of their graves, and vilifies them with slanderous aspersions. My Lords, the ancestor of Sujah Dowlah was a great prince,--certainly a subordinate prince, because he was a servant of the Great Mogul, who was well called King of Kings, for he had in his service persons of high degree. He was born in Persia; but was not, as is falsely said, _the more infamous son of an infamous Persian peddler_. Your Lordships are not unacquainted with the state and history of India; you therefore know that Persia has been the nursery of all the Mahometan nobility of India: almost everything in that country which is not of Gentoo origin is of Persian; so much so, that the Persian language is the language of the court, and of every office from the highest to the lowest. Among these noble Persians, the family of the Nabob stands in the highest degree. His father's ancestors were of noble descent, and those of his mother, Munny Begum, more eminently and more illustriously so. This distinguished family, on no better authority than that of the historian Dow, has been slandered by the prisoner at your bar, in order to destroy the character of those whom he had already robbed of their substance. Your Lordships will have observed with disgust how the Dows and the Hastings, and the whole of that tribe, treat their superiors,--in what insolent language they speak of them, and with what pride and indignity they trample upon the first names and the first characters in that devoted country. But supposing it perfectly true that this man was "the more infamous son of an infamous Persian peddler," he had risen to be the secondary sovereign of that country. He had a revenue of three millions six hundred thousand pounds sterling: a vast and immense revenue; equal, perhaps, to the clear revenue of the King of England. He maintained an army of one hundred and twenty thousand men. He had a splendid court; and his country was prosperous and happy. Such was the situation of Sujah Dowlah, the Nabob of Oude, and such the condition of Oude under his government. With his pedigree, I believe, your Lordships will think we have nothing to do in the cause now before us. It has been pressed upon us; and this marks the indecency, the rancor, the insolence, the pride and tyranny which the Dows and the Hastings, and the people of that class and character, are in the habit of exercising over the great in India.