I must observe where I am limited and where I am not. I am limited, strictly, fully, (and your Lordships and my country, who hear me, will judge how faithfully I shall adhere to that limitation,) not to support the credit of Nundcomar by any allegation against Mr. Hastings respecting his condemnation or execution; but I am not at all limited from endeavoring to support his credit against Mr. Hastings's charges of other forgeries, and from showing you, what I hope to show you clearly in a few words, that Nundcomar cannot be presumed guilty of forgery with more probability than Mr. Hastings is guilty of bringing forward a light and dangerous (for I use no other words than a light and dangerous) charge of forgery, when it serves his purpose. Mr. Hastings charges Nundcomar with two other forgeries. "These two forgeries," he says, "are facts recorded in the very Proceedings which my accuser partially quotes, proving this man to have been guilty of a most flagrant forgery of a letter from Munny Begum, and of a letter from the Nabob Yeteram ul Dowlah"; and therefore he infers malice in those who impute anything improper to him, knowing that the proof stood so. Here he asserts that there are records before the House of Commons, and on the Company's Proceedings and Consultations, proving Nundcomar to have been guilty of these two forgeries. Turn over the next page of his printed defence, and you find a very extraordinary thing. You would have imagined that this forgery of a letter from Munny Begum, which, he says, is recognized and proved on the Journals, was a forgery charged by Munny Begum herself, or by somebody on her part, or some person concerned in this business. There is no other charge of it whatever, but the charge of Warren Hastings himself. He wants you to discredit a man for forgery upon no evidence under heaven but that of his own, who thinks proper, without any sort of authority, without any sort of reference, without any sort of collateral evidence, to charge a man with that very direct forgery. "You are," he says, "well informed of the reasons which first induced me to give any share of my confidence to Nundcomar, with whose character I was acquainted by an experience of many years. The means which he himself took to acquire it were peculiar to himself. He sent a messenger to me at Madras, on the first news of my appointment to this Presidency, with pretended letters from Munny Begum and the Nabob Yeteram ul Dowlah, the brother of the Nabob Jaffier Ali Khan, filled with bitter invectives against Mahomed Reza Khan, and of as warm recommendations, as I recollect, of Nundcomar. I have been since informed by the Begum that the letter which bore her seal was a complete forgery, and that she was totally unacquainted with the use which had been made of her name till I informed her of it. Juggut Chund, Nundcomar's son-in-law, was sent to her expressly to entreat her not to divulge it. Mr. Middleton, whom she