Mr. Hastings by E.V. Lucas — Read

Had it not been for the trenchant pen of his cousin, Anthony Ashley Cooper, the first Lord Shaftesbury, we should know nothing of Mr. Hastings; but as it happens, a portrait of Mr. Hastings being painted, the Earl was amused to pit his pen against the brush of the artist and append the result to the picture. So that Mr. Hastings used to hang on the wall at Wimborne St. Giles's, near Cranbourn, in Dorset (one of the Shaftesbury seats), doubly limned. Where he is to-day I know not; but the Earl's words remain and are accessible. I take them in the form which follows from the "Connoisseur" for Thursday, 14 August, 1755, and I may in passing say that in turning over the leaves of this leisurely little breakfast-table companion it was not a little disquieting to think what good papers they had in London one hundred and fifty-six years ago, before the days of amalgamation.

As to the portrait of Mr. Hastings, I have seen an engraving of it in one of Hutchins's Dorsetshire books, and it is a crude enough thing -- a little odd old man, with a pointed beard, sharp eyes, and a long staff in his right hand -- not so much a patriarch's staff as a surveyor's pole. Nothing in it to suggest that he loved spaniels, for example, or knew the best thing to do with a disused pulpit. Yet he did.