[45] "Apropos de bottes,"--"Now you speak of a _Gun_:" Moore, in his Life of Sheridan, observes that but a very imperfect report of Sheridan's celebrated speech on the impeachment of Warren Hastings is preserved. The following piquant passage relating to the East India Company, as then constituted and acting, occurs in a report of the speech published in an old Magazine, for February, 1787. "He remembered to have heard an honourable and learned gentleman (Mr. Dundas) remark, that there was something in the first frame and constitution of the Company, which extended the sordid principles of their origin over all their successive operations, connecting with their civil policy, and even with their boldest achievements, the meanness of a pedlar and the profligacy of pirates. Alike in the political and the military line could be observed auctioneering ambassadors and trading generals; and thus we saw a revolution brought about by affidavits; an army employed in executing an arrest; a town besieged on a note of hand; a prince dethroned for the balance of an account. Thus it was they exhibited a government which united the mock majesty of a bloody sceptre, and the little traffic of a merchant's counting-house, wielding a truncheon with one hand and picking a pocket with another." [46] It is expressly stated that the cards of one of the packs are made of canvas, in a memorandum which accompanies them. This is the pack which is said to be a thousand years old. On first handling them they seemed to me to be made of thin veneers of wood. [47] Though Mahometans might object to paint figured cards, it appears that they do "tolerate" them, and that very amply, by using them. See a description of the Gunjeefu, or cards used by the Moslems, at page 41. [48] In a note to the article on Whist, in the Foreign Quarterly Review, No. 48, previously referred to, this pack of cards is noticed, and the suits are thus enumerated: "While this article was in the press, we have been favoured with a sight of two packs of cards in the possession of the Royal Asiatic Society: and, as truth is more strange than fiction, one of these, consisting of TEN Suits, certainly does represent the TEN Avatars or incarnations of the VISTNOU, or Vishnava, sect.... The suits are: 1. The Fish. 2. The Tortoise. 3. The Boar. 4. The Lion. 5. The Monkey. 6. The Hatchet. 7. The Umbrella (or Bow.) 8. The Goat. 9. The Boodh. 10. The Horse. "The Dwarf of the 5th Avatar is substituted by the Monkey; the Bow and Arrows of the 7th by the Cattashal or Umbrella, which gives precisely the same outline; and the Goat there, as often elsewhere, takes the place of the Plough."