“What pity that Mr. Hastings should have trusted his cause to so frivolous an agent! I believe, and indeed it is the general belief, both of foes and friends, that to his officious and injudicious zeal the present prosecution is wholly owing.” A long conversation—or rather several conversations, for the talk was interrupted more than once—ensued, in the course of which Miss Burney, much to the astonishment of Windham, who knew her friendship for Burke, declared herself a partisan of Hastings, while at the same time she admitted that she knew nothing of the merits of the case—had not even read the charges against the late Governor-General. “I had afterwards,” she writes, “to relate a great part of this to the Queen herself. She saw me engaged in such close discourse, and with such apparent interest on both sides, with Mr. Windham, that I knew she must else form conjectures innumerable. So candid, so liberal is the mind of the Queen, that she not only heard me with the most favourable attention towards Mr. Windham, but was herself touched even to tears by the relation. We stayed but a short time after this last conference; for nothing more was attempted than reading over the charges and answers, in the same useless manner.” Miss Burney went again to Westminster Hall on the second day of Burke’s opening speech: “All I had heard of his eloquence, and all I had conceived of his great abilities, was more than answered by his performance. Nervous, clear, and striking was almost all that he uttered: the main business, indeed, of his coming forth was frequently neglected, and not seldom wholly lost; but his excursions were so fanciful, so entertaining, and so ingenious, that no miscellaneous hearer, like myself, could blame them. It is true he was unequal, but his inequality produced an effect which, in so long a speech, was perhaps preferable to greater consistency, since, though it lost attention in its falling off, it recovered it with additional energy by some ascent unexpected and wonderful. When he narrated, he was easy, flowing, and natural; when he declaimed, energetic, warm, and brilliant. The sentiments he interspersed were as nobly conceived as they were highly coloured; his satire had a poignancy of wit that made it as entertaining as it was penetrating; his allusions and quotations, as far as they were English and within my reach, were apt and ingenious; and the wild and sudden flights of his fancy, bursting forth from his creative imagination in language fluent, forcible, and varied, had a charm for my ear and my attention wholly new and perfectly irresistible.”