Note 123 — 528.

The trial of Warren Hastings began in Westminster Hall on February 13, 1788. Sheridan's speech on the Begums of Oudh was delivered on June 3, 6, 10, and 13. The trial was adjourned on June 14 till the following session. "Mr. Sheridan," writes Horace Walpole, June 5, 1788, "I hear, did not quite satisfy the passionate expectation that had been raised; but it was impossible he could, when people had worked themselves into an enthusiasm of offering fifty—ay, fifty guineas for a ticket to hear him." Macaulay's account of Sheridan's knowledge of stage-effect, and of his sinking back, "as if exhausted, into the arms of Burke," is based on this letter of Gibbon. Sir Gilbert Elliot, however (Life and Letters, vol. i. pp. 206-219), gives a different account. "Burke caught him in his arms as he sat down, which was not the least affecting part of the day to my feelings, and could not be the least grateful testimony of his merit received by Sheridan. I have myself enjoyed that embrace on such an occasion, and know its value." In his speech, as reported in the Morning Chronicle for June 14, 1788, Sheridan said that "nothing equal in criminality was to be traced either in ancient or modern history, in the correct periods of Tacitus or the luminous page of Gibbon." The story, told by Moore in his Memoirs of Sheridan, that the orator really used the word "voluminous," is repudiated by Mr. Fraser Rae (Sheridan, vol. ii. p. 69).