Abuse and invective were not confined to Burke nor to the side which Burke represented. Warren Hastings, or those who acted for Warren Hastings, employed every means in their power to blacken the characters of their opponents and to hold them up to public ridicule and to public detestation. The times were not gentle times for men engaged in political warfare, and the companions of Hastings employed all the arts that the times placed at their disposal. Burke and Sheridan, and those who acted with Burke and Sheridan, were savage enough in the tribune, but they did not employ the extra-tribunal methods by which their enemy retaliated upon them. Hastings is scarcely to be blamed, considering duly the temper of his age, for doing everything that party warfare permitted against his opponents. He was fighting as for his life; he was fighting for what was far dearer to him than life--for life, indeed, he had ever shown a most soldierly disregard; he was fighting for an honorable name, for the reward of a lifetime devoted to the interests of his country, as he understood those interests; he was fighting for fame as against infamy, and he fought hard and he {288} fought after the fashion of the time in which he lived. The newspaper, the pamphlet, the lampoon, the caricature, the acidulated satire, the envenomed epigram, all were used, and used with success, against the promoters of the impeachment. The caricatures were not all on one side, but the most numerous and the most effective were in favor of the impeached statesman. If the adversaries of Hastings naturally seized upon the opportunity of a classical effect by presenting Burke and Hastings in the character of Cicero and Verres, the friends of Verres replied by the pencil of Gillray, representing Hastings as the savior of India defending himself heroically against assassins with the faces of Burke and of Fox. As the interest in the trial flagged the caricatures grew fewer and fewer, to revive a little at the close of the case. The popular view of the trial was then represented fairly enough by a large print called "The Last Scene of the Manager's Farce," in which Hastings was represented as rising in glory from the clouds of calumny, while Burke and Fox are represented witnessing with despair the failure of their protracted farce, and the crafty face of Philip Francis peeped from behind a scene where he was supposed to be playing the part of the prompter--"no character in the farce, but very useful behind the scenes," a description which sums up smartly enough the part that Philip Francis played in the whole transaction from first to last. [Sidenote: 1818--Death of Hastings]