ART. IV.-1. The Story of Nuncomar and the Impeachment of Sir Elijah Impey. By Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, K.C.S.I., one of the Judges of the High Court of Justice, Queen's Bench Division. In 2 vols. London, 1885.

2. Echoes from Old Calcutta; being chiefly Reminiscences of the days of Warren Hastings, Francis, and Impey. By H. E. Busteed. Calcutta, 1882.

3. Memoirs of Sir Elijah Impey: compiled from authentic Documents in refutation of the calumnies of the Right Hon. Thomas Babington Macaulay. By Elijah Barwell Impey. London,

1846.

4. Howell's State Trials. Vol. XX.

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HE lines in which Lord Macaulay has drawn the character of Sir Elijah Impey are strong and deep. In that famous essay, that thrills us with all the magic of a romance, the Chief Justice of Bengal is the foil to the Governor-General. Hastings bears the strong imperious soul, and, when he errs, errs nobly and proudly. When Impey sins, it is from the mere love of meanness and corruption. Hastings looks like a great man, and not like a bad man.' Impey is ever the creature and the tool. To heighten the picture, to aggravate the contrast, every resource of Macaulay's matchless rhetoric is employed, every note in his subtle gamut of invective set ringing. In very boyhood Impey is hunted out, and we are shown him already venal and subservient, hired' by Hastings with a tart or a ball' to play the worst part in their boyish pranks.' When Impey lands in India, it is with the words that had Hastings 'searched through all the Inns of Court he could not have found an equally serviceable tool.' Next he is the judge that will 'not hear of mercy or delay,' the judge who refuses to respite a prisoner that he may 'gratify the Governor-General;' he who, `sitting as a judge, put a man unjustly to death in order to serve a political purpose.' 'No other such judge has dishonoured the English ermine since Jeffreys drank himself to death in the Tower.' To call Hastings in fault if he bribed him is, 'to charge the payer of the ransom with corrupting the virtue of the corsair.' For on one occasion the corsair, the captive, and the ransomer, was 'not an unfair illustration of the relative positions of Impey, Hastings, and the people of India.' His love of what is loathsome and corrupt makes him hurry across India to find congenial work. 'It was not easy for him to intrude himself into a business so entirely alien from all his official duties. But there was something inexpressibly alluring, we must suppose, Vol. 161.-No. 321.

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in the peculiar rankness of the infamy which was then to be got at Lucknow.' To the end there is not one redeeming ray cast on the features of this monster of injustice and corruption, who lies down under this weight of crime, 'rich, quiet, and infamous.' It is with the contemptuous words that the time was approaching when he was to be stripped of that robe which has never since the Revolution been disgraced so foully as by him,' that Macaulay flings him off to the condemnation of the world. Such are the terms that have made Sir Elijah Impey a figure almost as familiar to English-speaking people as the warriors of the Iliad or the characters of Shakspeare.

The charge in the main rests on one event-the trial of Nuncomar. In the famous phrase of Burke, which has since echoed in a thousand different forms, 'Mr. Hastings murdered Nuncomar by the hand of Sir Elijah Impey.' Judicial murder,'— such is the crime imputed. Of a crime more hideous a man cannot well be accused, and, if true, no words can be too strong to condemn him. But if these charges are not true, not lightly can we blame him who, without duly weighing the proofs on which they rested, clothed them with the enchantments of his art, and lent them wings to fly where the faint voice of denial and disproof will sound but an empty and unheeded echo.

It is our contention that the charges are not true, and that Sir James Stephen has in the work before us proved conclusively that Impey, instead of being a second Jeffreys, was a man not other than just and fair-minded, and that in particular at the trial of Nuncomar he conducted himself with all that impartiality that is to be looked for in a judge. Sir James Stephen, in the Preface to the book at the head of this article, tells us, that a consideration of the historical importance of the administration of criminal justice led him to examine, with a lawyer's eye, some of the more remarkable of the trials in which our history abounds.' As a result of this examination he was at first inclined to take up the Impeachment of Warren Hastings. Finding, however, that to do this as a whole was a task almost too great to undertake, he decided to make an experiment by investigating the Story of Nuncomar; for that was a subject which, lying within comparatively narrow limits, might be accomplished within a reasonable time. may venture to hope that the interest, which the present work can hardly fail to excite, will be an inducement to its author to resume his suspended plan for treating the Trial of Hastings. Such a work by Sir James Stephen would be a priceless contribution to English and Indian history. Nothing can be said too

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highly in praise of the completeness with which he has carried out his present task. His attitude throughout is judicial. It is as if the trial of Nuncomar had come before him for rehearing. With the most careful attention to the minute details of evidence in accusation and defence, he has digested the materials before him. For such a work the ground had not even been prepared. The defence of Impey, published by his son, is a work beyond comparison, confused, tedious, and irrelevant; and, but for their pathetic earnestness, the clumsy attacks on Macaulay do more to excite ridicule than to carry conviction to the reader.

Sir James Stephen, then, in making his defence exhaustive, has had no easy task. If any of his readers should complain that they miss in his work that perfect symmetry, that absence of redundancy which the highest literary standard may require, they have only to turn to the materials themselves to discover, that in this case such symmetry of form would have been inconsistent with that judicial accuracy, with which Sir James Stephen has determined to charge the jury of historical students. No one, who compares his account of the evidence at the trial with the report itself, can fail to be struck by the close and faithful manner in which each doubt or difficulty is commented on or explained. It is seldom indeed that an historical subject, requiring imperatively as this does exact and judicial treatment, has secured an exponent essentially accomplished in these very requirements. In the present case it would be difficult to exaggerate the advantage which the future historian of India will derive from this work, or to over-estimate the peculiar interest which attaches to the record of a cause, thus interpreted step by step and day by day, by a judge so highly distinguished as Sir James Stephen in the theory and practice of our criminal law. Many pleasanter tasks might doubtless have been chosen to occupy the leisure of one who belongs to not the least hard-worked body of men in England; and no small honour, then, is due to the writer who has considered it a public trust to vindicate the memory of an innocent judge on whom a world-wide obloquy.... had fallen. Admitting the great abilities and extensive knowledge of Lord Macaulay, it is a subject of the gravest. regret that he did not investigate the charges, on which he so vehemently declaimed. Had he investigated them, we hope he could never have written as he has done. Yet his fault in this matter cannot easily be exaggerated. It is true that the sources of information to which he would naturally have had recourse. were poisoned; but this does not absolve him of responsibility. Mill, in particular, was here a most dangerous guide, and G 2

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one, we fear, who could not claim the excuse of being misled; for the materials on which to found a truer view must have been before him, and nothing but that rooted love of detraction, which defaces his history on every page, could have blinded him to the merits of the case. With him it is always the No student of Indian history who has followed the misrepresentations of Wellesley, and even of the blameless Cornwallis, will be surprised that he did not do justice to Impey, or will wonder that, after full investigation, Sir James Stephen charges him with falsehood, bad faith, and inaccuracy. The world, in fact, has been completely deceived by James Mill's way of writing, and has been unable to conceive that anything so dull could be untrue. Yet such is the case. As Sir James Stephen says, 'his excessive dryness and severity of style produce an impression of accuracy and labour, which a study of original authorities does not by any means confirm.' Macaulay too was no doubt influenced by the furious rhetoric of Sir Gilbert Elliot-Impey's accuser before the Commonsand by the magnificent denunciations of Burke.

We now proceed to show that the view adopted by Lord Macaulay was essentially wrong. An examination of the evidence given at the trial of Nuncomar, the man whom Impey is accused of judicially murdering, must be preceded by some account of the chief actors in the events that took place before the trial, and by a slight narrative of the events themselves. Of Nuncomar it is difficult to form any very clear conception. We know that he was tall and graceful in person, and of a constitution of extraordinary strength and vigour. As a Brahmin, he preserved the purity of his caste with even more than the perfection of ritual required of his order. The Mahomedan chronicler,* who recorded the dying throes of the Mogul Empire, speaks of him thus: 'He was a man of wicked disposition and a haughty temper, envious to a high degree, and on bad terms with the greater part of mankind, although he had conferred favours on two or three, and was firm in his attachments.' Lord Clive had accused him of forgery and treachery, and his name was at one time a constant subject of contumely among the directors in Leadenhall Street. But though it seems in vain to seek for any marked personal traits -unless it be the fortitude with which he met his death-the actual events of his life are clear enough. The political disintegration, which took place throughout Bengal before the complete establishment of English rule, brought into view

*See note on p. 100.

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two men of remarkable gifts-Mahomed Rheza Khan, the representative of the Musulman; Nuncomar, of the Hindoo interests. We cannot here stop to relate, how first one and then the other of these great opposing figures were made use of by the English Governors. Clive, when he left Bengal for the last time, had established the power of the Mahomedan, and had expressed emphatically his dislike and distrust of Nuncomar. Hastings had bitter personal feelings against the Hindoo, and, from private as well as from public motives, would have preferred to have withheld employment from him permanently. This, however, was not to be. Whether, as Lord Macaulay suggests, the crafty Hindoo was actually able to bring a secret influence to bear even in Leadenhall Street, or whether policy alone dictated the step, it is difficult to say; but at any rate the fact remains, that the Secret Committee, who controlled the affairs of the Company in London, determined to pull down Mahomed Rheza Khan from his offices, and, if need be, to make use of Nuncomar as the instrument of his destruction. To this course Hastings consented. The great Mahomedan officer fell, and with him the last remnant of native authority in Bengal. Nuncomar was not, as the Secret Committee had suggested, personally rewarded, but the office of treasurer of the household was bestowed' on his son: an appointment which, while it prevented Nuncomar from saying his services had gone unrewarded, placed no power in his hands. Nuncomar's ambition had been to fill the post which his help had been used to abolish, and the destruction of his rival thus gave but a fresh impulse to the hatred he felt for Hastings. He awaited only the opportunity to take his revenge on the Governor-General.

We need not repeat in detail the events of the latter part of the year 1774. It is well known, that at the close of that year was established in Bengal the new government, administrative and judicial, which had been called into existence by the Regulation Act. It is perhaps a fortunate circumstance, that in the eighteenth century there was no opportunity to make any fundamental change in the English Constitution. The Act, which established the rule of the Governor-General in Council and the Supreme Court of Judicature in Bengal, gives us some notion of what the work of the constitution-makers of those times was likely to have been. In that age the first thought of a continental monarch, who was anxious to liberalize his government, was to introduce into his administration what was called the collegiate system—that is, to administer his country by boards, not by individual ministers. This system the rulers of the eighteenth century considered the panacea for all that

was