Sir Alfred Lyall, his most recent biographer, has very happily said of him that “perhaps no man of undisputed genius ever inherited less in mind or money from his parents or owed them fewer obligations of any kind.” His father, Pynaston Hastings, was the vagrant ne’er-do-well son of a fine old family. He married when only fifteen without any means or prospect of supporting a family. Warren was the second son. His father was only seventeen at his birth, and his mother died a few days later. As soon as he was old enough Pynaston took holy orders, married again, obtained a living in the West Indies, and there died, leaving his son to be put into a charity school by his grandfather. This is not much for a father to do for a son, but there was something else that Pynaston Hastings did which was of very great consequence, though in the nature of the case no credit is due to him for it. He transmitted to him the blood of a long line of ancestors, which stretched away back through one of the followers of William the Norman to the days of those old pirate kings of the Northland who, as I have pointed out before, were none the worse fathers of Empire-Makers because they were pirates as well. One of his ancestors, John Hastings, Lord of the Manors of Yelford-Hastings in Oxfordshire, and of Dalesford in Worcestershire, lost about half of his worldly goods, including the plate that he sent to be coined at the Oxford Mint, in helping Charles Stuart to fight the great Oliver, and afterwards spent most of the remainder in buying his peace from the Parliament. It was on the ancient estate of Dalesford, long before sold to the stranger and the alien, that Warren Hastings was born, some two hundred years later, practically a pauper and almost an outcast, under the shadow of his ancestral home. When he came to reasoning years he made a boyish resolve, challenging fate with all the splendid insolence of a seven-year-old dreamer, that some day he would make his fortune and buy the old place back--which in due course he did, although in those days his prospect of doing so was about as small as it was of reigning over the millions of subjects whose descendants to-day revere his memory almost as that of one of their own demigods.