to the sticking-place. The non-arrival of succours from Madras and the opposition of two members in his own Council, caused the Governor of Bombay to hang back at a critical moment from the enterprise which he had been the first to advocate. In his private letters to Impey, Hastings freely expressed his annoyance at the check thus suddenly offered to his own movements and designs. 'Is this ingratitude, envy, stupidity, or pusillanimity,' he asks, 'or all together?' For the moment he was puzzled what to do, beyond writing Hornby a long letter of earnest expostulation. Of ultimate success in so great an enterprise he still felt morally certain, if the people of Bombay ceased to counteract him. But for the present he would pause, so he tells Impey, 'till other lights break in upon me, either from Bombay, or perhaps from England[1].'
Early in July he learned by way of Cairo that war with France had already begun. A month earlier the news of Burgoyne's surrender at Saratoga had reached Calcutta; and Francis made use of that disaster to our arms as a plea for recalling Leslie's column, 'lest it should undergo the same fate.' But Hastings was not so easily frightened into abandoning an enterprise which he had not lightly taken in hand.
His measures for meeting the new danger were boldly conceived and swiftly taken. The Madras Government were told to set about the capture of
- ↑ Gleig, Impey MSS. in British Museum.
