chose to differ from him respecting a vast and most complicated question which he had studied deeply guring many years and which she had never studied at all?  It Is clear, from Miss Burney’s own statement, that when she behaved so unkindly to Mr. Burke, she did not even know of what Hastings was accused.  One thing, however, she must have known, that Burke had been able to convince a House of Commons, bitterly prejudiced against him, that the charges were well founded, and that Pitt and Dundas had concurred with Fox and Sheridan in supporting the impeachment.  Surely a woman Of far inferior abilities to Miss Burney might have been expected to see that this never could have happened unless there had been a strong case against the late Governor-general.  And there was, as all reasonable men now admit, a strong case against him.  That there were great public services to be set off against his great