It did pass, but it took its long time to pass. The trial lasted seven years. Begun in the February of 1788, it ended in the April of 1795. In that long space of time men might well be excused if they had grown weary of it. Had its protracted course been even pursued in colorless, eventless times it would have been hard to preserve the public interest in the trial so terribly drawn out. But it was one of the curious fortunes of the trial to embrace within its compass some of the most thrilling and momentous years that have been recorded in the history of mankind. In the year after the trial began the Bastille fell. In the year before the trial closed the Reign of Terror came to an end with the deaths of Robespierre and St. Just. The interval had seen the whole progress of the French Revolution, had applauded the constitutional struggle for liberty, had shuddered at the September massacres, had seen the disciplined armies of the great European Powers reel back dismayed before the ragged regiments of the Republic, had seen France answer Europe with the head of a king, with the head of a queen, had observed how the Revolution, like Saturn, devoured its own children, had witnessed with fear as well as with fury the apotheosis of the guillotine. While the events in France were shaking every European State, including England, to its centre, it was hard for the public mind to keep itself fixed with any degree of intentness upon the trial of Warren Hastings. The events of that interval had affected too, profoundly, the chief actor in the trial. Burke entered upon the impeachment of Warren Hastings at the zenith of his great career, at the moment of his greatest glory. The rise and progress of the French evolution exercised a profound, even a disastrous, effect upon him. For once his fine intellect failed to discriminate between the essentials and the non-essentials of a great question. His horror at the atrocities of the Revolution blinded him to all the advantages that {285} the success of the Revolution brought with it. The whole framework of that great event was to him so hideously stained with the blood of the Queen, with the blood of so many innocent persons, that he could see nothing but the blood, and the influence of this is to be noticed in Burke's final speech with its almost confident expectation that the guillotine would sooner or later be established in England. Burke's frenzy against the French Revolution made it appear to many as if his reasoned and careful indictment of the erring Governor-General might after all be only mere frenzy too. [Sidenote: 1788-95--Acquittal of Hastings]