192 PATNA DURING THE MUTINY. 



must come down from their pedestals, and take their rank with 

 MachiaveUi or Barere. 



It may be said, " Well, let them come down from their pedestals if 

 Mr. Tayler was in the right." 



" Fiat justitia ruit caelum / " 



But the fact is, that India is a long way off, and a vigorous policy 

 out there in extraordinary times may be viewed bona-fide in very 

 different lights. 



I have always seen many points of resemblance between Mr. 

 Tayler and Warren Hastings, and although perhaps neither would 

 thank me for the comparison, both afford good examples of the 

 varying light in which a vigorous Indian policy in extraordinary 

 times may be viewed. The greatest Englishman of the eighteenth 

 century, considered that the natives of India were justified in raising 

 a temple to Hastings as a demon, whilst the greatest writer of the 

 nineteenth, declares that only one cemetery was worthy to contain his 

 remains; and this writer, posing as " Sir Oracle," has raised his hero, 

 whose reputation was almost sinking into obscurity, on a pedestal 

 which will last as long as the English language. 



From very early childhood I had heard of Warren Hastings. My 

 mother told me how he was a frequent visitor at her father's house 

 in Portland Place, and how, perhaps prompted by a natural instinct, 

 he would tie her up by her hair to the furniture or anything coming 

 handy; and when I walked abroad in the village here, old people 

 would describe how they worked for the Governor, at Daylesford, 

 close by, and how he declared as they were building a certain wall, 

 that the thermometer marked two degrees higher than he had ever 

 seen it in Bengal.* How he would walk for hours together with his 

 hands tightly clasped behind him, backwards and forwards, appar- 

 ently in deep thought, and how (this of course was a delightful 



* Either the Governor must have made a mistake, or the instrument clearly was out of order. 



