Exactly the same tide of emotion which afterwards filled to the brim the cup of prophetic anger against the desecrators of the Church and the monarchy of France, now poured itself out against those who in India had "tossed about, subverted, and tore to pieces, as if it were in the gambols of boyish unluckiness and malice, the most established rights and the most ancient and most revered institutions of ages and nations." From beginning to end of the fourteen years in which Burke pursued his campaign against Hastings, we see in every page that the India which ever glowed before his vision was not the home of picturesque usages and melodramatic costume, but rather, in his own words, the land of princes once of great dignity, authority, and opulence; of an ancient and venerable priesthood, the guides of the people while living, and their consolation in death; of a nobility of antiquity and renown; of millions of ingenious mechanics, and millions of diligent tillers of the earth; and finally, the land where might be found almost all the religions professed by men--the Brahminical, the Mussulman, the Eastern and the Western Christian.
When he published his speech on the Nabob of Arcot, Burke prefixed to it an admirable quotation from one of the letters of the Emperor Julian.

And Julian too, as we all know, had a strong feeling for the past.

But what in that remarkable figure was only the sentimentalism of reaction, in Burke was a reasoned and philosophic veneration for all old and settled order, whether in the free Parliament of Great Britain, in the ancient absolutism of Versailles, or in the secular pomp of Oude and the inviolable sanctity of Benares, the holy city and the garden of God.
It would be out of place here to attempt to follow the details of the impeachment.

Every reader has heard that great tale in our history, and everybody knows that it was Burke's tenacity and power which caused that tale to be told.

The House of Commons would not, it is true, have directed that Hastings should be impeached, unless Pitt had given his sanction and approval, and how it was that Pitt did give his sanction and approval so suddenly and on grounds ostensibly so slender, remains one of the secrets of history.