Suffer me to say that among the earliest lessons of my infancy I was taught by precept and example to love and venerate your name. I cannot remember the time when I did not associate with your character the idea of everything great, amiable, and good. Your benevolence was a theme on which my young attention hung with truer worship than courtiers ever pay the throne. Your works of taste, both of the pencil and the pen, were continually offered to my notice as objects of imitation and spurs to exertion. I shall never forget the delight which I experienced when, on producing a translation of a well-known Ode of Horace to my father's criticism, he favoured me with a perusal of your manuscript, and as a high mark of commendation said that he was sure Mr. Hastings would have been pleased with the perusal of my humble essay.
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Henry praises Warren Hastings
Jane Austen's brother Henry writes to Warren Hastings, the former governor-general of Bengal and benefactor of their cousin Eliza. One extract remembers the admiration for Hastings taught at Steventon; the other celebrates his acquittal after impeachment in 1795. These passages show the family's loyalty to a powerful and controversial connection. The biographer quotes separate extracts from Henry's letters.
Extract from Life and Letters (1913), p. 24.
Permit me,
to congratulate my country and myself as an Englishman; for right dear to every Englishman must it be to behold the issue of a combat where forms of judicature threatened to annihilate the essence of justice.
Extract from Life and Letters (1913), p. 79.