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BURKE 
 
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 JOHN MORLEY 
 
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 :N'EW YORK 
 
 HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS 
 
 PBANKLIN SQUARE 
 

 
NOTE. 
 
 The present writer published a study on Burke some 
 twelve years ago. It was almost entirely critical, and in 
 no sense a narrative. The volume now submitted to the 
 readers of this Series is biographical rather than critical, 
 and not more than about a score of pages have been re- 
 produced in it from the earlier book. Three pages (pp. 
 211-213) have been inserted from an article on Burke 
 contributed by me to the new edition of the ^ncyclopcedia 
 Britannica ; and I have to thank Messrs. Black for the 
 great courtesy with which they have allowed me to tran- 
 scribe the passage here. These borrowings from my for- 
 mer self, the reader will perhaps be willing to excuse, on 
 the old Greek principle, that a man may once say a thing 
 as he would have it said, c\q ^e ovk kvli-yETai — he cannot 
 
 say it twice. 
 
 J.M. 
 
BURKE. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 EARLY LIFE, AND FIRST WRITINGS. 
 
 It will soon be a hundred and twenty years since Burke 
 first took Ms seat in the House of Commons, and it is 
 eighty-five years since his voice ceased to be heard there. 
 Since his death, as during his life, opinion as to the place 
 to which he is entitled among the eminent men of his 
 country has touched every extreme. Tories have extolled 
 him as the saviour of Europe. "Whigs have detested him 
 as the destroyer of his party. One undiscriminating pan- 
 egyrist calls him the most profound and comprehensive of 
 political philosophers that has yet existed in the world. 
 Another and more distinguished writer insists that he is a 
 resplendent and far-seeing rhetorician, rather than a deep 
 and subtle thinker. A third tells us that his works can- 
 not be too much our study, if we mean either to. under- 
 stand or to maintain against its various enemies, open and 
 concealed, designing and mistaken, the singular constitu- 
 tion of this fortunate island. A fourth, on the contrary, 
 declares that it would be hard to find a single leading 
 principle or prevailing sentiment in one half of these 
 works, to which something extremely adverse cannot be 
 1* 
 
2 BUKKE. [chap. 
 
 found in the other half. A fifth calls him one of the 
 greatest men, and, Bacon alone excepted, the greatest 
 thinker, who ever devoted himself to the practice of Eng- 
 lish politics. Yet, oddly enough, the author of the fifth 
 verdict will have it that this great man and great think- 
 er was actually out of his mind, when he composed the 
 pieces for which he has been most widely admired and 
 revered. 
 
 A sufficient interval has now passed to allow all the sed- 
 iment of party fanaticism to fall to the bottom. The cir- 
 cumstances of the world have since Burke's time under- 
 gone variation enough to enable us to judge, from many 
 points of view, how far he was the splendid pamphleteer 
 of a faction, and how far he was a contributor to the uni- 
 versal stock of enduring wisdom. Opinion is slowly, but 
 without reaction, settling down to the verdict that Burke 
 is one of the abiding names in our history, not because he 
 either saved Europe or destroyed the Whig party ; but be- 
 cause he added to the permanent considerations of wise 
 political thought, and to the maxims of wise practice in 
 great affairs, and because he imprints himself upon us with 
 a magnificence and elevation of expression, that places him 
 among the highest masters of literature, in one of its high- 
 est and most comraandinoj senses. Those who have ac- 
 quired a love for abstract politics amid the almost mathe- 
 matical closeness and precision of Hobbes, the philosophic 
 calm of Locke or Mill, or even the majestic and solemn 
 fervour of Milton, are revolted by the unrestrained passion 
 and the decorated style of Burke. His passion appears 
 hopelessly fatal to success in the pursuit of Truth, who 
 does not usually reveal herself to followers thus inflamed. 
 His ornate style appears fatal to the cautious and pre- 
 cise method of statement, suitable to matter which is not 
 
I.] EARLY LIFE. 3 
 
 known at all unless it is known distinctly. Yet tlie nat- 
 ural ardour wliich impelled Burke to clothe his judgments 
 in glowing and exaggerated phrases, is one secret of his 
 power over us, because it kindles in those who are capable 
 of that generous infection a respondent interest and sym- 
 pathy. But more than this, the reader is speedily con- 
 scious of the precedence in Biirke of the facts of morality 
 and conduct, of the many interwoven affinities of human 
 affection and historical relation, over the unreal necessi- 
 ties of mere abstract logic. Burke's mind was full of the 
 matter of great truths, copiously enriched from the foun- 
 tains of generous and many-coloured feeling. He thought 
 about life as a whole, with all its infirmities and all its 
 pomps. With none of the mental exclusiveness of the 
 moralist by profession, he fills every page with solemn ref- 
 erence and meaning ; with none of the mechanical bustle 
 of the common politician, he is everywhere conscious of 
 the mastery of laws, institutions, and government over the 
 character and happiness of men. Besides thus diffusing a 
 strong light over the awful tides of human circumstance, 
 Burke has the sacred gift of inspiring men to use a grave 
 diligence in caring for high things, and in making their 
 lives at once rich and austere. Such a part in literature is 
 indeed high. We feel no emotion of revolt when Mackin- 
 tosh speaks of Shakespere and Burke in the same breath, 
 as being both of them above mere talent. And we do not 
 dissent when Macaulay, after reading Burke's works over 
 again, exclaims, " How admirable ! The greatest man since 
 Milton !" 
 
 The precise date of Burke's birth cannot he stated with 
 certainty. All that we can say is that it took place either 
 in 1728 or 1729, and it is possible that we may set it 
 
4 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 down in one or the other year, as we choose to reckon by 
 the old or the new style. The best opinion is that he 
 was born at Dublin on the 12th of January, 1729 (N.S.). 
 His father was a solicitor in good praetice, and is believed 
 to have been descended from some Bourkes of county 
 Limerick, who held a respectable local position in the time 
 of the civil wars. Burke's mother belonged to the Nagle 
 family, which had a strong connexion in the county of 
 Cork ; they had been among the last adherents of James 
 II., and they remained firm Catholics. Mrs. Burke re- 
 mained true to the church of her ancestors, and her only 
 daughter was brought up in the same faith. Edmund 
 Burke and his two brothers, Garret and Richard, were 
 bred in the religion of their father ; but Burke never, in" 
 after -times, lost a large and generous way of thinking 
 about the more ancient creed of his mother and his uncles. 
 In 1741 he was sent to school at Ballitore, a village 
 some thirty miles away from Dublin, where Abraham 
 Shackleton, a Quaker from Yorkshire, had established him- 
 self fifteen years before, and had earned a wide reputation 
 as a successful teacher and a good man. According to 
 Burke, he richly deserved this high character. It was to 
 Abraham Shackleton that he always professed to owe 
 whatever gain had come to him from education. If I am 
 anything, he said many years afterwards, it is the education 
 I had there that has made me so. His master's skill as a 
 teacher did not impress him more than the example which 
 was every day set before him of uprightness and simplici- 
 ty of heart. Thirty years later, when Burke had the news 
 of Shackleton's death (l77l), "1 had a true honour and 
 affection," he wrote, " for that excellent man. I feel 
 something like a satisfaction in the midst of my concern, 
 that I was fortunate enough to have him once under my 
 
I.] EARLY LIFE. . 5 
 
 roof before his departure." No man has ever had a deep- 
 er or more tender reverence than Burke for homely good- 
 ness, simple purity, and all the pieties of life ; it may well 
 be that this natural predisposition of all characters at once 
 so genial and so serious as his, was finally stamped in him 
 by his first schoolmaster. It is true that he was only two 
 years at Ballitore, but two years at that plastic time often 
 build up habits in the mind that all the rest of a life is 
 unable to pull down. 
 
 In 1743 Burke became a student of Trinity College, 
 Dublin, and he remained there until 1748, when he took 
 his Bachelor's degree. These five years do not appear to 
 have been spent in strenuous industry in the beaten paths 
 of academic routine. Like so many other men of great 
 gifts, Burke in his youth was desultory and excursive. He 
 roamed at large over the varied heights that tempt our cu- 
 riosity, as the dawn of intelligence first lights them up one 
 after another with bewitching visions and illusive magic. 
 "All my studies," Burke wrote in 1746, when he was in 
 the midst of them, " have rather proceeded from sallies of 
 passion, than from the preference of sound reason ; and, 
 like all other natural appetites, have been very violent for 
 a season, and very soon cooled, and quite absorbed in the 
 succeeding. I have often thought it a humorous consid- 
 eration to observe and sum up all the madness of this kind 
 I have fallen into this two years past. First, I was greatly 
 taken with natural philosophy ; which, while I should have 
 given my mind to logic, employed me incessantly. This I 
 call lay furor mathematicus. But this worked off as soon 
 as I began to read it in the college, as men by repletion 
 cast off their stomachs all they have eaten. Then I turned 
 back to logic and metaphysics. Here I remained a good 
 while, and with much pleasure, and this was mj furor logi- 
 
6 BUKKE. [chap. 
 
 cus, a disease very common in the days of ignorance, and 
 very uncommon in these enlightened times. Next suc- 
 ceeded the furor historicus, which also had its day, but 
 is now no more, being entirely absorbed in the furor 
 poeticusy 
 
 This is from one of Burke's letters to Richard Shackle- 
 ton, the son of his schoolmaster, with whom he had formed 
 one of those close friendships that fill the life of generous 
 youth, as ambition fills an energetic manhood. Many tears 
 were shed when the two boys parted at Ballitore, and they 
 kept up their intimacy by a steady correspondence. They 
 discuss the everlasting dispute as to the ultimate fate of 
 those who never heard the saving name of Christ. They 
 send one another copies of verses, and Burke prays for 
 Shackleton's judgment on an invocation of his new poem, 
 to beauteous nymphs who haunt the dusky wood, which 
 hangs recumbent o'er the crystal flood. Burke is warned 
 by Shackleton to endeavour to live according to the rules 
 of the Gospel, and he humbly accepts the good advice, 
 with the deprecatory plea that in a town it is difficult to 
 sit down to think seriously : it is easier, he says, to follow 
 the rules of the Gospel in the country, than at Trinity Col- 
 lege, Dublin. In the region of profaner things the two 
 friends canvass the comparative worth of Sallust and of 
 Tully's Epistles. Burke holds for the historian, who has, 
 he thinks, a fine, easy, diversified narrative, mixed with re- 
 flection, moral and political, neither very trite nor obvious, 
 nor out of the way and abstract, and this is the true beauty 
 of historical observation. 
 
 Some pages of verse describe to Shackleton how his 
 friend passes the day, but the reader will perhaps be con- 
 tent to learn in humbler prose that Burke rose with the 
 dawn, and strode forth into the country through fragrant 
 
I.] EARLY LIFE. 1 
 
 gardens and the pride of May, until want of breakfast 
 drove liim back unwillingly to the town, where amid lect- 
 ures and books his heart incessantly turned to the river 
 and the fir woods of Ballitore. In the evening he again 
 turned his back on the city, taking his way " where Liffey 
 rolls her dead dogs to the sea," along to the wall on the 
 shore, whence he delighted to see the sun sink into the 
 waters, gilding ocean, ships, and city as it vanished. 
 Alas, it was beneath the dignity of verse to tell us what 
 we should most gladly have known. For, 
 
 •' The muse nor can, nor will declare, 
 What is my work, and what my studies there." 
 
 What serious nourishment Burke was laying in for his 
 understanding, we cannot learn from any other source. 
 He describes himself as spending three hours almost every 
 day in the public library. " The best way in the world," 
 he adds oddly enough, " of killing thought." I have 
 read some history, he says, and among other pieces of 
 history, " I am endeavouring to get a little into the ac- 
 counts of this, our own poor country " — a pathetic ex- 
 pression, which represents Burke's perpetual mood, as long 
 as he lived, of affectionate pity for his native land. Of 
 the eminent Irishmen whose names adorn the annals of 
 Trinity College in the eighteenth century, Burke was only 
 contemporary at the University with one, the luckless 
 •sizar who in the fulness of time wrote the Vicar of Wake- 
 field. There is no evidence that at this time he and Gold- 
 smith were acquainted with one another. Flood had gone 
 to Oxford some time before. The one or two companions 
 whom Burke mentions in his letters are only shadows of 
 names. The mighty Swift died in 1745, but there is 
 nothing of Burke's upon the event. In the same year 
 
8 BUEKE. [chap. 
 
 came the Pretender's invasion, and Burke spoke of those 
 who had taken part in it in the same generous spirit 
 that he always showed to the partisans of lost historic 
 causes. 
 
 Of his own family Burke says little, save that in 1'746 
 his mother had a dangerous illness. In all my life, he 
 writes to his friend, I never found so heavy a grief, nor 
 really did I well know what it was before. Burke's father 
 is said to have been a man of angry and irritable temper, 
 and their disagreements were frequent. This unhappy 
 circumstance made the time for parting not unwelcome. 
 In 1747 Burke's name had been entered at the Middle 
 Temple, and after taking his degree, he prepared to go 
 to England to pursue the ordinary course of a lawyer's 
 studies. He arrived in London in the early part of 
 1750. 
 
 A period of nine years followed, in which the circum- 
 stances of Burke's life are enveloped in nearly complete 
 obscurity. He seems to have kept his terms in the regu- 
 lar way at the Temple, and from the mastery of legal prin- 
 ciples and methods which he afterwards showed in some 
 important transactions, we might infer that he did more 
 to qualify himself for practice than merely dine in the 
 hall of his Inn. For law, alike as a profession and an in- 
 strument of mental discipline, he had always the profound 
 respect that it so amply deserves, though he saw that it 
 was not without drawbacks of its own. The law, he 
 said, in his fine description of George Grenville, in words 
 that all who think about schemes of education ought to 
 ponder, " is, in my opinion, one of the first and noblest 
 of human sciences ; a science which does more to quicken 
 and invigorate the understanding than all the other kinds 
 of learning put together ; but it is not apt, except in 
 
I.] EARLY LIFE. 9 
 
 persons very happily born, to open and to liberalize the 
 mind exactly in the same proportion."^ Burke was 
 never called to the bar, and the circumstance that, about 
 the time when he ought to have been looking for his 
 first guinea, he published a couple of books which had 
 as little as possible to do with either law or equity, is a 
 tolerably sure sign that he had followed the same desul- 
 tory courses at the Temple as heTiad followed at Trinity 
 College. We have only to tell over again a very old 
 story. The vague attractions of literature prevailed over 
 the duty of taking up a serious profession. His father, 
 who had set his heart on having a son in the rank of a 
 barrister, was first suspicious, then extremely indignant, 
 and at last he withdrew his son's allowance, or else re- 
 duced it so low that the recipient could not possibly liv^e 
 upon it. This catastrophe took place some time in 1755 
 — a year of note in the history of Utei'ature, as the date 
 of the publication of Johnson's Dictionary. It was upon 
 literature, the most seductive, the most deceiving, the most 
 dangerous of professions, that Burke, like so many hun- 
 dreds of smaller men before and since, now threw himself 
 for a livelihood. 
 
 Of the details of the struggle we know very little. 
 Burke was not fond in after-life of talking about his ear- 
 lier days, not because he had any false shame about the 
 straits and hard shifts of youthful neediness, but because 
 he was endowed with a certain inborn stateliness of nature, 
 which made him unwilling to waste thoughts on the less 
 dignified parts of life. This is no unqualified virtue, and 
 Burke might have escaped some wearisome frets and em- 
 barrassments in his existence, if he had been capable of 
 letting the detail of the day lie more heavily upon him. 
 ' American Taxation. 
 
10 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 So far as it goes, however, it is a sign of mental health 
 that a man should he ahle to cast hehind him the barren 
 memories of bye -gone squalor. We may be sure that 
 whatever were the external ordeals of his apprenticeship 
 in the slippery craft of the literary adventurer, Burke nev- 
 er failed in keeping for his constant companions generous 
 ambitions and high thoughts. He appears to have fre- 
 quented the debating clubs in Fleet Street and the Piazza 
 of Covent Garden, and he showed the common taste of 
 his time for the theatre. He was much of a wanderer, 
 partly from the natural desire of restless youth to see the 
 world, and partly because his health was weak. In after- 
 life he was a man of great strength, capable not only of 
 bearing the strain of prolonged application to books and 
 papers in the solitude of his library, but of bearing it at 
 the same time with the distracting combination of active 
 business among men. At the date of which we are speak- 
 ino-, he used to seek a milder air at Bristol, or in Mon- 
 mouthshire, or Wiltshire. He passed the summer in re- 
 tired country villages, reading and writing with desultory 
 industry, in company with William Burke, a namesake but 
 perhaps no kinsman. It would be interesting to know 
 the plan and scope of his studies. We are practically re- 
 duced to conjecture. In a letter of counsel to his son in 
 after-years, he gave him a weighty piece of advice, which 
 is pretty plainly the key to the reality and fruitf ulness of 
 his own knowledge. ''^Reading ^'' he said, '•''and much 
 reading is good. But the power of diversifying the matter 
 infinitely in your oion mind, and of applying it to every 
 occasion that arises, is far better; so don't suppress the vi- 
 vida vis." We have no more of Burke's doings than ob- 
 scure and tantalizing glimpses, tantalizing, because he was 
 then at the age when character usually either fritters itself 
 
I.] ' EAKLY LIFE. 11 
 
 away, or grows strong on the inward sustenance of solid 
 and resolute aspirations. Writing from Battersea to his 
 old comrade, Shackleton, in 1757, he begins with an apol- 
 ogy for a long silence which seems to have continued from 
 months to years. " I have broken all rules ; I have neg- 
 lected all decorums ; everything except that I have never 
 forgot a friend, whose good head and heart have made me 
 esteem and love him. What appearance there may have 
 been of neglect, arises from my manner of life ; chequered 
 with various designs ; sometimes in London, sometimes in 
 remote parts of the country ; sometimes in France, and 
 shortly, please God, to be in America." 
 
 One of the hundred inscrutable rumours that hovered 
 about Burke's name was, that he at one time actually did 
 visit America. This was just as untrue as that he -became 
 a convert to the Catholic faith ; or that he was the lover 
 of Peg Woffington ; or that he contested Adam Smith's 
 chair of moral philosophy at Glasgow along with Hume, 
 and that both Burke and Hume were rejected in favour 
 of some fortunate Mr. James Clow. They are all alike 
 unfounded. But the same letter informs Shackleton of 
 a circumstance more real and more important than any 
 of these, though its details are only doubtfully known. 
 Burke had married — when and where, we cannot tell. 
 Probably the marriage took place in the winter of 1756. 
 His wife was the daughter of Dr. Nugent, an Irish physi- 
 cian once settled at Bath. One story is that Burke con- 
 sulted him in one of his visits to the west of England, and 
 fell in love with his daughter. Another version makes 
 Burke consult him after Dr. Nugent had removed to Lon- 
 don ; and tells how the kindly physician, considering that 
 the noise and bustle of chambers over a shop must hinder 
 his patient's recovery, offered him rooms in his own house. 
 
12 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 However these things may have been, all the evidence 
 shows Burke to have been fortunate in the choice or acci- 
 dent that bestowed upon him his wife. Mrs. Burke, like 
 her father, was, up to the time of her marriage, a Catholic. 
 Good judges belonging to her own sex describe her as 
 gentle, quiet, soft in her manners, and well-bred. She had 
 the qualities which best fitted and disposed her to soothe 
 the vehemence and irritability of her companion. Though 
 she afterwards conformed to the religion of her husband, 
 it was no insignificant coincidence that in two of the dear- 
 est relations of his life the atmosphere of Catholicism was 
 thus poured round the great preacher of the crusade 
 against the Revolution. 
 
 About the time of his marriage, Burke made his first 
 appearance as an author. It was in 1756 that he pub- 
 lished A Vindication of Natural Society, and the more 
 important essay, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin 
 of our Ideas on the Sublime and Beautiful. The latter of 
 them had certainly been written a long time before, and 
 there is even a traditional legend that Burke wrote it when 
 he was only nineteen years old. Both of these perform- 
 ances have in different degrees a historic meaning, but 
 neither of them would have survived to our own day un- 
 less they had been associated with a name of power. A 
 few words will suffice to do justice to them here. And 
 first as to the Vindication of Natural Society. Its alterna- 
 tive title was, A View of the Miseries and Uvils arising to 
 Mankind from every Species of Civil Society, in a Letter 
 
 to Lord , hy a late Nohle Writer. Bolingbroke had 
 
 died in 1751, and in 1754 his philosophical works were 
 posthumously given to the world by David Mallet, Dr. 
 Johnson's beggarly Scotchman, to whom Bolingbroke had 
 left half-a-crown in his will, for firing off a blunderbuss 
 
I.] FIRST WRITINGS. 13 
 
 whicli lie was afraid to fire off himself. The world of let- 
 ters had been keenly excited about Bolingbroke. His busy 
 and chequered career, his friendship with the great wits of 
 the previous generation, his splendid style, his bold opin- 
 ions, made him a dazzling figure. This was the late Noble 
 Writer whose opinions Burke intended to ridicule, by re- 
 ducing them to an absurdity in an exaggeration of Boling- 
 broke's own manner. As it happened, the public did not 
 readily perceive either the exaggeration in the manner, or 
 the satire in the matter. Excellent judges of style made 
 sure that the writing was really Bolingbroke's, and serious 
 critics of philosophy never doubted that the writer, who- 
 ever he was, meant all that he said. We can hardly 
 help agreeing with Godwin, when he says that in Burke's 
 treatise the evils of existing political institutions, which 
 had been described by Locke, are set forth more at large, 
 with incomparable force of reasoning and lustre of elo- 
 quence, though the declared intention of the writer was to 
 show that such evils ought to be considered merely trivial. 
 Years afterwards, Boswell asked Johnson whether an im- 
 prudent publication by a certain friend of his at an early 
 period of his life, would be likely to hurt him ? " No, 
 sir," replied the sage ; " not much ; it might perhaps be 
 mentioned at an election." It is significant that in 1765, 
 when Burke saw his chance of a seat in Parliament, he 
 thought it worth while to print a second edition of his 
 Vindication, with a preface to assure his readers that the 
 design of it was ironical. It has been remarked as a very 
 extraordinary circumstance that an author who had the 
 greatest fame of any man of his day as the master of a 
 superb style, for this was indeed Bolingbroke's position, 
 should have been imitated to such perfection by a mere 
 novice, that accomplished critics like Chesterfield and War- 
 
14 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 burton should have mistaken the copy for a first-rate orig- 
 inal. It is, however, to be remembered that the very bold- 
 ness and sweeping rapidity of Bolingbroke's prose render- 
 ed it more fit for imitation, than if its merits had been 
 those of delicacy or subtlety ; and we must remember that 
 the imitator was no pygmy, but himself one of the giants. 
 What is certain is that the study of Bolingbroke which 
 preceded this excellent imitation left a permanent mark, 
 and traces of Bolingbroke were never effaced from the 
 style of Burke. 
 
 The point of the Vindication is simple enough. It is 
 to show that the same instruments which Bolingbroke had 
 employed in favour of natural against revealed religion, - 
 could be employed with equal success in favour of natural 
 as against, what Burke calls, artificial society. " Show 
 me," cries the writer, " an absurdity in religion, and I will 
 undertake to show you a hundred for one in political laws 
 and institutions. ... If , after all, you should confess all 
 these things yet plead the necessity of political institutions, 
 weak and wicked as they are, I can argue with equal, per- 
 haps superior force, concerning the necessity of artificial re- 
 ligion ; and every step you advance in your argument, you 
 add a strength to mine. So that, if we are resolved to sub- 
 mit our reason and our liberty to civil usurpation, we have 
 nothing to do but to conform as quietly as we can to the 
 vulgar notions which are connected with this, and take up 
 the theology of the vulgar as well as their politics. But 
 if we think this necessity rather imaginary than real, we 
 should renounce their dreams of society, together with 
 their visions of religion, and vindicate ourselves into per- 
 fect liberty." 
 
 The most interesting fact about this spirited perform- 
 ance is, that it is a satirical literary handling of the great 
 
I.] FIRST WRITINGS. 15 
 
 proposition whicli Burke enforced, witli all the thunder 
 and lurid effulgence of his most passionate rhetoric, five- 
 and-thirty years later. This proposition is that the world 
 would fall into ruin, " if the practice of all moral duties, 
 and the foundations of society, rested upon having their 
 reasons made clear and demonstrative to every individual." 
 The satire is intended for an illustration of what with 
 a Burke was the cardinal truth for men, namely, that if you 
 f encourage every individual to let the imagination loose 
 I upon all subjects, without any restraint from a sense of 
 \ his own weakness, and his subordinate rank in the long 
 / scheme of things, then tliere is nothing of all that the 
 opinion of ages has agreed to regard as excellent and ven- 
 erable, whicli would not be exposed to destruction at the 
 hands of rationalistic criticism. This was Burke's most 
 
 (fundamental and unswerving conviction from the first 
 piece that he wrote down to the last, and down to the last 
 hour of his existence. 
 
 It is a coincidence worth noticing that only two years 
 before the appearance of the Vindication^ Eousseau had 
 published the second of the two memorable Discourses in 
 which he insisted with serious eloquence on that which 
 Burke treats as a triumph of irony. He believed, and 
 many thousands of Frenchmen came to a speculative agree- 
 ment with him, that artificial society had marked a de- 
 cline in the felicity of man, and there are passages in the 
 Discourse in which he demonstrates this, that are easily 
 interchangeable with passages in the Vindication. Who 
 would undertake to tell us from internal evidence whether 
 the following page, with its sombre glow, is an extract 
 from Burke, or an extract from the book which Rousseau 
 begins by the sentence that man is born free, yet is he 
 everywhere in chains ? 
 
16 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 There are in Great Britain upwards of a hundred thousand people 
 employed in lead, tin, iron, copper, and coal mines ; these unhappy 
 wretches scarce ever see the light of the sun ; they are buried in the 
 bowels of the earth ; there they work at a severe and dismal task, 
 without the least prospect of being delivered from it ; they subsist 
 upon the coarsest and worst sort of fare ; they have their health 
 miserably impaired, and their lives cut short, by being perpetually 
 confined in the close vapour of these malignant minerals. A hundred 
 thousand more at least are tortured without remission by the suffo- 
 cating smoke, intense fires, and constant drudgery, necessary in refin- 
 ing and managing the products of those mines. If any man inform- 
 ed us that two hundred thousand innocent persons were condemned 
 to so intolerable slavery, how should we pity the unhappy sufferers, 
 and how great would be our just indignation against those who in- 
 flicted so cruel and ignominious a punishment ! . . . But this number, 
 considerable as it is, and the slavery, with all its baseness and hor- 
 ror, which we have at home, is nothing to what the rest of the world 
 affords of the same nature. Millions daily bathed in the poisonous 
 damps and destructive effluvia of lead, silver, copper, and arsenic, to 
 say nothing of those other employments, those stations of wretched- 
 ness and contempt, in which civil society has placed the numerous 
 enfatis perdus of her army. Would any rational man submit to one 
 of the most tolerable of these drudgeries, for all the artificial enjoy- 
 ments which policy has made to result from them ? . . . Indeed, the 
 blindness of one part of mankind co-operating with the frenzy and 
 villany of the other, has been the real builder of this respectable 
 fabric of political society: and as the blindness of mankind has 
 caused their slavery, in return their state of slavery is made a pre- 
 tence for continuing them in a state of blindness ; for the politician 
 will tell you gravely, that their life of servitude disqualifies the 
 greater part of the race of man for a search of truth, and supplies 
 them with no other than mean and insufficient ideas. This is but 
 too true ; and this is one of the reasons for which I blame such in- 
 stitutions. 
 
 From the very beginning, therefore, Burte was drawn 
 to the deepest of all the currents in the thought of the 
 eighteenth century. Johnson and Goldsmith continued 
 
I.] FIRST WRITINGS. 11 
 
 the traditions of social and polite literature which had been 
 established by the Queen Anne men. Warburton and a 
 whole host of apologists carried on the battle against de- 
 ism and infidelity. Hume, after furnishing the arsenal of 
 scepticism with a new array of deadlier engines and more 
 abundant ammunition, had betaken himself placidly to the 
 composition of history. What is remarkable in Burke's 
 first performance is his discernment of the important fact, 
 that behind the intellectual disturbances in the sphere of 
 philosophy, and the noisier agitations in the sphere of the- 
 ology, there silently stalked a force that might shake the 
 whole fabric of civil society itself. In France, as all stu- 
 dents of its speculative history are agreed, there came a 
 time in the eighteenth century when theological contro- 
 versy was turned into political controversy. Innovators 
 left the question about the truth of Christianity, and bus- 
 ied themselves with questions about the ends and means 
 of governments. The appearance of Burke's Vindication 
 of Natural Society coincides in time with the beginning 
 of this important transformation. Burke foresaw from 
 the first what, if rationalism were allowed to run an unim- 
 peded course, would be the really great business of the sec- 
 ond half of his century. 
 
 If in his first book Burke showed how alive he was to 
 the profound movement of the time, in the second he dealt 
 with one of the most serious of its more superficial inter- 
 ests. The essay on the Sublime and Beautiful fell in with 
 a set of topics, on which the curiosity of the better minds 
 of the age, alike in France, England, and Germany, was 
 fully stirred. In England the essay has been ordinarily 
 slighted; it has perhaps been overshadowed by its author's 
 fame in weightier matters. The nearest approach to a full 
 and serious treatment of its main positions is to be found 
 2 
 
18 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 in Dugald Stewart's lectures. The great rhetorical art-critic 
 of our own day refers to it in words of disparagement, and 
 in truth it has none of the flummery of modern criticism. 
 It is a piece of hard thinking, and it has the distinction 
 of having interested and stimulated Lessing, the author of 
 Laokoon (1766), by far the most definitely valuable of all 
 the contributions to aesthetic thought in an age which 
 was not poor in them. Lessing was so struck with the 
 Inquiry that he set about a translation of it, and the cor- 
 respondence between him and Moses Mendelssohn on the 
 questions which Burke had raised, contains the germs of 
 the doctrine as to poetry and painting which Laokoon af- 
 terwards made so famous. Its influence on Lessing and on 
 Kant was such as to justify the German historian of the 
 literature of the century in bestowing on it the coveted 
 epithet of epoch-making. 
 
 The book is full of crudities. We feel the worse side 
 of the eighteenth century when Burke tells us that a thirst 
 for Variety in architecture is sure to leave very little true 
 taste; or that an air of robustness and strength is very 
 prejudicial to beauty ; or that sad fuscous colours are in- 
 dispensable for sublimity. Many of the sections, again, 
 are little more than expanded definitions from the diction- 
 ary. Any tiro may now be shocked at such a proposition 
 as that beaiity acts by relaxing the solids of the whole sys- 
 tem. But at least one signal merit remains to the Inquiry. 
 It was a vigorous enlargement of the principle, which Ad- 
 dison had not long before timidly illustrated, that critics 
 of art seek its principles in the wrong place, so long as 
 they limit their search to poems, pictures, engravings, stat- 
 ues, and buildings, instead of first arranging the sentiments 
 and faculties in man to which art makes its appeal. Ad- 
 dison's treatment was slight, and merely literary ; Burke 
 
I.] FIRST WRITINGS. 19 
 
 dealt boldly with his subject on the base of the most sci- 
 entific psychology that was then within his reach. To ap- 
 proach it on the psychological side at all, was to make a 
 distinct and remarkable advance in the method of the in- 
 quiry which he had taken in hand. 
 
CHAPTER 11. 
 
 IN IRELAND PARLIAMENT BEACONSFIELD. 
 
 Burke was thirty years old before he approached even the 
 threshold of the arena in which he was destined to be so 
 great a figure. He had made a mark in literature, and it 
 was to literature rather than to public affairs that his am- 
 bition turned. He had naturally become acquainted with 
 the brother authors who haunted the coffee-houses in Fleet ' 
 Street ; and Burke, along with his father-in-law, Dr. Nu- 
 gent, was one of the first members of the immortal club 
 where Johnson did conversational battle with all comers. 
 We shall, in a later chapter, have something to say on 
 Burke's friendships with the followers of his first profes- 
 sion, and on the active sympathy with which he helped 
 those who were struggling into authorship. Meanwhile, 
 the fragments that remain of his own attempts in this 
 direction are no considerable contributions. His Hints 
 for an Essay on the Drama are jejune and infertile, when 
 compared with the vigorous and original thought of Dide- 
 rot and Lessing at about the same period. He wrote an 
 Account of the European Settlements in America. His 
 Abridgment of the History of England comes down no 
 further than to the reign of John. A much more impor- 
 tant undertaking than his history of the past, was his de- 
 sign for a yearly chronicle of the present. The Annual 
 Register began to appear in 1759. Dodsley, the bookseller 
 
CHAP, n.] IRELAND. 21 
 
 of Pall Mall, provided the sinews of war, and be gave Burke 
 a hundred pounds a year for Ms survey of the great events 
 which were then passing in the world. The scheme was 
 probably born of the circumstances of the hour, for this 
 was the climax of the Seven Years' War. The clang of 
 arms was heard in every quarter of the globe, and in East 
 and West new lands were being brought under the domin- 
 ion of Great Britain. 
 
 In this exciting crisis of national affairs, Burke began to 
 be acquainted with public men. In 1759 he was intro- 
 duced, probably by Lord Charlemont, to William Gerard 
 Hamilton, who only survives in our memories by his nick- 
 name of Single -speech. As a matter of fact, he made 
 many speeches in Parliament, and some good ones, but 
 none so good as the first, delivered in a debate in 1755, in 
 which Pitt, Fox, Grenville, and Murray all took part, and 
 were all outshone by the new luminary. But the new 
 luminary never shone again with its first brilliance. He 
 sought Burke out on the strength of the success of the 
 Vmd.ication of Natural Society^ and he seems to have had 
 a taste for good company. Horace Walpole describes a 
 dinner at his house in the summer of 1761. " There were 
 Garrick," he says, " and a young Mr. Burke, who wrote a 
 book in the style of Lord Bolingbroke, that is much ad- 
 mired. He is a sensible man, but has not worn off his 
 authorism yet, and thinks there is nothing so charming as 
 writers, and to be one. He will know better one of these 
 days." The prophecy came true in time, but it was Burke's 
 passion for authorism that eventually led to a rupture with 
 his first patron. Hamilton was a man of ability, but self- 
 ish and unreasonable. Dr. Leland afterwards described 
 him compendiously as a sullen, vain, proud, selfish, canker- 
 hearted, envious reptile. 
 
22 BLKKE. [chap. 
 
 In 1761 Hamilton went to Ireland as secretary to Lord 
 Halifax, and Burke accompanied him in some indefinite 
 capacity. " The absenteeism of her men of genius," an 
 eminent historian has said, " was a worse wrong to Ireland 
 than the absenteeism of her landlords. If Edmund Burke 
 had remained in the country where Providence had placed 
 him, he might have changed the current of its history."^ 
 It is at least to be said that Burke was never so absorbed 
 in other affairs, as to forget the peculiar interests of his 
 native land. We have his own word, and his career does 
 not belie it, that in the elation with which he was filled on 
 being elected a member of Parliament, what was first and 
 uppermost in his thoughts was the hope of being some- 
 what useful to the place of his birth and education ; and 
 to the last he had in it " a dearness of instinct more than 
 he could justify to reason." In fact the affairs of Ireland 
 had a most important part in Burke's life at one or two 
 critical moments, and this is as convenient a place as we 
 are likely to find for describing in a few words what were 
 the issues. The brief space can hardly be grudged in an 
 account of a great political writer, for Ireland has fur- 
 nished the chief ordeal, test, and standard of English 
 statesmen. 
 
 Ireland in the middle of the eighteenth century was to 
 England just what the American colonies would have been, 
 if they had contained, besides the European settlers, more 
 than twice their number of unenslaved negroes. After the 
 suppression of the great rebellion of Tyrconnel by William 
 of Orange, nearly the whole of the land was confiscated, 
 the peasants were made beggars and outlaws, the Penal 
 Laws against the Catholics were enacted and enforced, and 
 the grand reign of Protestant Ascendancy began in all its 
 * Froude's Ireland, ii. 214. 
 
il] IRELAND. 23 
 
 vileness and completeness. The Protestants and landlords 
 were supreme ; the peasants and the Catholics were pros- 
 trate in despair. The Revolution brought about in Ireland 
 just the reverse of what it effected in England. Here it 
 delivered the body of the nation from the attempted 
 supremacy of a small sect. There it made a small sect 
 supreme over the body of the nation. " It was, to say the 
 truth,-' Burke wrote, " not a revolution but a conquest," 
 and the policy of conquest was treated as the just and 
 normal system of government. The last conquest of Eng- 
 land was in the eleventh century. The last conquest of 
 Ireland was at the very end of the seventeenth. 
 
 Sixty years after these events, when Burke revisited Ire- 
 land, some important changes had taken place. The Eng- 
 lish settlers of the beginning of the century had formed 
 an Irish interest. They had become Anglo-Irish, just as 
 the colonists still further west had formed a colonial inter- 
 est and become Anglo-American. The same conduct on the 
 part of the mother country promoted the growth of these 
 hostile interests in both cases. The commercial policy 
 pursued by England towards America was identical with 
 that pursued towards Ireland. The industry of the Anglo- 
 Irish traders was restricted, their commerce and even their 
 production fettered, their prosperity checked, for the bene- 
 fit of the merchants of Manchester and Bristol. Crescit 
 Roma Albce minis. "The bulk of the people," said Stone, 
 the Primate, " are not regularly either lodged, clothed, or 
 fed ; and those things which in England are called neces- 
 saries of life, are to us only accidents, and we can, and in 
 many places do, subsist without them." On the other 
 hand, the peasantry had gradually taken heart to resent 
 their spoliation and attempted extirpation, and in 1761 
 their misery under the exactions of landlords and a church 
 
24 BUKKE. - [chap. 
 
 which tried to spread Christianity by the brotherly agency 
 of the tithe-proctor, gave birth to Whiteboyism — a terrible 
 spectre, which, under various names and with various mod- 
 ifications, has ridden Ireland down to our own time. 
 
 Burke saw the Protestant traders of the dependency the 
 victims of the colonial and commercial system ; the Catho- 
 lic land-owners legally dispossessed by the operation of the 
 penal laws ; the Catholic peasantry deeply penetrated with 
 an insurgent and vindictive spirit; and the imperial gov- 
 ernment standing very much aloof, and leaving the coun- 
 try to the tender mercies of the Undertakers and some 
 Protestant churchmen. The Anglo-Irish were bitterly dis- 
 contented with the mother country ; and the Catholic na- 
 tive Irish were regarded by their Protestant oppressors 
 with exactly that combination of intense contempt and 
 loathing, and intense rage and terror, which their American 
 counterpart would have divided between the Negro and 
 the Eed Indian. To the Anglo-Irish the native peasant 
 was as odious as the first, and as terrible as the second. 
 Even at the close of the century Burke could declare that 
 the various descriptions of the people were kept as much 
 apart, as if they were not only separate nations, but sep- 
 arate species. There were thousands, he says, who had 
 never talked to a Eoman Catholic in their whole lives, un- 
 less they happened to talk to a gardener's workman, or 
 some other labourer of the second or third order, while a 
 little time before this they were so averse to have them 
 near their persons, that they would not employ even those 
 who could never find their way beyond the stables. Ches- 
 terfield, a thoroughly impartial and just observer, said in 
 1764 that the poor people in Ireland were used worse than 
 negroes by their masters and the middlemen. We should 
 never forget that in the transactions with the English gov- 
 
n.] IRELAND. 25 
 
 eminent during tlie eigliteenth century, the people con- 
 cerned were not the Irish, but the Anglo-Irish, the colonists 
 of 1691. They were an aristocracy, as Adam Smith said 
 of them, not founded in the natural and respectable dis- 
 tinctions of birth and fortune, but in the most odious of 
 all distinctions, those of religious and political prejudices 
 — distinctions which, more than any other, animate both 
 the insolence of the oppressors, and the hatred and indig- 
 nation of the oppressed. 
 
 The directions in which Irish improvement would move, 
 were clear from the middle of the century to men with 
 much less foresight than Burke had. The removal of all 
 commercial restrictions, either by Independence or Union, 
 on the one hand ; and the gradual emancipation of the 
 Catholics, on the other ; were the two processes to which 
 every consideration of good government manifestly point- 
 ed. The first proved a much shorter and simpler process 
 than the second. To the first the only obstacle was the 
 blindness and selfishness of the English merchants. The 
 second had to overcome the virulent opposition of the ty- 
 rannical Protestant faction in Ireland, and the disgrace- 
 ful but deep-rooted antipathies of the English nation. 
 The history of the relation between the mother country 
 and her dependency during Burke's life, may be charac- 
 terized as a commercial and legislative struggle between 
 the imperial government and the Anglo-Irish interest, in 
 which each side for its own convenience, as the turn served, 
 drew support from the Catholic majority. 
 
 A Whiteboy outbreak, attended by the usual circum- 
 stances of disorder and violence, took place while Burke 
 was in Ireland. It suited the interests of faction to repre- 
 sent these commotions as the symptoms of a deliberate 
 rebellion. The malcontents were represented as carrying 
 2* 
 
26 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 on treasonable correspondence, sometimes with Spain and 
 sometimes with France; they were accused of receiving 
 money and arms from their foreign sympathizers, and of 
 aiming at throwing off the English rule. ^ Burke says that 
 he had means and the desire of informino; himself to the 
 bottom upon the matter, and he came strongly to the con- 
 clusion that this was not a true view of what had happen- 
 ed. What had happened was due, he thought, to no plot, 
 but to superficial and fortuitous circumstances. He con- 
 sequently did not shrink from describing it as criminal, 
 that the king's Catholic subjects in Ireland should have 
 been subjected, on no good grounds, to harassing persecu- 
 tion, and that numbers of them should have been ruined 
 in fortune, imprisoned, tried, and capitally executed for a 
 rebellion which was no rebellion at all. The episode is 
 only important as illustrating the strong and manly tem- 
 per in which Burke, unlike too many of his countrymen 
 with fortunes to make by English favour, uniformly con- 
 sidered the circumstances of his country. It was not un- 
 til a later time that he had an opportunity of acting con- 
 spicuously on her behalf, but whatever influence he came 
 to acquire with his party was unflinchingly used against 
 the cruelty of English prejudice. 
 
 Burke appears to have remained in Ireland for two years 
 (1761-3). In 1763 Hamilton, who had found him an 
 invaluable auxiliary, procured for him, principally with 
 the aid of the Primate Stone, a pension of three hundred 
 pounds a year from the Irish Treasury. In thanking him 
 for this service, Burke proceeded to bargain that the obli- 
 gation should not bind him to give to his patron the whole 
 of his time. He insisted on being left with a discreet lib- 
 erty to continue a little work which he had as a rent- 
 charge upon his thoughts. Whatever advantages he had 
 
II.] SEPARATION FROM HAMILTON. 27 
 
 acquired, he says, had been due to literary reputation, and 
 he could only hope for a continuance of such advantages 
 on condition of doing something to keep the same reputa- 
 tion alive. What this literary design was we do not know 
 with certainty. It is believed to have been a history of 
 England, of which, as I have said, a fragment remains. 
 Whatever the work may have been, it was an offence to 
 Hamilton. With an irrational stubbornness that may well 
 astound us when we think of the noble genius that he thus 
 wished to confine to paltry personal duties, he persisted 
 that Burke should bind himself to his service for life, and 
 to the exclusion of other interests. " To circumscribe my 
 hopes," cried Burke, " to give up even the possibility of 
 liberty, to annihilate myself for ever!" He threw up the 
 pension, which he had held for two years, and declined all 
 further connexion with Hamilton, whom he roundly de- 
 scribed as an infamous scoundrel. " Six of the best years 
 of my life he took me from every pursuit of my literary 
 reputation, or of improvement of my fortune. ... In all 
 this time you may easily conceive how much I felt at see- 
 ing myself left behind by almost all of my contemporaries. 
 There never was a season more favourable for any man 
 who chose to enter into the career of public life ; and I 
 think I am not guilty of ostentation in supposing my own 
 moral character, and my industry, my friends and con- 
 nexions, when Mr. Hamilton first sought ray acquaintance, 
 were not at all inferior to those of several whose fortune 
 is at this day upon a very different footing from mine." 
 
 It was not long before a more important opening offered 
 itself, which speedily brought Burke into the main stream 
 of public life. In the summer of 1765 a change of min- 
 istry took place. It was the third since the king's acces- 
 sion five years ago. First, Pitt had been disgraced, and 
 
28 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 the old Duke of Newcastle dismissed. Then Bute came 
 into power, but Bute quailed before the storm of calumny 
 and hate which his Scotch nationality, and the supposed 
 source of his power over the king, had raised in every 
 town in England. After Lord Bute, George Grenville 
 undertook the Government. Before he had been many 
 months in office, he had sown the seeds of war in the col- 
 onies, wearied parliament, and disgusted the king. In 
 June, 1765, Grenville was dismissed. With profound re- 
 luctance the king had no other choice than to summon 
 Lord Rockingham, and Lord Rockingham, in a happy mo- 
 ment for himself and his party, was induced to offer Burke 
 a post as his private secretary. A government by country 
 gentlemen is too apt to be a government of ignorance, 
 and Lord Rockingham was without either experience or 
 knowledge. He felt, or friends felt for him, the advantage 
 of having at his side a man who was chiefly known as an 
 author in the service of Dodsley, and as having conducted 
 the Annual Register with great ability, but who even then 
 was widely spoken of as nothing less than an encyclopaedia 
 of political knowledge. 
 
 It is commonly believed that Burke was commended to 
 Lord Rockingham by William Fitzherbert. Fitzherbert 
 was President of the Board of Trade in the new govern- 
 ment, but he is more likely to be remembered as Dr. John- 
 son's famous example of the truth of the observation, that 
 a man will please more upon the whole by negative quali- 
 ties than by positive, because he was the most acceptable 
 man in London, and yet overpowered nobody by the supe- 
 riority of his talents, made no man think worse of himself 
 by being his rival, seemed always to listen, did not oblige 
 you to hear much from him, and did not oppose what 
 you said. Besides Fitzherbert's influence, we have it on 
 
il] introduction to lord ROCKINGHAM. 29 
 
 Burke's own authority that his promotion was partly due 
 to that mysterious person, William Burke, who was at the 
 same time appointed an iinder-secretary of state. There 
 must have been unpleasant rumours afloat as to the Burke 
 connexion, and we shall presently consider w^hat they were 
 worth. Meanwhile, it is enough to say that the old Duke 
 of Newcastle hurried to the new premier, and told him 
 the appointment would never do : that the new secretary 
 was not only an Irish adventurer, which was true, but that 
 he was an Irish papist, which was not true ; that he was 
 a Jesuit, that he was a spy from Saint Omer's, and that 
 his real name was O'Bourke. Lord Rockingham behaved 
 like a man of sense and honour, sent for Burke, and re- 
 peated to him what he had heard. Burke warmly de- 
 nounced the truthlessness of the Duke's tattle : he insisted 
 that the reports which his chief had heard would prob- 
 ably, even unknown to himself, create in his mind such 
 suspicions as would stand in the way of a thorough con- 
 fidence. No earthly consideration, he said, should induce 
 him to continue in relations with a man whose trust in 
 him was not entire ; and he pressed his resignation. To 
 this Lord Rockingham would not consent, and from that 
 time until his death, seventeen years afterwards, the rela- 
 tions between them were those of loyal and honourable 
 service on the one hand, and generous and appreciative 
 friendship on the other. Six-and-twenty years afterwards 
 (1791) Burke remembered the month in which he had 
 first become connected with a man whose memory, he said, 
 will ever be precious to Englishmen of all parties, as long 
 as the ideas of honour and virtue, public and private, are 
 understood and cherished in this nation. 
 
 The Rockingham ministry remained in office for a year 
 and twenty days (1765-6). About the middle of this 
 
30 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 term (Dec. 26, 1765), Burke was returned to Parliament 
 for the borougli of Wendover, by the influence of Lord 
 Verney, who owned it, and who also returned "William 
 Burke for another borough. Lord Verney was an Irish 
 peer, with large property in Buckinghamshire ; he now 
 represented that county in Parliament. It was William 
 Burke's influence with Lord Verney that procured for his 
 namesake the seat at Wendover. Burke made his first 
 speech in the House of Commons a few days after the 
 opening of the session of 1766 (Jan. 27), and was honour- 
 ed by a compliment from Pitt, still the Great Commoner. 
 A week later he spoke again on the same momentous 
 theme, the complaints of the American colonists, and his 
 success was so marked that good judges predicted, in the 
 stiff phraseology of the time, that he would soon add the 
 palm of the orator to the laurel of the writer and the phi- 
 losopher. The friendly Dr. Johnson wrote to Langton, 
 that Burke had gained more reputation than any man at 
 his first appearance had ever gained before. The session 
 was a great triumph to the new member, but it brought 
 neither strength nor popularity to the administration. At 
 the end of it, the king dismissed them, and the Chatham 
 government was formed ; that strange combination which 
 has been made famous by Burke's description of it, as a 
 piece of joinery so crossly indented and whimsically dove- 
 tailed, such a piece of diversified mosaic, such a tesselated 
 pavement without cement, that it was indeed a very curi- 
 ous show, but utterly unsafe to touch and unsure to stand 
 upon. There was no obvious reason why Burke should 
 not have joined the new ministry. The change was at 
 first one of persons, rather than of principles or of meas- 
 ures. To put himself, as Burke afterwards said, out of 
 the way of the negotiations which were then being carried 
 
11.] IN PARLIAMENT. 31 
 
 on very eagerly and througli many channels with the Earl 
 of Chatham, he went to Ireland very soon after the change 
 of ministry. He was free from party engagements, and 
 more than this, he was free at the express desire of his 
 friends ; for on the very day of his return, the Marquis of 
 Rockingham wished him to accept office under the new 
 svstem. Burke " believes he mio-ht have had such a situ- 
 ation, but he cheerfully took his fate with his party." In 
 a short time he rendered his party the first of a long series 
 of splendid literary services by writing his Observations on 
 the Present State of the Nation (1769). It was a reply 
 to a pamphlet by George Grenville, in which the disap- 
 pointed minister accused his successors of ruining the coun- 
 try. Burke, in answering the charge, showed a grasp of 
 commercial and fiscal details at least equal to that of Gren- 
 ville himself, then considered the first man of his time in 
 dealing with the national trade and resources. To this 
 easy mastery of the special facts of the discussion, Burke 
 added the far rarer art of lighting them up by broad prin- 
 ciples, and placing himself and his readers at the highest 
 and most effective point of view for commanding their 
 general bearings. 
 
 If Burke had been the Irish adventurer that his enemies 
 described, he might well have seized with impatience the 
 opening to office that the recent exhibition of his powers 
 in the House of Commons had now made accessible to 
 him. There was not a man in Great Britain to whom the 
 emoluments of office would have been more useful. It is 
 one of the standing mysteries in literary biography, how 
 Burke could think of entering Parliament without any 
 means that anybody can now trace of earning a fitting 
 livelihood. Yet at this time Burke, whom we saw not 
 long ago writing for the booksellers, had become affluent 
 
32 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 enough to pay a yearly allowance to Barry, the painter, 
 in order to enable him to study the pictures in the great 
 European galleries, and to mate a prolonged residence at 
 Rome. A little later he took a step which makes the rid- 
 dle still more difficult, and which has given abundant em- 
 ployment to wits who are maximi in minimis, and think 
 that every question which they can ask, yet to which his- 
 tory has thought it worth while to leave no answer, is 
 somehow a triumph of their own learning and dialectic. 
 
 In 1769 Burke purchased a house and lands known as 
 Gregories, in the parishes of Penn and Beaconsfield, in the 
 county of Bucks. It has often been asked, and naturally 
 enough, how a man who, hardly more than a few months 
 before, was still contented to earn an extra hundred pounds 
 a year by writing for Dodsley, should now have launched 
 out as the buyer of a fine house and estate, which cost up- 
 wards of twenty-two thousand pounds, which could not be 
 kept up on less than two thousand five hundred a year, 
 and of which the returns did not amount to one-fifth of 
 that sum. Whence did he procure the money, and what 
 is perhaps more difficult to answer, how came he first to 
 entertain the idea of a design so ill-proportioned to any- 
 thing that we can now discern in his means and prospects ? 
 The common answer from Burke's enemies, and even from 
 some neutral inquirers, gives to every lover of this great 
 man's high character an unpleasant shock. It is alleged 
 that he had plunged into furious gambling in East India 
 stock. The charge was current at the time, and it was 
 speedily revived when Burke's abandonment of his party, 
 after the French Revolution, exposed him to a thousand 
 attacks of reckless and uncontrolled virulence. It has been 
 stirred by one or two pertinacious critics nearer our own 
 time, and none of the biographers have dealt with the per- 
 
II.] PURCHASE OF BEACONSFIELD. 33 
 
 plexities of the matter as tliey ought to have done. No- 
 body, indeed, has ever pretended to find one jot or tittle of 
 direct evidence that Burke himself took a part in the gam- 
 bling in India or other stocks. There is evidence that he 
 was a holder of the stock, and no more. But what is un- 
 deniable is that Richard Burke, his brother, William Burke, 
 his intimate if not his kinsman, and Lord Yerney, his po- 
 litical patron, were all three at this time engaged together 
 in immense transactions in East India stock; that in 1769 
 the stock fell violently ; that they were unable to pay their 
 dLfferences ; and that in the very year in which Edmund 
 Burke bought Gregories, they were utterly ruined, two of 
 them beyond retrieval. Again it is clear that, after this, 
 Richard Burke was engaged in land-jobbing in the West 
 Indies ; that his claims were disputed by the Government 
 as questionable and dishonest ; and that he lost his case. 
 Edmund Burke was said, in the gossip of the day, to be 
 deeply interested in land at Saint Vincent's. But there is 
 no evidence. What cannot be denied is that an unpleasant 
 taint of speculation and financial adventurership hung at 
 one time about the whole connexion, and that the advent- 
 ures invariably came to an unlucky end. 
 
 Whether Edmund Burke and William Burke were rela- 
 tions or not, and if so, in what degree they were relations, 
 neither of them ever knew ; they believed that their fa- 
 thers sometimes called one another cousins, and that was 
 all that they had to say on the subject. But they were 
 as intimate as brothers, and when William Burke went to 
 mend his broken fortunes in India, Edmund Burke com- 
 mended him to Philip Francis — then fighting his deadly 
 duel of five years with Warren Hastings at Calcutta — as 
 one whom he had tenderly loved, highly valued, and con- 
 tinually lived with in an union not to be expressed, quite 
 
34 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 since their boyish years. " Looking back to the course of 
 my life," he wrote in 1771, "I remember no one consid- 
 erable benefit in the whole of it which I did not, mediate- 
 ly or immediately, derive from William Barke." There is 
 nothing intrinsically incredible, therefore, considering this 
 intimacy and the community of purse and home which 
 subsisted among the three Burkes, in the theory that when 
 Edmund Burke bought his property in Buckinghamshire, 
 he looked for help from the speculations of Richard and 
 William. However this may have been, from them no 
 help came. Many years afterwards (1783), Lord Verney 
 filed a bill in Chancery claiming from Edmund Burke a 
 sum of 6000^., which he alleged that he had lent at the 
 instigation of William Burke to assist in completing the 
 purchase of Beaconsfield. Burke's sworn answer denied 
 all knowledge of the transaction, and the plaintiff did not 
 get the relief for which he had prayed. 
 
 In a letter to Shackleton (May 1, 1768) Burke gave the 
 following account of what he had done: — "I have made 
 a push," he says, " with all I could collect of ray own, and 
 the aid of my friends, to cast a little root in this country. 
 I have purchased a house, with an estate of about six hun- 
 dred acres of land, in Buckinghamshire, twenty-four miles 
 from London. It is a place exceedingly pleasant ; and I 
 propose, God willing, to become a farmer in good earnest. 
 You who are classical will not be displeased to know that 
 it was formerly the seat of Waller, the poet, whose house, 
 or part of it, makes at present the farm-house within an 
 hundred yards of me." The details of the actual purchase 
 of Beaconsfield have been made tolerably clear. The price 
 was twenty-two thousand pounds, more or less. Fourteen 
 thousand were left on mortgage, which remained outstand- 
 ing until the sale of the property by Mrs. Burke in 1812. 
 
II.] BEACONSFIELD. 35 
 
 Garret Barke, the elder brotlier, liad shortly before the 
 purchase made Edmund his residuary legatee, and this be- 
 quest is rather conjecturally estimated at two thousand 
 pounds. The balance of six thousand was advanced by 
 Lord Rockingham on Burke's bond. 
 
 The purchase after all was the smallest part of the mat- 
 ter, and it still remains a puzzle not only how Burke was 
 able to maintain so handsome an establishment, but how 
 he could ever suppose it likely that he would be able to 
 maintain it. He counted, no doubt, on making some sort 
 of income by farming, but then he might well have known 
 that an absorbed politician would hardly be able, as he 
 called it, to turn farmer in good earnest. For a short time 
 he received a salary of seven hundred pounds a year as 
 agent for New York. AVe may perhaps take for granted 
 that he made as much more out of his acres. He received 
 something from Dodsley for his work on the Annual Reg- 
 ister down to 1788. But when all these resources have 
 been counted up, we cannot but see the gulf of a great 
 yearly deficit. The unhappy truth is that from the mid- 
 dle of 1769, when we find him applying to Garrick for 
 the loan of a thousand pounds, down to 1794, when the 
 king gave him a pension, Burke w^as never free from the 
 harassing strain of debts and want of money. It has 
 been stated with good show of authority, that his obliga- 
 tions to Lord Rockingham amounted to not less than thir- 
 ty thousand pounds. When that nobleman died (1782), 
 with a generosity which is not the less honourable to him 
 for having been so richly earned by the faithful friend 
 who was the object of it, he left instructions to his execu- 
 tors that all Burke's bonds should be destroyed. 
 
 We may indeed wish from the bottom of our hearts 
 that all this had been otherwise. But those who press it 
 
36 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 as a reproach against Burke's memory may be justly re- 
 minded that when Pitt died, after drawing the pay of a 
 minister for twenty years, he left debts to the amount of 
 forty thousand pounds. Burke, as I have said elsewhere, 
 had none of the vices of profusion, but he had that quality 
 which Aristotle places high among the virtues — the noble 
 mean of Magnificence, standing midway between the two 
 extremes of vulgar ostentation and narrow pettiness. x\t 
 least, every creditor was paid in good time, and nobody 
 suffered but himself. Those who think these disagreeable 
 matters of supreme importance, and allow such things to 
 stand between them and Burke's greatness, are like the 
 people — slightly to alter a figure from a philosopher of 
 old — who, when they went to Olympia, could only per- 
 ceive that they were scorched by the sun, and pressed by 
 the crowd, and deprived of comfortable means of bathing, 
 and wetted by the rain, and that life was full of disagree- 
 able and troublesome things, and so they almost forgot the 
 great colossus of ivory and gold, Phidias's statue of Zeus, 
 which they had come to see, and which stood in all its 
 glory and power before their perturbed and foolish vision. 
 There have been few men in history with whom per- 
 sonal objects counted for so little as they counted with 
 Burke. He really did what so many public men only 
 feign to do. He forgot that he had any interests of his 
 own to be promoted, apart from the interests of the party 
 with which he acted, and from those of the whole nation, 
 for which he held himself a trustee. What William 
 Burke said of him in 1766 was true throughout his life 
 — " Ned is full of real business, intent upon doing solid 
 good to his country, as much as if he was to receive twenty 
 per cent, from the Empire." Such men as the shrewd and 
 impudent Eigby atoned for a plebeian origin by the arts 
 
11.] BEACONSFIELD. 37 
 
 of dependence and a judicious servility, and drew more 
 of the public money from tlie pay ojQBce in half-a-dozen 
 quarter-days than Burke received in all his life. It was 
 not by such arts that Burke rose. When we remember 
 all the untold bitterness of the struggle in which he was 
 engaged, from the time when the old Duke of Newcastle 
 tried to make the Marquis of Rockingham dismiss his new 
 private secretary as an Irish Jesuit in disguise (1765), 
 down to the time when the Duke of Bedford, himself bat- 
 tening " in grants to the house of Russell, so enormous as 
 not only to outrage economy, but even to stagger credibil- 
 ity," assailed the government for giving Burke a moderate 
 pension, we may almost imagine that if Johnson had imi- 
 tated the famous Tenth Satire a little later, he would have 
 been tempted to apply the poet's cynical criticism of the 
 career heroic to the greater Cicero of his own day. " I 
 was not," Burke said, in a passage of lofty dignity, " like 
 his Grace of Bedford, swaddled and rocked and dandled 
 into a legislator; Nitor in adversum is the motto for a 
 man like me. I possessed not one of the qualities, nor 
 cultivated one of the arts, that recommend men to the fa- 
 vour and protection of the great. I was not made for a 
 minion or a tool. As little did I follow the trade of win- 
 ning the hearts, by imposing on the understandings of the 
 people. At every step of my progress in life, for in every 
 step was I traversed and opposed, and at every turnpike I 
 met I was obliged to show my passport, and again and 
 again to prove my sole title to the honour of being useful 
 to my country, by a proof that I was not wholly unac- 
 quainted with its laws, and the whole system of its inter- 
 ests both abroad and at home ; otherwise no rank, no tol- 
 eration even for me." 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE CONSTITUTIONAL STRUGGLE. 
 
 Foreign observers of our affairs looked upon the state of 
 England between the accession of George III. and the loss 
 of the American colonies (1760-1776), with mixed dis- 
 gust and satisfaction. Their instinct as absolute rulers 
 was revolted by a spectacle of unbridled faction and raging 
 anarchy ; their envy was soothed by the growing weakness 
 of a power which Chatham had so short a time before left 
 at the highest point of grandeur and strength. Frederick 
 the Great spoke with contempt of the insolence of Opposi- 
 tion and the virulence of parties ; ^nd vowed that, petty 
 German prince as he was, he would not change places with 
 the King of England. The Emperor Joseph pronounced 
 positively that Great Britain was declining, that Parlia- 
 ment was ruining itself, and that the colonies threatened 
 a catastrophe. Catherine of Russia thought that nothing 
 would restore its ancient vigour to the realm, short of the 
 bracing and heroic remedy of a war. Even at home, such 
 shrewd and experienced onlookers as Horace Walpole sus- 
 pected that the state of the country was more serious than 
 it had been since the Great Rebellion, and declared it to 
 be approaching by fast strides to some sharp crisis. Men 
 who remembered their Roman history, fancied that they 
 saw every symptom of confusion that preceded the ruin 
 of the Commonwealth, and began to inquire uneasily what; 
 
CHAP. III.] THE CONSTITUTIONAL STRUGGLE. 39 
 
 was the temper of the army. Men who remembered the 
 story of the violence and insatiable factiousness of Flor- 
 ence, turned again to Macchiavelli and to Guicciardini, to 
 trace a parallel between the fierce city on the Arno and 
 the fierce city on the Thames. When the King of Sweden, 
 in 1772, carried out a revolution, by abolishing an oligarch- 
 ic council and assuming the powers of a dictator, with 
 the assent of his people, there were actually serious men 
 in England who thought that the English, after having 
 been guilty of every meanness and corruption, would soon, 
 like the Swedes, own themselves unworthy to be free. 
 The Duke of Richmond, who happened to have a claim to 
 a peerage and an estate in France, excused himself for 
 taking so much pains to establish his claim to them, by 
 gravely asking who knew that a time might not soon come 
 when England would not be worthy living in, and when a 
 retreat to France might be a very happy thing for a free 
 man to have ? 
 
 The reign had begun by a furious outbreak of hatred 
 between the English and the Scotch. Lord Bute had 
 been driven from oflSce, not merely because he was sup- 
 posed to owe his power to a scandalous friendship with 
 the King's mother, but because he was accused of crowding 
 the public service with his detested countrymen from the 
 other side of the Tweed. He fell, less from disapproval of 
 his policy than from rude prejudice against his country. 
 The flow of angry emotion had not subsided before the 
 whisper of strife in the American colonies began to trouble 
 the air; and before that had waxed loud, the Middlesex 
 election had blown into a portentous hurricane. This 
 was the first great constitutional case after Burke came 
 into the House of Commons. As, moreover, it became a 
 leading element in the crisis which was the occasion of 
 
40 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 Burke's first remarkable essay in the literature of politics, 
 it is as well to go over the facts. 
 
 The Parliament to which he had first been returned, 
 now approaching the expiry of its legal term, was dis- 
 solved in the spring of 1768. Wilkes, then an outlaw in 
 Paris, returned to England, and announced himself as a 
 candidate for the City. When the election was over, his 
 name stood last on the poll. But his ancient fame as 
 the opponent and victim of the court five years before 
 were revived. After his rejection in the City, he found 
 himself strong enough to stand for the county of Mid- 
 dlesex. Here he was returned at the head of the poll 
 after an excited election. Wilkes had been tried in 1764, 
 and found guilty by the King's Bench of republishing 
 Number Forty-five of the North Briton^ and of printing 
 and publishing the Essay on Woman. He had not ap- 
 peared to receive sentence, and had been outlawed in con- 
 sequence. After his election for Middlesex, he obtained a 
 reversal of his outlawry on the point of technical form. 
 He then came up for sentence under the original verdict. 
 The court sent him to prison for twenty-two months, and 
 condemned him to pay a fine of a thousand pounds. 
 
 Wilkes was in prison when the second session of the 
 new Parliament began. His case came before the House 
 in November, 1768, on his own petition, accusing Lord 
 Mansfield of altering the record at his trial. After many 
 acrimonious debates and examinations of Wilkes and oth- 
 ers at the bar of the House, at length, by 219 votes against 
 136, the famous motion was passed which expelled him 
 from the House. Another election for Middlesex was now 
 held, and Wilkes was returned without opposition. The 
 day after the return, the House of Commons resolved, by 
 an immense majority, that, having been expelled, Wilkes 
 
III.] PARLIAMENTARY PRIVILEGE. 41 
 
 was incapable of serving- in that Parliament. The follow- 
 ing month Wilkes was once more elected. The House 
 once more declared the election void. In April another 
 election took place, and this time the Government put for- 
 ward Colonel Luttrell, who vacated his seat for Bossiney 
 for the purpose of opposing Wilkes. There was the same 
 result, and for the fourth time Wilkes was at the head of 
 the poll. The House ordered the return to be altered, 
 and after hearing by counsel the freeholders of Middlesex 
 who petitioned against the alteration, finally confirmed it 
 (May 8, 1769) by a majority of 221 to 152. According 
 to Lord Temple, this was the greatest majority ever known 
 on the last day of a session. 
 
 The purport and significance of these arbitrary proceed- 
 ings need little interpretation. The House, according to 
 the authorities, had a constitutional right to expel Wilkes, 
 though the grounds on which even this is defended would 
 probably be questioned if a similar case were to arise in 
 our own day. But a single branch of the legislature could 
 have no power to pass an incapacitating vote either against 
 Wilkes or anybody else. An Act of Parliament is the 
 least instrument by which such incapacity could be im- 
 posed. The House might perhaps expel Wilkes, but it 
 could not either legally, or with regard to the less definite 
 limits of constitutional morality, decide whom the Middle- 
 sex freeholders should not elect, and it could not therefore 
 set aside their representative, who was then free from any 
 disabling quality. Lord Camden did not much exagger- 
 ate, when he declared in a debate on the subject in the 
 House of Lords, that the judgment passed upon the Mid- 
 dlesex election had given the constitution a more danger- 
 ous wound than any which were given during the twelve 
 years* absence of Parliament in the reign of Charles I. 
 
42 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 The House of Commons was usurping another form of 
 that very dispensing power, for pretending to which the 
 last of the Stuart sovereigns had lost his crown. If the 
 House by a vote could deprive Wilkes of a right to sit, 
 what legal or constitutional impediment would there be in 
 the way, if the majority were at any time disposed to de- 
 clare all their most formidable opponents in the minority 
 incapable of sitting? 
 
 In the same Parliament, there was another and scarcely 
 less remarkable case of Privilege, " that eldest son of Pre- 
 rogative," as Burke truly called it, " and inheriting all the 
 vices of its parent." Certain printers were accused of 
 breach of privilege for reporting the debates of the House 
 (March, 1771). The messenger of the serjeant-at-arms 
 attempted to take one of them into custody in his own 
 shop in the City. A constable was standing by, designed- 
 ly, it has been supposed, and Miller, the printer, gave the 
 messenger into his custody for an assault. The case came 
 on before the Lord Mayor, Alderman Wilkes, and Alder- 
 man Oliver, the same evening, and the result was that the' 
 messenger of the House was committed. The City doc- 
 trine was, that if the House of Commons had a serjeant- 
 at-arms, they had a serjeant-at-mace. If the House of 
 Commons could send their citizens to Newgate, they could 
 send its messenger to the Compter. Two other printers 
 were collusively arrested, brought before Wilkes and Oli- 
 ver, and at once liberated. 
 
 The Commons instantly resolved on stem measures. 
 The Lord Mayor and Oliver were taken and dispatched to 
 the Tower, where they lay until the prorogation of Parlia- 
 ment. Wilkes stubbornly refused to pay any attention to 
 repeated summonses to attend at the bar of the House, 
 very properly insisting that he ought to be summoned to 
 
HI.] PARLIAMEjS'TARY privilege. 43 
 
 attend in his place as member for Middlesex. Besides 
 committing Crosby and Oliver to the Tower, the House 
 summoned the Lord Mayor's clerk to attend with his 
 books, and then and there forced him to strike out the 
 record of the recognisances into which their messenger 
 had entered on being committed at the Mansion House. 
 No Stuart ever did anything more arbitrary and illegal. 
 The House deliberately intended to constitute itself, as 
 Burke had said two years before, an arbitrary and despotic 
 assembly. "The distempers of monarchy were the great 
 subjects of apprehension and redress in the last century. 
 In this, the distempers of Parliament." 
 
 Burke, in a speech which he delivered in his place in 
 1771, warned the House of the evils of the course upon 
 which they were entering, and declared those to be their 
 mortal enemies who would persuade them to act as if they 
 were a self-originated magistracy, independent of the peo- 
 ple, and unconnected with their opinions and feelings. 
 But these mortal enemies of its very constitution were at 
 this time the majority of the House. It was to no pur- 
 pose that Burke argued with more than legal closeness 
 that incapacitation could not be a power according to law, 
 inasmuch as it had neither of the two properties of law : 
 it was not known, " you yourself not knowing upon what 
 grounds you will vote the incapacity of any man ;" and it 
 was not fixed, because it was varied according to the occa- 
 sion, exercised according to discretion, and no man could 
 call for it as a right. A strain of unanswerable reasoning 
 of this kind counted for nothing, in spite of its being un- 
 answerable. Despotic or oligarchic pretensions are proof 
 against the most formidable battery that reason and ex- 
 perience can construct against them. And Wilkes's exclu- 
 sion endured until this Parliament — the Unreported Parlia- 
 
44 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 meut, as it was called, and in many respects the very worst 
 that ever assembled at Westminster — was dissolved, and a 
 new one elected (1774), when he was once again returned 
 for Middlesex, and took his seat. 
 
 The London multitude had grown zealous for Wilkes, 
 and the town had been harassed by disorder. Of the 
 fierce brutality of the crowd of that age, we may form a 
 vivid idea from the unflinching pencil of Hogarth. Bar- 
 barous laws were cruelly administered. The common peo- 
 ple were turbulent, because misrule made them miserable. 
 Wilkes had written filthy verses, but the crowd cared no 
 more for this than their betters cared about the vices of 
 Lord Sandwich. They made common cause with one who 
 was accidentally a more conspicuous sufferer. AVilkes was 
 quite right when he vowed that he was no Wilkite. The 
 masses were better than their leader. " Whenever the 
 people have a feeling," Burke once said, " they commonly 
 are in the right: they sometimes mistake the physician." 
 Franklin, who was then in London, was of opinion that if 
 George IIL had had a bad character, and John Wilkes a 
 good one, the latter might have turned the former out of 
 the kingdom ; for the turbulence that began in street riots 
 at one time threatened to end in revolt. The King 
 himself was attacked with savage invective in papers of 
 which it was said, that no one in the previous century 
 would have dared to print any like them until Charles was 
 fast Igcked up in Carisbrooke Castle. 
 
 As is usual when the minds of those in power have 
 been infected with an arbitrary temper, the employment 
 of military force to crush civil disturbances became a fa- 
 miliar and favourite idea. The military, said Lord Wey- 
 mouth, in an elaborate letter which he addressed to the 
 Surrey magistrates, can never be employed to a more con- 
 
III.] POPULAR DISORDER. 45 
 
 stitutional purpose than in the support of the authority 
 and dignity of the magistracy. If the magistrate should 
 be menaced, he is cautioned not to delay a moment in 
 calling for the aid of the military, and making use of 
 them effectually. The consequence of this bloody scroll, 
 as Wilkes rightly called it, was that shortly afterwards 
 an affray occurred between the crowd and the troops, in 
 which some twenty people were killed and wounded (May 
 10, 1768). On the following day, the Secretary of War, 
 Lord Barrington, wrote to the commanding officer, inform- 
 ing him that the King highly approved of the conduct 
 both of officers and men, and wished that his gracious ap- 
 probation of them should be communicated to them. 
 
 Burke brought the matter before the House in a motion 
 for a Committee of Inquiry, supported by one of the most 
 lucid and able of his minor speeches. " If ever the time 
 should come," he concluded, " when this House shall be 
 found prompt to execute and slow to inquire; ready to 
 punish the excesses of the people, and slow to listen to 
 their grievances ; ready to grant supplies, and slow to ex- 
 amine the account ; ready to invest magistrates with large 
 powers, and slow to inquire into the exercise of them ; 
 ready to entertain notions of the military power as incor- 
 porated with the constitution — when you learn this in the 
 air of St. James's, then the business is done ; then the 
 House of Commons will change that character which it 
 receives from the people only." It is hardly necessary to 
 say that his motion for a committee was lost by the over- 
 whelming majority of two hundred and forty-five against 
 thirty. The general result of the proceedings of the gov- 
 ernment from the accession of George III. to the beginning 
 of the troubles in the American colonies, was in Burke's 
 own words, that the government was at once dreaded and 
 
46 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 contemned ; that the laws were despoiled of all their re- 
 spected and salutary terrors ; that their inaction was a sub- 
 ject of ridicule, and their exertion of abhorrence ; that our 
 dependencies had slackened in their affections ; that we 
 knew neither how to yield nor how to enforce ; and that 
 disconnection and confusion, in offices, in parties, in fami- 
 lies, in Parliament, in the nation, prevailed beyond the dis- 
 orders of any former time. 
 
 It was in the pamphlet on the Present Discontents, pub- 
 lished in 17*70, that Burke dealt at large with the whole 
 scheme of policy of which all these irregularities were the 
 distempered incidents. The pamphlet was composed as a 
 manifesto of the Rockingham section of the Whig party, 
 to show, as Burke wrote to his chief, how different it was 
 in spirit and composition from "the Bedfords, the Gren- 
 villes, and other knots, who are combined for no public 
 purpose, but only as a means of furthering with joint 
 strength their private and individual advantage." The 
 pamphlet was submitted in manuscript or proof to the 
 heads of the party. Friendly critics excused some inele- 
 gancies which they thought they found in occasional pas- 
 sages, by taking for granted, as was true, that he had ad- 
 mitted insertions from other hands. Here for the first 
 time he exhibited, on a conspicuous scale, the strongest 
 qualities of his understanding. Contemporaries had an 
 opportunity of measuring this strength, by comparison 
 with another performance of similar scope. The letters 
 of Junius had startled the world the year before. Burke 
 was universally suspected of being their author, and the 
 suspicion never wholly died out so long as he lived. There 
 was no real ground for it beyond the two unconnected 
 facts, that the letters were powerful letters, and that Burke 
 had a powerful intellect. Dr. Johnson admitted that he 
 
 I 
 
ni.] THOUOnXS ON THE PRESENT DISCONTENTS. 47 
 
 had never had a better reason for believing that Burke 
 was Junius, than that he knew nobody else who had the 
 ability of Junius. But Johnson discharged his mind of 
 the thought, at the instant that Burke voluntarily assured 
 him that he neither wrote the letters of Junius nor knew 
 who had written them. The subjects and aim of those 
 famous pieces were not very different from Burke's tract, 
 but any one who in our time turns from the letters to the 
 tract will wonder how the author of the one could ever 
 have been suspected of writing the other. Junius is never 
 more than a railer, and very often he is third-rate even as 
 a railer. The author of the Present Discontents speaks 
 without bitterness even of Lord Bute and the Duke of 
 Grafton ; he only refers to persons, when their conduct or 
 their situation illustrates a principle. Instead of reviling, 
 he probes, he reflects, he warns ; and as the result of this 
 serious method, pursued by a man in whom close mastery 
 of detail kept exact pace with wide grasp of generalities, 
 we have not the ephemeral diatribe of a faction, but one 
 of the monumental pieces of political literature. 
 
 The last great pamphlet in the history of English pub- 
 lic affairs had been Swift's tract On the Conduct of the 
 Allies (iTll), in which the writer did a more substantial 
 service for the Tory party of his day than Burke did for 
 the Whig party of a later date. Swift's pamphlet is close, 
 strenuous, persuasive, and full of telling strokes ; but no- 
 body need read it to-day, except the historical student, or 
 a member of the Peace Society, in search of the most 
 convincing exposure of the most insane of English wars.^ 
 There is not a sentence in it which does not belong exclu- 
 sively to the matter in hand : not a line of that general 
 
 ^ This was not Burke's judgment on the long war against Louis 
 XIV. See Regicide Peace^ i. 
 
48 BtJKKE. [chap. 
 
 wisdom which is for all time. In the Present Discontents 
 the method is just the opposite of this. The details are 
 slurred, and they are not literal. Burke describes with 
 excess of elaboration how the new system is a system of 
 double cabinets ; one put forward with nominal powers in 
 Parliament, the other concealed behind the throne, and se- 
 cretly dictating the policy. The reader feels that this is 
 worked out far too closely to be real. It is a structure of 
 artificial rhetoric. But we lightly pass this over, on our 
 way to more solid matter ; to the exposition of the prin- 
 ciples of a constitution, the right methods of statesman- 
 ship, and the defence of party. 
 
 It was Bolingbroke, and not Swift, of w^hom Burke was 
 thinking, when he sat down to the composition of his 
 tract. The Patriot King was the fountain of the new 
 doctrines, which Burke trained his party to understand 
 and to resist. If his foe was domestic, it was from a for- 
 eign armoury that Burke derived the instruments of re- 
 sistance. The great fault of political writers is their too 
 close adherence to the forms of the system of state which 
 they happen to be expounding or examining. They stop 
 short at the anatomy of institutions, and do not penetrate 
 to the secret of their functions. An illustrious author 
 in the middle of the eighteenth century introduced his 
 contemporaries to a better way. It is not too much to 
 say that at that epoch the strength of political specula- 
 tion in this country, from Adam Smith downwards, was 
 drawn from France ; and Burke had been led to some of 
 what was most characteristic in his philosophy of society 
 by Montesquieu's Spirit of Laws (1748), the first great 
 manual of the historic school. We have no space here to 
 work out the relations between Montesquieu's principles 
 and Burke's, but the student of the Esprit des Lois will 
 
III.] THOUGHTS ON THE PRESENT DISCONTENTS. 49 
 
 recognize its influence in every one of Burke's master- 
 pieces. 
 
 So far as immediate events were concerned, Burke was 
 quick to discern their true interpretation. As has been 
 already said, he attributed to the King and his party a 
 deliberateness of system which probably had no real ex- 
 istence in their minds. The Kino- intended to reassert 
 the old right of choosing his own ministers. George II. 
 had made strenuous but futile endeavours to the same 
 end. His son, the father of George III., Frederick, Prince 
 of Wales, as every reader of Dodington's Diary will re- 
 member, was equally bent on throwing off the yoke of the 
 great Whig combinations, and making his own cabinets. 
 George III. was only continuing the purpose of his father 
 and his grandfather ; and there is no reason to believe 
 that he ^vent more elaborately to work to obtain his ends. 
 
 It is when he leaves the artifices of a cabal, and strikes 
 down below the surface to the work'ng of deep social 
 forces, that we feel the breadth and power of Burke's 
 method. "I am not one of those," he began, "who 
 think that the people are never wrong. They have been 
 so, frequently and outrageously, both in other countries 
 and in this. But I do say that in all disputes between 
 them and their rulers, the presumption is at least upon a 
 par in favour of the jpeople.^^ Nay, experience perhaps 
 justifies him in going further. When popular discontents 
 are prevalent, something has generally been found amiss 
 in the constitution or the administration. "The people 
 have no interest in disorder. When they go wrong, it is 
 their error, and not their crime." And then he quotes the 
 famous passage from the Memoirs of Sully, which both 
 practical politicians and political students should bind 
 about their necks, and write upon the tables of their 
 3* 
 
50 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 hearts : " The revolutions that come to pass in great states 
 are not the result of chance, nor of popular caprice. . . , 
 As for the populace, it is never from a passion for attack 
 that it rebels, but from impatience of suffering." 
 
 What really gives its distinction to the Present Dis- 
 contents is not its plea for indulgence to popular impa- 
 tience, nor its plea for the superiority of government by 
 aristocracy, but rather the presence in it of the thought of 
 Montesquieu and his school, of the necessity of studying 
 political phenomena in relation, not merely to forms of 
 government and law, but in relation to whole groups of 
 social facts which give to law and government the spirit 
 that makes them workable. Connected with this, is a 
 particularly wide interpretation and a particularly impres- 
 sive application of the maxims of expediency, because a 
 wide conception of the various interacting elements of a 
 society naturally extends the considerations which a bal- 
 ance of expediencies will include. Hence, in time, there 
 came a strong and lofty ideal of the true statesman, his 
 breadth of vision, his flexibility of temper, his hardly 
 measurable influence. These are the principal thoughts 
 in the Discontents to which that tract owes its permanent 
 interest. " Whatever original energy," says Burke, in one 
 place, " may be supposed either in force or regulation, the 
 operation of both is in truth merely instrumental. Na- 
 tions are governed by the same methods, and on the same 
 principles, by which an individual without authority is 
 often able to govern those who are his equals or superiors ; 
 by a knowledge of their temper, and by a judicious man- 
 agement of it. . . . The laws reach but a very little way. 
 Constitute Government how you please, infinitely the 
 greater part of it must depend upon the exercise of pow- 
 ers, which are left at large to the prudence and upright- 
 
III.] THOUGHTS ON THE PRESENT DISCONTENTS. 51 
 
 ness of ministers of state. Even all the use and potency 
 of the laws depends upon them. Without them, your 
 Commonwealth is no better than a scheme upon paper ; 
 and not a living, active, effective constitution.'''' Thus early 
 in his public career had Burke seized that great antithe- 
 sis which he so eloquently laboured in the long and ever 
 memorable episode of his war against the French Revo- 
 lution : the opposition between artificial arrangements in 
 politics, and a living, active, effective organization, formed 
 by what he calls elsewhere in the present tract, the natural 
 strength of the kingdom, and suitable to the temper and 
 mental habits of the people. When he spoke of the nat- 
 ural strength of the kingdom, he gave no narrow or con- 
 ventional account of it. He included in the elements of 
 that strength, besides the great peers and the leading land- 
 ed gentlemen, the opulent merchants and manufacturers, 
 and the substantial yeomanry. Contrasted with the trite 
 versions of government as fixed in King, Lords, and Com- 
 mons, this search for the real organs of power w^as going 
 to the root of the matter in a spirit at once thoroughly 
 scientific and thoroughly practical. Burke had, by the 
 speculative training to which he had submitted himself 
 in dealing with Bolingbroke, prepared his mind for a 
 complete grasp of the idea of the body politic as a com- 
 plex growth, a manifold whole, with closely interdepend- 
 ent relations "kmong its several parts and divisions. It 
 was this conception from which his conservatism sprang. 
 Revolutionary politics have one of their sources in the 
 idea that societies are capable of infinite and immediate 
 modifications, without reference to the deep-rooted condi- 
 tions that have worked themselves into every part of the 
 social structure. 
 
 The same opposition of the positive to the doctrinaire 
 
52 BUKKE. [chap. 
 
 spirit is to be observed in the remarkable vindication of 
 Party, whicli fills the last dozen pages of the pamphlet, 
 and which is one of the most courageous of all Burke's 
 deliverances. Party combination is exactly one of those 
 contrivances which, as it might seem, a wise man would 
 accept for working purposes, but about which he would 
 take care to say as little as possible. There appears to be 
 something revolting to the intellectual integrity and self- 
 respect of the individual, in the systematic surrender of 
 his personal action, interest, and power, to a political con- 
 nexion in which his own judgment may never once be 
 allowed to count for anything. It is like the surrender 
 of the right of private judgment to the authority of the 
 Church, but with its nakedness not concealed by a mystic 
 doctrine. Nothing is more easy to demolish by the bare 
 logical reason. But Burke cared nothing about the bare 
 logical reason, until it had been clothed in convenience 
 and custom, in the affections on one side, and experience 
 on the other. Not content with insisting that for some 
 special purpose of the hour, " when bad men combine, the 
 good must associate," he contended boldly for the merits 
 of fidelity to party combination in itself. Although Burke 
 wrote these strong pages as a reply to Bolingbroke, who 
 had denounced party as an evil, they remain as the best 
 general apology that has ever been offered for that prin- 
 ciple of public action, against more philosophic attacks 
 than Bolino'broke's. Burke admitted that when he saw a 
 man acting a desultory and disconnected part in public 
 life with detriment to his fortune, he was ready to believe 
 such a man to be in earnest, though not ready to believe 
 him to be right. In any case he lamented to see rare 
 and valuable qualities squandered away without any public 
 utility. He admitted, moreover, on the other hand, that 
 
III.] DEFENCE OF PARTY. 63 
 
 people frequently acquired in party confederacies a nar- 
 row, bigoted, and proscriptive spirit. " But where duty 
 renders a critical situation a necessary one, it is our busi- 
 ness to keep free from the evils attendant upon it, and 
 not to fly from the situation itself. It is surely no very 
 rational account of a man that he has always acted right ; 
 but has taken special care to act in such a manner that 
 his endeavours could not possibly be productive of any 
 consequence. . . . When men are not acquainted with each 
 other's principles, nor experienced in each other's talents, 
 nor at all practised in their mutual habitudes and disposi- 
 tions by joint efforts of business ; no personal confidence, 
 no friendship, no common interest subsisting among them ; 
 it is evidently impossible that they can act a public part 
 with uniformity, perseverance, or eflScacy." 
 
 In terras of eloquent eulogy he praised the sacred rev- 
 erence with which the Romans used to regard the neces- 
 situdo sortis, or the relations that grew up between men 
 who had only held office together by the casual fortune 
 of the lot. He pointed out to emulation the Whig junto 
 who held so close together in the reign of Anne — Sunder- 
 land, Godolphin, Somers, and Marlborough — who believed 
 "that no men could act with effect who did not act in 
 concert; that no men could act in concert who did not 
 act with confidence ; and that no men could act with con- 
 fidence who were not bound together by common opin- 
 ions, common affections, and common interests." In read- 
 ing these energetic passages we have to remember two 
 things : first, that the writer assumes the direct object of 
 party combination to be generous, great, and liberal causes ; 
 and, second, that when the time came, and when he be- 
 lieved that his friends were espousing a wrong and per- 
 nicious cause, Burke, like Samson bursting asunder the 
 
64 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 seven green withes, broke away from the friendships of a 
 life, and deliberately broke his party in pieces.^ 
 
 When Burke came to discuss the cure for the disorders 
 of 1770, he insisted on contenting himself with what he 
 ought to have known to be obviously inadequate prescrip- 
 tions. And we cannot help feeling that he never speaks 
 of the constitution of the government of this country 
 without gliding into a fallacy identical with that which he 
 himself described and denounced, as thinking better of the 
 wisdom and power of human legislation than in truth it 
 deserved. He was uniformly consistent in his view of 
 the remedies which the various sections of Opposition pro- 
 posed against the existing debasement and servility of the 
 Lower House. The Duke of Richmond wanted universal 
 suffrage, equal electoral districts, and annual parliaments. 
 Wilkes proposed to disfranchise the rotten boroughs, to 
 increase the county constituencies, and to give members 
 to rich, populous, trading towns — a general policy Avhich 
 was accepted fifty -six years afterwards. The Constitu- 
 tional Society desired frequent parliaments, the exclusion 
 of placemen from the House, and the increase of the coun- 
 ty representation. Burke uniformly refused to give his 
 countenance to any proposals such as these, which involved 
 a clearly organic change in the constitution. He confessed 
 that he had no sort of reliance upon either a triennial par- 
 liament or a place-bill, and with that reasonableness which 
 as a rule was fully as remarkable in him as his eloquence, 
 he shov^ed very good grounds for his want of faith in the 
 popular specifics. In truth, triennial or annual parlia- 
 ments could have done no good, unless the change had 
 been accompanied by the more important process of 
 amputating, as Chatham called it, the rotten boroughs. 
 ^ See on the same subject, Corresp. ii. 276-7. 
 
III.] BURKE'S REMEDIES. 55 
 
 Of these the Crown could at that time reckon some sev- 
 enty as its own property. Besides those which belonged 
 to the Crown, there was also the immense number which 
 belonged to the Peerage. If the King sought to strengthen 
 an administration, the thing needful was not to enlist the 
 services of able and distinguished men, but to conciliate 
 a duke, who brought with him the control of a given 
 quantity of voting power in the Lower House. All this 
 patrician influence, which may be found at the bottom of 
 most of the intrigues of the period, would not have been 
 touched by curtailing the duration of parliaments. 
 
 What then was the remedy, or had Burke no remedy to 
 offer for these grave distempers of Parliament ? Only the 
 remedy of the interposition of the body of the people it- 
 self. We must beware of interpreting this phrase in the 
 modern democratic sense. In 1766 he had deliberately 
 declared that he thought it would be more conformable to 
 the spirit of the constitution, " by lessening the number, 
 to add to the weight and independency of our voters." 
 " Considering the immense and dangerous charge of elec- 
 tions, the prostitute and daring venality, the corruption of 
 manners, the idleness and profligacy of the lower sort of 
 voters, no prudent man would propose to increase such an 
 evil."^ In another place he denies that the people have 
 either enough of speculation in the closet, or of experience 
 in business, to be competent judges, not of the detail of 
 particular measures only, but of general schemes of policy.^ 
 On Burke's theory, the people, as a rule, were no more 
 concerned to interfere with Parliament, than a man is con- 
 cerned to interfere with somebody whom he has voluntari- 
 ly and deliberately made his trustee. But here, he con- 
 
 * Observations on late State of the Nation^ Works, 1. 105, b. 
 ' Speech on Duration of Parliaments. 
 
66 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 fessed, was a sharneful and ruinous breacli of trust. The 
 ordinary rule of government was being every day mis- 
 chievously contemned and daringly set aside. Until the 
 confidence thus outraged should be once more restored, 
 then the people ought to be excited to a niore strict and 
 detailed attention to the conduct of their representatives. 
 The meetings of counties and corporations ought to settle 
 standards for judging more systematically of the behav- 
 iour of those whom they had sent to Parliament. Fre- 
 quent and correct lists of the voters in all important ques- 
 tions ought to be procured. The severest discouragement 
 ought to be given to the pernicious practice of affording a 
 blind and undistinguishing support to every administra- 
 tion. "Parliamentary support comes and goes with oflSce, 
 totally regardless of the man or the merit." For instance, 
 Wilkes's annual motion to expunge the votes upon the 
 Middlesex election had been uniformly rejected, as often 
 as it was made while Lord North was in power. Lord 
 North had no sooner given way to the Eockingham Cabi- 
 net, than the House of Comuions changed its mind, and 
 the resolutions were expunged by a handsome majority of 
 115 to 47. Administration was omnipotent in the House, 
 because it could be a man's most efficient friend at an 
 election, and could most amply reward his fidelity after- 
 wards. Against this system Burke called on the nation 
 to set a stern face. Root it up, he kept crying ; settle the 
 general course in which you desire members to go ; insist 
 that they shall not suffer themselves to be diverted from 
 this by the authority of the government of the day ; let 
 lists of votes be published, so that you may ascertain for 
 yourselves whether your trustees have been faithful or 
 fraudulent; do all this, and there will be no need to re- 
 sort to those organic changes, those empirical innovations, 
 
in.] HIS LOVE OF THE CONSTITUTION. 67 
 
 which may possibly cure, but are much more likely to 
 destroy. 
 
 It is not surprising that so halting a policy should have 
 given deep displeasure to very many, perhaps to most, of 
 those whose only common bond was the loose and negative 
 sentiment of antipathy to the court, the ministry, and the 
 too servile majority of the House of Commons. The Con- 
 stitutional Society was furious. Lord Chatham wrote to 
 Lord Rockingham that the work in which these 'doctrines 
 first appeared must do much mischief to the common 
 cause. But Burke's view of the constitution was a part 
 of his belief with which he never paltered, and on which 
 he surrendered his judgment to no man. " Our constitu- 
 tion," in his opinion, "stands on a nice equipoise, with 
 steep precipices and deep waters upon all sides of it. Li 
 removing it from a dangerous leaning towards one side, 
 there may be a risk of oversetting it on the other." ^ This 
 image was ever before his mind. It occurs again in the 
 last sentence of that great protest against all change and 
 movement, when he describes himself as one who, when 
 the equipoise of the vessel in which he sails may be en- 
 dangered by overloading it upon one side, is desirous of 
 carrying the small weight of his reasons to that which 
 may preserve its equipoise.' AVhen we think of the odi- 
 ous misgovernment in England which the constitution 
 permitted, between the time when Burke wrote and the 
 passing of Lord Sidmouth's Six Acts fifty years later, we 
 may be inclined to class such a constitution among the 
 most inadequate and mischievous political arrangements 
 that any free country has ever had to endure. Yet it was 
 this which Burke declared that he looked upon with filial 
 
 ^ Present Biscotitents. 
 
 ' Reflections on tlie French Revolution, 
 
68 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 reverence. "Never will I cut it in pieces, and put it into 
 the kettle of any magician, in order to boil it with the pud- 
 dle of their compounds into youth and vigour ; on the con- 
 trary, I will drive away such pretenders ; I will nurse its ven- 
 erable age, and with, lenient arts extend a parent's breath." 
 
 He was filled with the spirit, and he borrowed the argu- 
 ments, which have always marked the champion of faith 
 and authority against the impious assault of reason or in- 
 novation. The constitution was sacred to him as the voice 
 of the Church and the oracles of her saints are sacred to 
 the faithful. Study it, he cried, until you know how to 
 admire it, and if you cannot know and admire, rather be- 
 lieve that you are dull, than that the rest of the world has 
 been imposed upon. We ought to understand it accord- 
 ing to our measure, and to venerate where we are not able 
 presently to comprehend. "Well has Burke been called the 
 Bossuet of politics. 
 
 Although, however, Burke's unflinching reverence for 
 the constitution, and his reluctance to lay a finger upon it, 
 may now seem clearly excessive, as it did to Chatham and 
 his son, who were great men in the right, or to Beckford 
 and Sawbridge, who were very little men in the right, we 
 can only be just to him by comparing his ideas with those 
 which were dominant throughout an evil reign. While 
 he opposed more frequent parliaments, he still upheld 
 the doctrine that " to govern according to the sense, and 
 agreeably to the interests, of the people is a great and glo- 
 rious object of government." While he declared himself 
 against the addition of a hundred knights of the shire, he 
 in the very same breath protested that, though the people 
 might be deceived in their choice of an object, he " could 
 scarcely conceive any choice they could make, to be so 
 very mischievous as the existence of any human force ca- 
 
HI.] THE STRUGGLE DECIDED IN AMERICA. 59 
 
 pable of resisting it."^ To us this may seem very mild 
 and commonplace doctrine, but it was not commonplace 
 in an age when Anglican divines — men like Archbishop 
 Markham, Dr. Nowell, or Dr. Porteous — had revived the 
 base precepts of passive obedience and non-resistance, and 
 when such a man as Lord Mansfield encouraged them. 
 And these were the kind of foundations which Burke had 
 been laying, while Fox was yet a Tory, while Sheridan was 
 writing farces, and while Grey was a schoolboy. 
 
 It is, however, almost demonstrably certain that the vin- 
 dication of the supremacy of popular interests over all oth- 
 er considerations would have been bootless toil, and that 
 the great constitutional straggle from 1760 to 1783 would 
 have ended otherwise than it did, but for the failure of the 
 war against the insurgent colonies, and the final establish- 
 ment of American Independence. It was this portentous 
 transaction which finally routed the arbitrary and despotic 
 pretensions of the House of Commons over the people, 
 and which put an end to the hopes entertained by the sov- 
 ereign of making his personal will supreme in the Cham- 
 bers. Fox might well talk of an early Loyalist victory 
 in the war, as the terrible news from Long Island. The 
 struggle which began unsuccessfully at Brentford in Mid- 
 dlesex, was continued at Boston in Massachusetts. The 
 scene had changed, but the conflicting principles were the 
 same. The war of Independence was virtually a second 
 English civil war. The ruin of the American cause would 
 have been also the ruin of the constitutional cause in Eng- 
 land ; and a patriotic Englishman may revere the memory 
 of Patrick Henry and George Washington not less just- 
 ly than the patriotic American. Burke's attitude in this 
 great contest is that part of his history about the majestic 
 and noble wisdom of which there can be least dispute. 
 ^ To the Chairman of the Buchinghamshire Meeting^ 1780. 
 
/ 
 
 CHAPTER ly. 
 
 THE ROCKINGHAM PARTY PARIS ELECTION AT BRISTOL — ■ 
 
 THE AMERICAN WAR. 
 
 The war witli the American colonies was preceded by an 
 interval of stupor. The violent ferment which had been 
 stirred in the nation by the affairs of Wilkes and the Mid- 
 dlesex election was followed, as Burke said, by as remark- 
 able a deadness and vapidity. In 1770 the distracted 
 ministry of the Duke of Grafton came to an end, and was 
 succeeded by that of Lord North. The King liad at last 
 triumphed. He had secured an administration of which 
 the fundamental principle was that the sovereign was to. 
 be the virtual head of it, and the real director of its coun-^^ 
 sels. Lord North's government lasted for twelve years, 
 and its career is for ever associated with one of the most 
 momentous chapters in the history of the English nation 
 and of free institutions. 
 
 Through this long and eventful period, Burke's was as 
 the voice of one crying in the wilderness. He had be- 
 come important enough for the ministry to think it worth 
 while to take pains to discredit him. They busily encour- 
 aged the report that he was Junius, or a close ally to Ju- 
 nius. This was one of the minor vexations of Burke's mid- 
 dle life. Even his friends continued to torment him for 
 incessant disclaimers. Burke's lofty pride made him slow 
 to deal positively with what he scorned as a malicious and 
 
CHAP. IV.] BURKE AND JUNIUS. 61 
 
 unworthy imputation. To such a friend as Johnson ho 
 did not, as we have seen, disdain to volunteer a denial, but 
 Charles Townshend was forced to write more than one im- 
 portunate letter before he could extract from Burke the 
 definite sentence (Nov. 24, lV7l) : "I now give you my 
 word and honour that I am not the author of Junius, and 
 that I know not the author of that paper, and I do author- 
 ize you to say so." Nor was this the only kind of annoy- 
 ance to which he was subjected. His rising fame kindled 
 the candour of the friends of his youth. With proverbial 
 good - nature, they admonished him that he did not bear 
 instruction ; that he showed such arrogance as in a man 
 of his condition was intolerable ; that he snapped furious- 
 ly at his parliamentary foes, like a wolf who had broken 
 into the fold ; that his speeclfes were useless declamations ; 
 and that he disgraced the House b}'' the scurrilities of the 
 bear-garden. These sharp chastenings of friendship Burke 
 endured with the perfect self-command, not of the cold 
 and indifferent egotist, but of one who had trained himself 
 not to expect too much from men. He possessed the true 
 solace for all private chagrins in the activity and the fer- 
 vour of his public interests. 
 
 In 1772 the affairs of the East India Company, and its 
 relations with the Government, had fallen into disorder. 
 The Opposition, though powerless in the Houses of Par- 
 liament, were often able to thwart the views of the minis- 
 try in the imperial board-room in Leadenhall Street. The 
 Duke of Richmond was as zealous and as active in his op- 
 position to Lord North in the business of the East Indies 
 as he was in the business of the country at Westminster. 
 A proposal was made to Burke to go out to India at the 
 head of a commission of three supervisors, with authority 
 to examine the concerns of every department, and full 
 
62 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 powers of control over the company's servants. Though 
 this offer was pressed by the directors, Burke, after anxious 
 consideration, declined it. What his reasons were, there is 
 no evidence ; we can only guess that he thought less of his 
 personal interests than of those of the country and of his 
 party. Without him the Rockingham connexion would 
 undoubtedly have fallen to ruin, and with it the most up- 
 right, consistent, and disinterested body of men then in 
 public life. " You say," the Duke of Richmond wrote to 
 him (Nov. 15, 1V72), "the party is an object of too much 
 importance to go to pieces. Indeed, Burke, you have 
 more merit than any man in keeping us together." It 
 was the character of the party, almost as much as their 
 principles, that secured Burke's zeal and attachment ; their 
 decorum, their constancy, their aversion to all cabals for 
 private objects, their indifference to office, except as an in- 
 strument of power and a means of carrying out the policy 
 of their convictions. They might easily have had office, 
 if they would have come in upon the King's terms. A 
 year after his fall from power. Lord Rockingham was sum- 
 moned to the royal closet, and pressed to resume his post. 
 But office at any price was not in their thoughts. They 
 knew the penalties of their system, and they clung to it 
 undeterred. Their patriotism was deliberate and consid- 
 ered. Chalcedon was called the city of the blind, because 
 its founders wilfully neglected the more glorious site of 
 Byzantium which lay under their eyes. " We have built 
 our Chalcedon," said Burke, "with the chosen part of 
 the universe full in our prospect." They had the faults to 
 which an aristocratic party in opposition is naturally liable. 
 Burke used to reproach them with being somewhat lan- 
 guid, scrupulous, and unsystematic. He could not make 
 the Duke of Richmond put off a large party at Goodwood 
 
IT.] THE ROCKIXGHAM PARTY. C3 
 
 for the sake of an important division in the House of 
 Lords ; and he did not always agree with Lord John Cav- 
 endish as to what constitutes a decent and reasonable quan- 
 tity of fox-hunting for a political leader in a crisis. But 
 it was part of the steadfastness of his whole life to do his 
 best with such materials as he could find ; he did not lose 
 patience nor abate his effort, because his friends would 
 miss the opportunity of a great political stroke, rather than 
 they would miss Newmarket Races. He wrote their pro- 
 tests for the House of Lords, composed petitions for coun- 
 ty meetings, drafted resolutions, and plied them with in- 
 formation, ideas, admonitions, and exhortations. Never 
 before nor since has our country seen so extraordinary a 
 union of the clever and indefatigable party-manager, with, 
 the reflective and philosophic habits of the speculative 
 publicist. It is much easier to make either absolutism or 
 democracy attractive than aristocracy ; yet we see how 
 consistent with his deep moral conservatism was Burke's 
 attachment to an aristocratic party, when we read his ex- 
 hortation to the Duke of Richmond to remember that per- , 
 sons in his high station of life ought to have long views. 
 "You people," he writes to the Duke (November 17, 
 1772), "of great families and hereditary trusts and fort- 
 unes, are not like such as I am, who, whatever we may be, 
 by the rapidity of our growth, and even by the fruit we 
 bear, and flatter ourselves that, while we creep on the 
 ground, we belly into melons that are exquisite for size 
 and flavour, yet still we are but annual plants that perish 
 with our season, and leave no sort of traces behind us. 
 You, if you are what you ought to be, are in my eye the 
 great oaks that shade a country, and perpetuate your ben- 
 efits from generation to generation. The immediate pow- 
 er of a Duke of Richmond, or a Marquis of Rockingham. 
 
64 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 is not so much of moment ; but if their conduct and ex- 
 iraple hand down their principles to their successors, then 
 their houses become the public repositories and office of 
 record for the constitution. ... I do not look upon your 
 time or lives as lost, if in this sliding away from the genu- 
 ine spirit of the country, certain parties, if possible — if not, 
 the heads of certain families — should make it their busi- 
 ness by the whole course of their lives, principally by their 
 example, to mould into the very vital stamina of their de- 
 scendants, those principles which ought to be transmitted 
 pure and unmixed to posterity." 
 
 Perhaps such a passage as this ought to be described 
 less as reflection than as imagination — moral, historic, con- 
 servative imagination — in which order, social continuity, 
 and the endless projection of past into present, and of pres- 
 ent into future, are clothed with the sanctity of an inner 
 shrine. We may think that a fox-hunting duke and a 
 racing marquis were very poor centres round which to 
 group these high emotions. But Burke had no puny sen- 
 timentalism, and none of the mere literary or romantic 
 conservatism of men like Chateaubriand. He lived in the 
 real world, and not in a false dream of some past world 
 that had never been. He saw that the sporting squires of 
 his party were as much the representatives of ancestral 
 force and quality, as in older days were long lines of 
 Claudii and Valerii. His conservative doctrine was a pro- 
 found instinct, in part political, but in greater part moral. 
 The accidental roughness of the symbol did not touch him, 
 for the symbol was glorified by the sincerity of his faith 
 and the compass of his imagination. 
 
 With these ideas strong within him, in 1773 Burke 
 made a journey to France. It was almost as though the 
 solemn hierophant of some mystic Egyptian temple should 
 
IV.] JOURNEY TO FRANCE. 65 
 
 have found himself amid the brilliant chatter of a band 
 of reckless, keen-tongued disputants of the garden or the 
 porch at Athens. His only son had just finished a suc- 
 cessful school-course at AVestminster, and was now entered 
 a student at Christ Church. He was still too young for 
 the university, and Burke thought that a year could not 
 be more profitably spent than in forming his tongue to 
 foreign languages. The boy was placed at Auxerre, in the 
 house of the business agent of the BisTiop of Auxerre. 
 From the Bishop he received many kindnesses, to be am- 
 ply repaid in after-years when the Bishop came in his old 
 age, an exile and a beggar, to England. 
 
 While in Paris, Burke did all that he could to instruct 
 himself as to what was going on in French society. If he 
 had not the dazzling reception which had greeted Hume 
 in 1764, at least he had ample opportunities of acquaint- 
 ing himself with the prevailing ideas of the times, in more 
 than one of the social camps into which Paris was then 
 divided. Madame du Deffand tells the Duchess of Choi- 
 seul that though he speaks French extremely ill, everybody 
 felt that he would be infinitely agreeable if he could more 
 easily make himself understood. He followed French well 
 enough as a listener, and went every day to the courts to 
 hear the barristers and watch the procedure. Madame du 
 Deffand showed him all possible attention, and her friends 
 eagerly seconded her. She invited him to supper parties 
 where he met the Count de Broglie, the agent of the king's 
 secret diplomacy ; Caraccioli, successor of the nimble-wit- 
 ted Galiani as minister from Naples; and other notabilities 
 of the high world. He supped with the Duchess of Lux- 
 embourg, and heard a reading of La Harpe's Barmecides. 
 It was high treason in this circle to frequent the rival salon 
 of Mademoiselle Lespinasse, but either the law was relaxed 
 4 
 
66 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 in the case of foreigners, or else Burke kept his own coun- 
 sel. Here were for the moment the headquarters of the 
 party of innovation, and here he saw some of the men who 
 were busily forging- the thunderbolts. His eye was on the 
 alert, now as always, for anything that might light up the 
 sovereign problems of human government. A book, by a 
 member of this circle, had appeared six months before, 
 which was still the talk of the town, and against which the 
 government had taken the usual impotent measures of re- 
 pression. This was the Treatise on Tactics, by a certain 
 M. de Guibert, a colonel of the Corsican legion. The im- 
 portant part of the work was the introduction, in which 
 the writer examined with what was then thought extraor- 
 dinary hardihood, the social and political causes of the de- 
 cline of the military art in France. Burke read it with 
 keen interest and energetic approval. He was present at 
 the reading of a tragedy by the same author, and gave 
 some offence to the rival coterie by preferring Guibert's 
 tragedy to La Harpe's. To us, however, of a later day, 
 Guibert is known neither for his tragedy nor his essay on 
 tactics, nor for a memory so rapid that he could open a 
 book, throw one glance like a flash of lightning on to a 
 page, and then instantly repeat from it half a dozen lines 
 word for word. He lives in literature as the inspirer of 
 that ardent passion of Mademoiselle Lespinasse's letters, so 
 unique in their consuming intensity that, as has been said, 
 they seem to burn the page on which they are written. It 
 was, perhaps, at Mademoiselle Lespinasse's that Burke met 
 Diderot. The eleven volumes of the illustrative plates of 
 the Encyclopaedia had been given to the public twelve 
 months before, and its editor was just released from the 
 gianVs toil of twenty years. Yoltaire was in imperial exile 
 at Ferney. Rousseau was copying music in a garret in the 
 
IV.] JOURNEY TO FRANCE. 67 
 
 street which is now called after his name, but he had long 
 ago cut himself off from society ; and Burke was not like- 
 ly to take much trouble to find out a man whom he had 
 known in England seven years before, and against whom 
 he had conceived a strong and lasting antipathy, as enter- 
 taining no principle either to influence his heart or to 
 guide his understanding save a deranged and eccentric 
 vanity. 
 
 It was the fashion for English visitors to go to Versailles. 
 They saw the dauphin and his brothers dine in public, be- 
 fore a crowd of princes of the blood, nobles, abbes, and all 
 the miscellaneous throng of a court. They attended mass 
 in the chapel, where the old King, surrounded by bishops, 
 sat in a pew just above that of Madame du Barri. The 
 royal mistress astonished foreigners by hair without pow- 
 der and cheeks without rouge, the simplest toilettes, and 
 the most unassuming manners. Vice itself, in Burke's 
 famous words, seemed to lose half its evil by losing all its 
 grossness. And there, too, Burke had that vision to which 
 we owe one of the most gorgeous pages in our literature — - 
 Marie Antoinette, the young dauphiness, "decorating and 
 cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in, 
 glittering like the morning-star, full of life and splendour 
 and joy." The shadow was rapidly stealing on. The 
 year after Burke's visit, the scene underwent a strange 
 transformation. The King died; the mistress was ban- 
 ished in luxurious exile ; and the dauphiness became the 
 ill-starred Queen of France. Burke never forgot the emo- 
 tions of the scene ; they awoke in his imagination sixteen 
 years after, when all w^as changed, and the awful contrast 
 shook him with a passion that his eloquence has made 
 immortal. 
 
 Madame du Deffand wrote to Horace Walpole that 
 
68 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 Burke had been so well received, that he ought to leave 
 France excellently pleased with the country. But it was 
 not so. His spirit was perturbed by what he had listened 
 to. He came away with small esteem for that busy fer- 
 mentation of intellect in which his French friends most 
 exulted, and for which they looked forward to the grati- 
 tude and admiration of posterity. From the spot on 
 which he stood there issued two mighty streams. It was 
 from the ideas of the Parisian Freethinkers whom Burke 
 so detested, that Jefferson, Franklin, and Henry drew those 
 theories of human society which were so soon to find life 
 In American Independence. It was from the same ideas 
 that later on that revolutionary tide surged forth, in which 
 Burke saw no elements of a blessed fertility, but only a 
 horrid torrent of red and desolating Java. In 1773 there 
 was a moment of strange repose in Western Europe, the 
 little break of stillness that precedes the hurricane. It 
 was, indeed, the eve of a momentous epoch. Before six- 
 teen years were over, the American Republic had risen like 
 a new constellation into the firmament, and the French 
 monarchy, of such antiquity and fame and high pre-emi- 
 nence in European history, had been shattered to the dust. 
 We may not agree with Burke's appreciation of the forces 
 that were behind these vast convulsions. But at least he 
 saw, and saw with eyes of passionate alarm, that strong 
 speculative forces were at work, which must violently 
 prove the very bases of the great social superstructure, 
 and might not improbably break them up for ever. 
 
 Almost immediately after his return from France, he 
 sounded a shrill note of warning. Some Methodists from 
 Chatham had petitioned Parliament against a bill for 
 the relief of Dissenters from subscription to the Articles. 
 Burke denounced the intolerance of the petitioners. It is 
 
IV.] ATTITUDE OF AMERICA 69 
 
 not the Dissenters, lie cried, whom you have to fear, but 
 the men who, " not contented with endeavouring to turn 
 your eyes from the blaze and effulgence of light, by which 
 life and immortality is so gloriously demonstrated by the 
 Gospel, would even extinguish that faint glimmering of 
 Nature, that only comfort supplied to ignorant man before 
 this great illumination. . . . These are the people against 
 whom you ought to aim the shaft of the law; these are 
 the men to whom, arrayed in all the terrors of government,' 
 I would say, * You shall not degrade us into brutes.' . . . 
 The most horrid and cruel blow that can be offered to civil 
 society is through atheism. . . . The infidels are outlaws 
 of the constitution, not of this country, but of the human 
 race. They are never, never to be supported, never to be 
 tolerated. Under the systematic attacks of these people, I 
 see some of the props of good government already begin 
 to fail ; I see propagated principles which will not leave to 
 religion even a toleration. I see myself sinking every day 
 under the attacks of these wretched people."^ To this 
 pitch he had been excited by the vehement band of men, 
 who had inscribed on their standard Ecraser Vlnfame. 
 
 The second Parliament in which Burke had a seat was 
 difssolved suddenly and without warning (October, 1774). 
 The attitude of America was threatening, and it was be- 
 lieved the Ministers were anxious to have the elections 
 over before the state of things became worse. The whole 
 kingdom was instantly in a ferment. Couriers, chaises, 
 post-horses hurried in every direction over the island, and 
 it was noted, as a measure of the agitation, that no fewer 
 than sixty messengers passed through a single turnpike on 
 one day. Sensible observers were glad to think that, in 
 * Speech on Relief of Protestant Dissenters^ 1773. 
 
70 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 consequence of the rapidity of the elections, less wine and 
 money would be wasted than at any election for sixty 
 years past. Burke had a houseful of company at Beacons- 
 field when the news ariived. Johnson was among them, 
 and as the party was hastily breaking up, the old Tory, 
 took his Whig friend kindly by the hand : " Farewell, my 
 dear sir," he said, " and remember that I wish you all the 
 success that ought to be wished to you, and can possibly 
 be wished to you, by an honest man." 
 
 The words were of good omen. Burke was now re- 
 warded by the discovery that his labours had earned for 
 him recognition and gratitude beyond the narrow limits 
 of a rather exclusive party. He had before this attracted 
 the attention of the mercantile public. The Company of 
 Merchants trading to Africa voted him their thanks for his 
 share in supporting their establishments. The Committee 
 of Trade at Manchester formally returned him their grate- 
 ful acknowledgments for the active part that he had taken 
 in the business of the Jamaica free ports. But then Man- 
 chester returned no representative to Parliament. In two 
 Parliaments Burke had been elected for Wendover free of 
 expense. Lord Verney's circumstances were now so em- 
 barrassed, that he was obliged to part with the four seats 
 at his disposal to men who could pay for them. There 
 had been some talk of proposing Burke for Westminster, 
 and Wilkes, who was then omnipotent, promised him the 
 support of the popular party. But the patriot's memory 
 was treacherous, and he speedily forgot, for reasons of his 
 own, an idea that had originated with himself. Burke's 
 constancy of spirit was momentarily overclouded. *' Some- 
 times when I am alone," he wrote to Lord Rockingham 
 (September 15, 1774), "in spite of all my efforts, I fall 
 into a melancholy which is inexpressible, and to which, if 
 
IV.] ELECTED FOR BRISTOL. H 
 
 I gave way, I should not continue long under it, but must 
 totally sink. Yet I do assure you that partly, and indeed 
 principally, by the force of natural good spirits, and partly 
 by a strong sense of what I ought to do, I bear up so well 
 that no one who did not know them could easily discover 
 the state of m'y mind or my circumstances. I have those 
 that. are dear to me, for whom I must live as long as God 
 pleases, and in what way he pleases. Whether I ought 
 not totally to abandon this public station for which I am 
 so unfit, and have of course been so unfortunate, I know 
 not." But he was always saved from rash retirement from 
 public business by two reflections. He doubted whether 
 a man has a right to retire after he has once gone a certain 
 length in these things. And he remembered that there 
 are often obscure vexations in the most private life, which 
 as effectually destroy a man's peace as anything that can 
 occur in public contentions. 
 
 Lord Rockingham offered his influence on behalf of 
 Burke at Malton, one of the family boroughs in Yorkshire, 
 and thither Burke in no high spirits betook himself. On 
 his way to the north he heard that he had been nominated 
 for Bristol, but the nomination had, for certain electioneer- 
 ing reasons, not been approved by the party. As it hap- 
 pened, Burke was no sooner chosen at Malton than, owing 
 to an unexpected turn of affairs at Bristol, the idea of pro- 
 posing him for a candidate revived. Messengers were sent 
 express to his house in London, and, not finding him there, 
 they hastened down to Yorkshire. Burke quickly resolved 
 that the offer was too important to be rejected. Bristol 
 was the capital of the west, and it was still in wealth, pop- 
 ulation, and mercantile activity the second city of the king- 
 dom. To be invited to stand for so great a constituency, 
 without any request of his own and free of personal ex- 
 
12 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 pense, was a distinction whicTi no politician could hold 
 lightly. Burke rose from the table where he was dining 
 with some of his supporters, stepped into a post-chaise at 
 six on a Tuesday evening, and travelled without a break 
 until he reached Bristol on the Thursday afternoon, hav- 
 ing got over two hundred and seventy miles in forty-four 
 hours. Not only did he execute the journey without a 
 break, but, as he told the people of Bristol, with an exult- 
 ing commemoration of his own zeal that recalls Cicero, he 
 did not sleep for an instant in the interval. The poll was 
 kept open for a month, and the contest vf as the most tedi- 
 ous that had ever been known in the city, New freemen 
 were admitted down to the very last day of the election. 
 At the end of it, Burke was second on the poll, and was 
 declared to be duly chosen (November 3, 1774). There 
 was a petition against his return, but the election was con- 
 firmed, and he continued to sit for Bristol for six years. 
 
 The situation of a candidate is apt to find out a man^s 
 weaker places. Burke stood the test. He showed none 
 of the petulant rage of those clamorous politicians whose 
 flight, as he said, is winged in a lower region of the air. 
 As the traveller stands on the noble bridge that now spans 
 the valley of the Avon, he may recall Burke's local com- 
 parison of these busy, angry familiars of an election, to the 
 gulls that skim the mud of the river when it is exhausted 
 of its tide. He gave his new friends a more important 
 lesson, when the time came for him to thank them for the 
 honour which they had just conferred upon him. His 
 colleague had opened the subject of the relations between 
 a member of Parliament and his constituents; and had 
 declared that, for his own part, he should regard the in- 
 structions of the people of Bristol as decisive and binding. 
 Burke in a weighty passage upheld a manlier doctrine. 
 
IV.] RELATIONS WITH HIS CONSTITUENTS. 73 
 
 " Certainly, gentlemen, it ought to be the happiness and glory of a 
 representative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspond- 
 ence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents. 
 Their wishes ought to have great weight with him ; their opinions 
 high respect, their business unremitted attention. It is his duty to 
 sacrifice his repose, his pleasure, his satisfactions, to theirs ; and above 
 all, ever, and: in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own. But his 
 unbiassed opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, 
 he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men 
 living. Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his 
 judgment ; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it 
 to your opinion. 
 
 "My worthy colleague says, his will ought to be subservient to 
 yours. If that be all, the thing is innocent. If government were a 
 matter of will upon any side, yours, without question, ought to be su- 
 perior. But government and legislation are matters of reason and 
 judgment, and not of inclination ; and what sort of reason is that in 
 which the determination precedes the discussion, in which one set of 
 men deliberate and another decide, and where those who form the 
 conclusion are perhaps three hundred miles distant from those who 
 hear the arguments? . . . Authoritative instructions, mandates is- 
 sued, which the member is bound blindly and implicitly to obey, to 
 vote and to argue for, though contrary to the clearest convictions of 
 his judgment and conscience — these are things utterly unknown to 
 the laws of this land, and which arise from a fundamental mistake 
 of the whole order and tenour of our Constitution."* 
 
 For six years the British electors were content to be 
 represented by a man of this independence. They never, 
 however, really acquiesced in the principle that a member 
 of Parliament owes as much to his own convictions as to 
 the will of his constituents. In 1778 a bill was brought 
 into Parliament, relaxing some of the restrictions imposed 
 upon Ireland by the atrocious fiscal policy of Great Brit- 
 ain. The great mercantile centres raised a furious outcry, 
 and Bristol was as blind and as boisterous as Manchester 
 * Speech at the conclusion of the Poll. 
 4* 
 
74 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 and Glasgow. Burke not only spoke and voted in favour 
 of the commercial propositions, but urged that the pro- 
 posed removal of restrictions on Irish trade did not go 
 nearly far enough. There was none of that too familiar 
 casuistry, by which public men argue themselves out of 
 their consciences in a strange syllogism, that they can best 
 serve the country in Parliament ; that to keep their seats 
 they must follow their electors ; and that therefore, in the 
 long run, they serve the country best by acquiescing in ig- 
 norance and prejudice. Anybody can denounce an abuse. 
 It needs valour and integrity to stand forth against a wrong 
 to which our best friends are most ardently committed. 
 It warms our hearts to think of the noble courage with 
 which Burke faced the blind and vile selfishness of his 
 own supporters. He reminded them that England only 
 consented to leave to the Irish, in two or three instances, 
 the use of the natural faculties which God had given them. 
 He asked them whether Ireland was united to Great Brit- 
 ain for no other purpose than that we should counteract 
 the bounty of Providence in her favour ; and whether, in 
 proportion as that bounty had been liberal, we were to re- 
 gard it as an evil to be met with every possible corrective ? 
 In our day there is nobody of any school who doubts that 
 Burke's view of our trade policy towards Ireland was ac- 
 curately, absolutely, and magnificently right. I need not 
 repeat the arguments. They made no mark on the Bris- 
 tol merchants. Burke boldly told them that he would 
 rather run the risk of displeasing than of injuring them. 
 They implored him to become their advocate. " I should 
 only disgrace myself," he said ; " I should lose the only 
 thing which can make such abilities as mine of any use to 
 the world now or hereafter. I mean that authority which 
 is derived from the opinion that a member speaks the Ian- 
 
IV.] RELATIONS WITH HIS CONSTITUENTS. 15 
 
 guage of truth and sincerity, and that he is not ready to 
 take up or lay down a great political system for the con- 
 venience of the hour ; that he is in Parliament to support 
 his opinion of the public good, and does not form his opin- 
 ion in order to get into Parliament or to continue in it."^ 
 
 A small instalment of humanity to Ireland was not 
 more distasteful to the electors of Bristol, than a small 
 instalment of toleration to Roman Catholics in England. 
 A measure was passed (iTTS) repealing certain iniquitous 
 penalties created by an act of William the Third. It is 
 needless to say that this rudimentary concession to justice 
 and sense was supported by Burke. His voters began to 
 believe that those were right who had said that he had 
 been bred at Saint Omer's, was a Papist at heart, and a 
 Jesuit in disguise. When the time came, summa dies et 
 ineluctahile fatum, Burke bore with dignity and temper 
 his dismissal from the only independent constituency that 
 he ever represented. Years before he had warned a young 
 man entering public life to regard and wish well to the 
 common people, whom his best instincts and his highest 
 duties lead him to love and to serve, but to put as little 
 trust in them as in princes. Burke somewhere describes 
 an honest public life as carrying on a poor unequal conflict 
 against the passions and prejudices of our day, perhaps 
 with no better weapons than passions and prejudices of 
 our own. 
 
 The six years during which Burke sat in Parliament for 
 Bristol saw this conflict carried on under the most des- 
 perate circumstances. They were the years of the civil 
 war between the English at home and the English in the 
 American colonies. George III. and Lord North have been 
 made scapegoats for sins which were not exclusively their 
 ^ Two letters to gentlemen in Bristol^ 1118. 
 
76 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 own. They were only the organs and representatives of 
 all the lurking ignorance and arbitrary humours of the en- 
 tire community. Burke discloses in many places, that for 
 once the King and Parliament did not act without the 
 sympathies of the mass. In his famous speech at Bristol, 
 in 1780, he v/as rebuking the intolerance of those who 
 bitterly taunted him for the support of the measure for 
 the relaxation of the Penal Code. " It is but too true," 
 he said in a passage worth remembering, " that the love, 
 and even the very idea, of genuine liberty is extremely 
 rare. It is but too true that there are many whose whole 
 scheme of freedom is made up of pride, perverseness, and 
 insolence. They feel themselves in a state of thraldom ; 
 they imagine that their souls are cooped and cabined in, 
 unless they have some man, or some body of men, depend- 
 ent on their mercy. The desire of having some one below 
 them descends to those who are the very lowest of all ; 
 and a Protestant cobbler, debased by his poverty, but ex- 
 alted by his share of the ruling church, feels a pride in 
 knowing it is by his generosity alone that the peer, whose 
 footman's instep he measures, is able to keep his chaplain 
 from a gaol. This disposition is the true source of the 
 passion which many men, in very humble life, have taken 
 to the American war. Our subjects in America ; our 
 colonies; our dependents. This lust of party power is 
 the liberty they hunger and thirst for ; and this Siren 
 song of ambition has charmed ears that we would have 
 thought were never organized to that sort of music." 
 
 This was the mental attitude of a majority of the nation, 
 and it was fortunate for them and for us that the yeomen 
 and merchants on the other side of the Atlantic had a 
 more just and energetic appreciatiou of the crisis. The 
 insurgents, while achieving their own freedom, were indi- 
 
IV.] THE AMERICAN WAR. 77 
 
 rectly engaged in fighting the battle of the people of the 
 mother country as well. Burke had a vehement corre- 
 spondent who wrote to him (1111) that if the utter ruin 
 of this country were to be the consequence of her persist- 
 inn; in the claim to tax America, then he would be the first 
 to say, Let her perish ! If England prevails, said Horace 
 Walpole, English and American liberty is at an end ; if 
 one fell, the other would fall with it. Burke, seeing this, 
 " certainly never could and never did wish," as he says of 
 himself, " the colonists to be subdued by arms. He was 
 fully persuaded that if such should be the event, they must 
 be held in that subdued state by a great body of standing 
 forces, and perhaps of foreign forces. He was strongly of 
 opinion that such armies, first victorious over Englishmen, 
 in a conflict for English constitutional rights and priv- 
 ileges, and afterwards habituated (though in America) to 
 keep an English people in a state of abject subjection, 
 would prove fatal in the end to the liberties of England 
 itself."^ The way for this remote peril was being sedu- 
 lously prepared by a widespread deterioration among pop- 
 ular ideas, and a fatal relaxation of the hold which they 
 had previously gained in the public mind. In order to 
 prove that the Americans had no right to their liberties, 
 we were every day endeavouring to subvert the maxims 
 which preserve the whole spirit of our own. To prove 
 that the Americans ought not to be free, we were obliged 
 to depreciate the value of freedom itself. The material 
 strength of the Government, and its moral strength alike, 
 would have been reinforced by the defeat of the colonists, 
 to such an extent as to have seriously delayed or even 
 jeopardized English progress, and therefore that of Europe 
 too. As events actually fell out, the ferocious administra- 
 * Appeal from, the new to the old Whigs. 
 
78 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 tion of the law in the last five or six years of the eigh- 
 teenth century, was the retribution for the lethargy or ap- 
 proval with which the mass of the English community had 
 watched the measures of the government against their fel- 
 low-Englishmen in America. 
 
 It is not necessary here to follow Burke minutely 
 through the successive stages of parliamentary action in 
 the American war. He always defended the settlement of 
 1766 ; the Stamp Act was repealed, and the constitutional 
 supremacy and sovereign authority of the mother country 
 was preserved in a Declaratory Act. When the project 
 of taxing the colonies was revived, and relations with them 
 were becoming strained and dangerous, Burke came for- 
 ward with a plan for leaving the General Assemblies of 
 the colonies to grant supplies and aids, instead of giving 
 and granting supplies in Parliament, to be raised and paid 
 in the colonies. Needless to say that it was rejected, and 
 perhaps it was not feasible. Henceforth Burke could only 
 watch in impotence the blunders of government, and the 
 disasters that befell the national arms. But his protests 
 against the war will last as long as our literature. 
 
 Of all Burke's writings none are so fit to secure unqual- 
 ified and unanimous admiration as the three pieces on this 
 momentous struggle: the Speech on American Taxation 
 (April 19, 1774) ; the Speech on Conciliation with Amer- 
 ica (March 22, 1775); and the Letter to the Sheriffs of 
 Bristol (1777). Together they hardly exceed the compass 
 of the little volume which the reader now has in his hands. 
 It is no exaggeration to say that they compose the most 
 perfect manual in our literature, or in any literature, for 
 one who approaches the study of public affairs, whether 
 for knowledge or for practice. They are an example with- 
 out fault of all the qualities which the critic, whether a 
 
IV.] THE AMERICAN WAR. '79 
 
 theorist or an actor, of great political situations sliould 
 strive by night and by day to possess. If the subject with 
 which they deal were less near than it is to our interests 
 and affections as free citizens, these three performances 
 would still abound in the lessons of an incomparable polit- 
 ical method. If their subject were as remote as the quar- 
 rel between the Corinthians and Corcyra, or the war be- 
 tween Rome and the Allies, instead of a conflict to which 
 the world owes the opportunity of the most important of 
 political experiments, we should still have everything to 
 learn from the author's treatment; the vigorous grasp of 
 masses of compressed detail, the wide illumination from 
 great principles of human experience, the strong and mas- 
 culine feeling for the two great political ends of Justice 
 and Freedom, the large and generous interpretation of ex- 
 pediency, the morality, the vision, the noble temper. If 
 ever, in the fulness of time — and surely the fates of men 
 and literature cannot have it otherwise — Burke becomes one 
 of the half-dozen names of established and universal cur- 
 rency in education and in common books, rising above the 
 waywardness of literary caprice or intellectual fashions, as 
 Shakespere and Milton and Bacon rise above it, it will be 
 the mastery, the elevation, the wisdom, of these far-shining 
 discourses in which the world will in an especial degree 
 recognize the combination of sovereign gifts with benefi- 
 cent uses. 
 
 The pamphlet on the Present Discontents is partially 
 obscured or muffled to the modern reader by the space 
 which is given to the cabal of the day. The Reflections 
 on the French Revolution over-abounds in declamation, and 
 — apart from its being passionately on one side, and that 
 perhaps the wrong one — the splendour of the eloquence is 
 out of proportion to the reason and the judgment. In the 
 
80 BUKKE. [chap. 
 
 pieces on the American war, on tlie contrary, Burke was 
 conscious that he could trust nothing to the sympathy or 
 the prepossessions of his readers, and this put him upon an 
 unwonted persuasiveness. Here it is reason and judgment, 
 not declamation ; lucidity, not passion ; that produces the 
 effects of eloquence. No choler mars the page ; no purple 
 patch distracts our minds from the penetrating force of the 
 argument ; no commonplace is dressed up into a vague sub- 
 limity. The cause of freedom is made to wear its own 
 proper robe of equity, self-control, and reasonableness. 
 
 Not one, but all those great Idols of the political market- 
 place whose worship and service has cost the race so dear, 
 are discovered and sbown to be the foolish uncouth stocks 
 and stones that they are. Fox once urged members of 
 parliament to peruse the speech on Conciliation again and 
 again, to study it, to imprint it on their minds, to impress 
 it on their hearts. But Fox only referred to the lesson 
 which he thought to be contained in it, that representa- 
 tion is the sovereign remedy for every evil. This is by 
 far the least important of its lessons. It is great in many 
 ways. It is greatest as a remonstrance and an answer 
 against the thriving sophisms of barbarous national pride, 
 the eternal fallacies of war and conquest ; and here it is 
 great, as all the three pieces on the subject are so, because 
 they expose with unanswerable force the deep-lying faults 
 of heart and temper, as well as of understanding, which 
 move nations to haughty and violent courses. 
 
 The great argument with those of the war party who 
 pretended to a political defence of their position was the 
 doctrine that the English government was sovereign in the 
 colonies as at home ; and in the notion of sovereignty they 
 found inherent the notion of an indefeasible right to im- 
 pose and exact taxes. Having satisfied themselves of the 
 
IV.] THE AMERICAN WAR. 81 
 
 existence of this sovereignty, and of the right which they 
 took to be its natural property, they saw no step between 
 the existence of an abstract right and the propriety of en- 
 forcing it. "We have seen an instance of a similar mode of 
 political thinking in our own lifetime. During the great 
 civil war between the Northern and Southern States of the 
 American Union, people in England convinced themselves 
 — some after careful examination of documents, others by. 
 cursory glances at second-hand authorities — that the South 
 had a right to secede. The current of opinion was pre- 
 cisely similar in the struggle to which the United States 
 owed their separate existence. Now the idea of a right as 
 a mysterious and reverend abstraction, to be worshipped in 
 a state of naked divorce from expediency and convenience, 
 was one that Burke's political judgment found preposter- 
 ous and unendurable. He hated the arbitrary and despotic 
 savour which clung about the English assumptions over 
 the colonies. And his repulsion was heightened when he 
 found that these assumptions were justified, not by some 
 permanent advantage which their victory would procure 
 for the mother country or for the colonies, or which would 
 repay the cost of gaining such a victory ; not by the asser- 
 tion and demonstration of some positive duty, but by the 
 futile and meaningless doctrine that we had a right to do 
 something or other, if we liked. 
 
 The alleged compromise of the national dignity implied 
 in a withdrawal of the just claim of the government, in- 
 stead of convincing, only exasperated him. "Show the 
 thing you contend for to be reason ; show it to be com- 
 mon-sense ; show it to be the means of attaining some use- 
 ful end ; and then I am content to allow it what dignity 
 you please."^ The next year he took up the ground still 
 ' Speech on American Taxation. 
 
82 BUEKE. [chap. 
 
 more firmly, and explained it still more impressively. As 
 for the question of the right of taxation, he exclaimed, 
 " It is less than nothing in ray consideration. . . . My con- 
 sideration is narrow, confined, and wholly limited to the 
 policy of the question. I do not examine whether the 
 giving away a man's money be a power excepted and re- 
 served out of the general trust of Government. . . . The 
 question with me is not whether you have a right to ren- 
 der your people miserable, but whether it is not your inter- 
 est to make them happy. It is not what a lawyer tells me 
 I may do, but what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I 
 ought to do. I am not determining a point of law ; I am 
 restoring tranquillity, and the general character and situa- 
 tion of a people must determine what sort of government 
 is fitted for them." " I am not here going into the dis- 
 tinctions of rights," he cries, "not attempting to mark 
 their boundaries. I do not enter into these metaphysical 
 distinctions. / hate the very sound of them. This is the 
 true touchstone of all theories which regard man and the 
 affairs of man : does it suit his nature in general ? does it 
 suit his nature as modified by his habits ?" He could not 
 bear to think of having legislative or political arrange- 
 ments shaped or vindicated by a delusive geometrical ac- 
 curacy of deduction, instead of being entrusted to " the 
 natural operation of things, which, left to themselves, gen- 
 erally fall into their proper order." 
 
 Apart from his incessant assertion of the principle that 
 man acts from adequate motives relative to his interests, 
 and not on metaphysical speculations, Burke sows, as he 
 marches along in his stately argument, many a germ of 
 the modern philosophy of civilization. He was told that 
 America was worth fighting for. " Certainly it is," he 
 answered, " if fighting a people be the best way of gaining 
 
IV.] THE AMERICAN WAR. 83 
 
 them." Every step that has been taken in the direction 
 of progress, not merely in empire, but in education, in 
 punishment, in the treatment of the insane, has shown the 
 deep wisdom, so unfamiliar in that age of ferocious penal- 
 ties and brutal methods, of this truth — that " the natural 
 effect of fidelity, clemency, kindness in governors, is peace, 
 good-will, order, and esteem in the governed." Is there a 
 single instance to the contrary ? Then there is that sure 
 key to wise politics: '"''Nobody shall persuade me, when 
 a whole people are concerned, that acts of lenity are not 
 means of conciliation.^^ And that still more famous sen- 
 tence, "/ do not know the method of drawing up an indict- 
 ment against a whole peopled 
 
 Good and observant men will feel that no misty benev- 
 olence or vague sympathy, but the positive reality of ex- 
 perience, inspired such passages as that where he says, 
 " Never expecting to find perfection in men, and not look- 
 ing for divine attributes in created beings, in my com- 
 merce with my contemporaries I have found much human 
 virtue. The age unquestionably produces daring profli- 
 gates and insidious hypocrites? What then? Am I not 
 to avail myself of whatever good is to be found in the 
 world, because of the mixture of evil that is in it ! ... 
 Those who raise suspicions of the good, on account of the 
 behaviour of evil men, are of the party of the latter. ... A 
 conscientious person would rather doubt his own judg- 
 ment, than condemn his species. He that accuses all man- 
 kind of corruption, ought to remember that he is sure to 
 convict only one. In truth, I should much rather admit 
 those whom at any time I have disrelished the most, to be 
 patterns of perfection, than seek a consolation to my own 
 un worthiness in a general communion of depravity with 
 all about rae." This is one of those pieces of rational 
 
84 BUKKE. [chap. iv. 
 
 constancy and mental wholeness in Burke, which fill up 
 our admiration for him — one of the manifold illustrations 
 of an invincible fidelity to the natural order and operation 
 of things, even when they seemed most hostile to all that 
 was dear to his own personality. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 ECONOMICAL REFORM BURKE IN OFFICE FALL OF HIS 
 
 PARTY. 
 
 Towards 1780 it began to be clear tbat the ministers 
 had brought the country into disaster and humiliation, 
 from which their policy contained no way of escape. In 
 the closing months of the American war, the Opposition 
 pressed ministers with a vigour that never abated. Lord 
 North bore their attacks with perfect good - humour. 
 When Burke, in the course of a great oration, parodied 
 Burgoyne's invitation to the Indians to repair to the 
 King's standard, the wit and satire of it almost suffo- 
 cated the prime minister, not with shame but with laugh- 
 ter. His heart had long ceased to be in the matter, and 
 everybody knew that he only retained his post in obe- 
 dience to the urgent importunities of the King, whilst 
 such colleagues as Rigby only clung to their place because 
 the salaries were endeared by long familiarity. The gen- 
 eral gloom was accidentally deepened by that hideous out- 
 break of fanaticism and violence, which is known as the 
 Lord George Gordon Riots (June, 1780). The Whigs, as 
 having favoured the relaxation of the laws against pop- 
 ery, were especially obnoxious to the mob. The govern- 
 ment sent a guard of soldiers to protect Burke's house in 
 Charles Street, St. James's ; but, after he had removed the 
 more important of his papers, he insisted on the guard 
 
86 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 being dispatched for the protection of mo^re important 
 places, and he took shelter under the roof of General Bur- 
 goyne. His excellent wife, according to a letter of his 
 brother, had " the firmness and sweetness of an angel ; 
 y but why do I say of an angel? — of a w'oman." Burke 
 himself courageously walked to and fro amid the raging 
 crowds with firm composure, though the experiment was 
 full of peril. He describes the mob as being made up, as 
 London mobs generally are, rather of the unruly and dis- 
 solute than of fanatical malignants, and he vehemently 
 opposed any concessions by Parliament to the spirit of 
 mtolerance which had first kindled the blaze. All the 
 letters of the time show that the outrages and alarms of 
 those days and nights, in which the capital seemed to be 
 at the mercy of a furious rabble, made a deeper impres- 
 sion on the minds of contemporaries than they ought to 
 have d )ne. Burke was not likely to be less excited than 
 others by the sight of such insensate disorder; and it is 
 no idle fancy that he had the mobs of 1780 still in his 
 memory, when ten years later he poured out the vials of 
 his wrath on the bloodier mob which carried the King 
 and Queen of France in wild triumph from Versailles to 
 Paris. 
 
 In the previous February (1780) Burke had achieved 
 one of the greatest of all his parliamentary and oratorical 
 successes. Though the matter of this particular enter- 
 prise is no longer alive, yet it illustrates his many strong 
 qualities in so remarkable a way that it is right to give 
 some account of it. We have already seen that Burke 
 steadily set his face against parliamentary reform ; he ha-, 
 bitually declared that the machine was w^ell enough to 
 answer any good purpose, provided the materials were 
 sound. The statesman who resists all projects for the 
 
T.] ECONOMICAL REFORM. 87 
 
 reform of the constitution, and yet eagerly proclaims how 
 deplorably imperfect are the practical results of its work- 
 ins:, binds himself to vi2;orons exertions for the amend- 
 ment of administration. Burke devoted himself to this 
 duty with a fervid assiduity that has not often been ex- 
 am pled, and has never been surpassed. He went to work 
 with the zealof a religious enthusiast, intent on purging 
 his church and his faith of the corruptions which lowered 
 it in the eyes of men. There was no part or order of 
 government so obscure, so remote, or so complex, as to 
 escape his acute and persevering observation. 
 
 Burke's object, in his schemes for Economical Reform, 
 was less to husband the public resources and relieve the 
 tax-payer — though this aim could not have been absent 
 from his mind, overburdened as England then was with 
 the charges of the American war — than to cut off the 
 channels which supplied the corruption of the House of 
 Commons. The full title of the first project which he 
 presented to the legislature (February, 1780), was A Plan 
 for the Better Security of the Independence of Parlia- 
 ment, and the Economical Reformation of the Civil and 
 other Establishments. It was to the former that he deem- 
 ed the latter to be the most direct road. The strength 
 of the administration in the House was due to the gifts 
 which the Minister had in his hands to dispense. Men 
 voted with the side which could reward their fidelity. It 
 was the number of sinecure places and unpublished pen- 
 sions which, along with the controllable influence of peers 
 and nabobs, furnished the Minister with an irresistible 
 lever: the avarice and the degraded public spirit of the 
 recipients supplied the required fulcrum. Burke knew 
 that in sweeping away these factitious places and secret 
 pensions, he would be robbing the Court of its chief im- 
 
88 BUKKE. [chap. 
 
 plements of corruption, and protecting the representative 
 against his chief motive in selling his country. He con- 
 ceived that he would thus be promoting a far more infal- 
 lible means than any scheme of electoral reform could 
 have provided, for reviving the integrity and indepen- 
 dence of the House of Commons. In his eyes, the evil 
 resided not in the constituencies, but in their representa- 
 tives ; not in the small number of the one, but in the 
 smaller integrity of the other. 
 
 The evil did not stop where it began. It was not mere- 
 ly that the sinister motive, thus engendered in the minds 
 of too lax and facile men, induced them to betray their 
 legislative trust, and barter their own uprightness and the 
 interests of the State. The acquisition of one of these ne- 
 farious bribes meant much more than a sinister vote. It 
 called into existence a champion of every inveterate abuse 
 that weighed on the resources of the country. There is a 
 well-knojvn passage in the speech on Economical Reform, 
 in which the speaker shows what an insurmountable obsta- 
 cle Lord Talbot had found in his attempt to carry out cer- 
 tain reforms in the royal household, in the fact that the 
 turnspit of the King's kitchen was a member of Parlia- 
 ment. "On that rock his whole adventure split — his 
 whole scheme of economy was dashed to pieces ; his de- 
 partment became more expensive than ever ; the Civil List 
 debt accumulated." Interference with the expenses of the 
 household meant interference with the perquisites or fees 
 of this legislative turnspit, and the rights of sinecures were 
 too sacred to be touched. In comparison with them, it 
 counted for nothing that the King's tradesmen went un- 
 paid, and became bankrupt ; that the judges were unpaid ; 
 that " the justice of the kingdom bent and gave way ; the 
 foreign ministers remained inactive and unprovided ; the 
 
v.] ECONOMICAL REFORM. 89 
 
 system of Europe was dissolved ; the chain of our alliances 
 was broken ; all the wheels of Government at home and 
 abroad were stopped. The king^s turns2nt tvas a member 
 of Parliament.''''^ This office, and numbers of others ex- 
 actly like it, existed solely because the House of Commons 
 was crowded with venal men. The post of royal scullion 
 meant a vote that could be relied upon under every cir- 
 cumstance and in all emergencies. And each incumbent y 
 of such an office felt his honour and interests concerned in 
 the defence of all other offices of the same scandalous de- 
 scription. There was thus maintained a strong standing 
 army of expensive, lax, and corrupting officials. 
 
 The royal household was a gigantic nest of costly job- 
 bery and purposeless profusion. It retained all " the cum- 
 brous charge of a Gothic establishment," though all its 
 usage and accommodation had " shrunk into the polished 
 littleness of modern elegance." The outlay was enormous. 
 The expenditure on the court tables only was a thing un- 
 fathomable. Waste was the rule in every branch of it. 
 There was an office for the Great Wardrobe, another office 
 of the Robes, a third of the Groom of the Stole. For 
 these three useless offices there were three useless treasur- 
 ers. They all laid a heavy burden on the tax-payer, in or- 
 der to supply a bribe to the member of Parliament. The 
 plain remedy was to annihilate the subordinate treasuries. 
 " Take away," was Burke's demand, " the whole establish- 
 ment of detail in the household : the Treasurer, the Comp- 
 troller, the Cofferer of the Household, the Treasurer of the 
 
 ^ The Civil List at this time comprehended a great number of 
 charges, such as those of which Burke speaks, that had nothing to 
 do with the sovereign personally. They were slowly removed, the 
 judicial and diplomatic charges being transferred on the accession 
 of William IV. 
 5 
 
90 BUKKE. [chap. 
 
 Chamber, the Master of the Household, the whole Board 
 of Green Cloth ; a vast number of subordinate offices in 
 the department of the Steward of the Household ; the 
 whole establishment of the Great AVardrobe ; the Remov- 
 ing Wardrobe ; the Jewel Office ; the Robes ; the Board 
 of Works." The abolition of this confused and costly sys- 
 tem would not only diminish expense and promote effi- 
 ciency ; it would do still more excellent service in destroy- 
 ing the roots of parliamentary corruption. "Under other 
 governments a question of expense is only a question of 
 economy, and it is nothing more ; with us, in every ques- 
 tion of expense, there is always a mixture of constitutional 
 considerations." 
 
 Places and pensions, though the worst, were not by any 
 means the only stumbling-block in the way of pure and 
 well-ordered government. The administration of the es- 
 tates of the Crown — the Principality, the Duchy of Corn- 
 wall, the Duchy of Lancaster, the County Palatine of Ches- 
 ter — was an elaborate system of obscure and unprofitable 
 expenditure. Wales had to herself eight judges, while no 
 more than twelve sufficed to perform the whole business 
 of justice in England, a country ten times as large, and a 
 hundred times as opulent. Wales, and each of the duch- 
 ies, had its own exchequer. Every one of these principali- 
 ties, said Burke, has the apparatus of a kingdom, for the 
 jurisdiction over a few private estates ; it has the formality 
 and charge of the Exchequer of Great Britain, for collect- 
 ing the rents of a country squire. They were the field, in 
 his expressive phrase, of mock jurisdictions and mimic rev- 
 enues, of difficult trifles and laborious fooleries. " It was 
 but the other day that that pert factious fellow, the Duke 
 of Lancaster, presumed to fly in the face of his liege lord, 
 our gracious sovereign — presumed to go to law with the 
 
v.] ECONOMICAL REFORM. 91 
 
 King. The object is neither your business nor mine. Which 
 of the parties got the better I really forget. The material 
 point is that the suit cost about 15,000^. But as the Duke 
 of Lancaster is but agent of Duke Humphrey, and not 
 worth a groat, our sovereign was obliged to pay the costs 
 of both." The system which involved these costly absurd- 
 ities, Burke proposed entirely to abolish. In the same 
 spirit he wished to dispose of the Crown lands and the 
 forest lands, which it was for the good of the community, 
 not less than of the Crown itself, to throw into the hands 
 of private owners. 
 
 One of the most important of these projected reforms, 
 and one which its author did not flinch from carrying out 
 two years later to his own loss, related to the office of Pay- 
 master. This functionary was accustomed to hold large 
 balances of the public money in his own hands and for his 
 own profit, for long periods, owing to a complex system of 
 accounts which was so rigorous as entirel}^ to defeat its 
 own object. The Paymaster could not, through the multi- 
 plicity of forms and the exaction of impossible conditions, 
 get a prompt acquittance. The audit sometimes did not 
 take place for years after the accounts were virtually 
 closed. Meanwhile, the money accumulated in his hands, 
 and its profits were his legitimate perquisite. The first 
 Lord Holland, for example, held the balances of his office 
 from 1765, when he retired, until 1778, when they were 
 audited. During this time he realized, as the interest on 
 the use of these balances, nearly two hundred and fifty ^ 
 thousand pounds. Burke diverted these enormous gains 
 into the coffers of the state. He fixed the Paymaster's 
 salary at four thousand pounds a year, and was himself the 
 first person who accepted the curtailed income. 
 
 Not the most fervid or brilliant of Burke's pieces, yet 
 
92 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 the Speech on Economical Reform is certainly not the least 
 instructive or impressive of them. It gives a suggestive 
 view of the relations existing at that time between the 
 House of Commons and the Court. It reveals the narrow 
 and unpatriotic spirit of the King and the ministers, who 
 could resist proposals so reasonable in themselves, and so 
 remedial in their effects, at a time when the nation was 
 suffering the heavy and distressing burdens of the most 
 disastrous war that our country has ever carried on. It 
 is especially interesting as an illustration of its author's 
 political capacity. At a moment when committees, and 
 petitions, and great county meetings showed how thor- 
 oughly the national anger was roused against the existing 
 system, Burke came to the front of affairs with a scheme, 
 of which the most striking characteristic proved to be that 
 it was profoundly temperate. Bent on the extirpation of 
 the system, he had no ill-will towards the men who had 
 happened to flourish in it. " I never will suffer," he said, 
 " any man or description of men to suffer from errors that 
 naturally have grown out of the abusive constitution of 
 those offices which I propose to regulate. If I cannot re- 
 form with equity, I will not reform at all." Exasperated 
 as he was by the fruitlessness of his opposition to a policy 
 which he detested from the bottom of his soul, it would 
 have been little wonderful if he had resorted to every 
 weapon of his unrivalled rhetorical armoury, in order to 
 discredit and overthrow the whole scheme of government. 
 Yet nothing could have been further from his mind than 
 any violent or extreme idea of this so-i't. Many years af- 
 terwards he took credit to himself less for what he did on 
 this occasion, than for what he prevented from being done. 
 People were ready for a new modelling of the two Houses 
 of Parliament, as well as for grave modifications of the 
 
v.] ECONOMICAL KEFORM. 93 
 
 Prerogative. Burke resisted this temper unflinchingly. 
 " I had," he says, " a state to preserve, as well as a state 
 to reform. I had a people to gratify, but not to inflame 
 or to mislead." He then recounts without exaggeration 
 the pains and caution with which he sought reform, while 
 steering clear of innovation. He heaved the lead every 
 inch of way he made. It is grievous to think that a man 
 who could assume such an attitude at such a time, who 
 could give this kind of proof of his skill in the great, the 
 difficult, art of governing, only held a fifth -rate office for 
 some time less than a twelvemonth. 
 
 The year of the project of Economic Reform (lYSO) is 
 usually taken as the date when Burke's influence and re- 
 pute were at their height. He had not been tried in the 
 fire of official responsibility, and his impetuosity was still 
 under a decree of control which not lono- afterwards was 
 fatally weakened by an over-mastering irritability of con 
 stitution. High as his character was now in the ascend- 
 ant, it was in the same year that Burke suffered the sharp 
 mortification of losing his seat at Bristol. His speech be- 
 fore the election is one of the best known of all his per- 
 formances ; and it well deserves to be so, for it is surpassed 
 by none in gravity, elevation, and moral dignity. We can 
 only wonder that a constituency which could suffer itself 
 to be addressed on this high level should have allowed the 
 small selfishness of local interest to weigh against such 
 wisdom and nobility. But Burke soon found in the course 
 of his canvas that he had no chance, arid he declined to 
 go to the poll. On the previous day one of his competi- 
 tors had fallen down dead. " What shadows we are,'''' said 
 Burke, ^^ and what shadows we pursue T^ 
 
 In 1782 Lord North's government came to an end, and 
 the King " was pleased," as Lord North quoted with jest- 
 
94 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 ing irony from the Gazette, to send for Lord Rockingham, 
 Charles Fox, and Lord Shelburne. Members could hardly 
 believe their own eyes, as they saw Lord North and the 
 members of a government whicli had been in place for 
 twelve years, now lounging on the opposition benches in 
 their great-coats, frocks, and boots, while Fox and Burke 
 shone in the full dress that was then worn by ministers, ■ 
 
 and cut unwonted figiires with swords, lace, and hair pow- 
 der. Sheridan was made an under-secretary of state, and" 
 to the younger Pitt was offered his choice of various mi- 
 nor posts, which he haughtily refused. Burke, to whom 
 on their own admission the party owed everything, was 
 appointed Paymaster of the Forces, witli a salary of four 
 thousand pounds a year. His brother, Richard Burke, 
 was made Secretary of the Treasury. His son, Richard, 
 was named to be his father's deputy at the Pay Oflfice, 
 with a salary of five hundred pounds a year. 
 
 This singular exclusion from cabinet oflSce of the most 
 powerful genius of the party has naturally given rise to 
 abundant criticism ever since. It will be convenient to 
 say what there is to be said on this subject, in connexion 
 with the events of 1788 (below, p. 136), because there hap- 
 pens to exist some useful information about the ministe- 
 rial crisis of that year, which sheds a clearer light upon the 
 arrano'ements of six years before. Meanwhile it is enough 
 to say that Burke himself had most reasonably looked to 
 some higher post. There is the distinct note of the hu- 
 mility of mortified pride in a letter written in reply to 
 some one who had applied to him for a place. " You 
 have been misinformed," he says ; " I make no part of 
 the ministerial arrano-ement. Somethino; in the official 
 line may possibly be thought fit for my measure." Burke 
 knew that his position in the country entitled him to 
 
V.J THE ROCKINGHAM MINISTRY. 95 
 
 something above the official line. In a later year, when 
 .he felt himself called upon to defend his pension, he de- 
 scribed what his position was in the momentous crisis from 
 1*780 to 1782, and Burke's habitual veraciousness forbids 
 us to treat the description as in any way exaggerated. 
 "By what accident it matters not," he says, "nor upon 
 what desert, but just then, and in the midst of that hunt 
 of obloquy which has ever pursued me with a full cry 
 through life, I had obtained a very full degree of public 
 confidence. . . . Nothing to prevent disorder was omitted ; 
 when it appeared, nothing to subdue it was left uncoun- 
 selled nor unexecuted, as far as I could prevail. At the 
 time I speak of, and having a momentary lead, so aided 
 and so encouraged, and as a feeble instrument in a mighty 
 hand — I do not say I saved my country — I am sure I did 
 my country important service. There were few indeed 
 that did not at that time acknowledge it — and that time 
 was thirteen years ago. It was but one view, that no man 
 in the kingdom better deserved an honourable provision 
 should be made for him.'" 
 
 We have seen that Burke had fixed the Paymaster's 
 salary at four thousand pounds, and had destroyed the ex- 
 travagant perquisites. The other economical reforms which 
 were actually effected fell short by a long way of those 
 which Burke had so industriously devised and so forcibly 
 recommended. In 1782, while Burke declined to spare 
 his own office, the chief of the cabinet conferred upon 
 Barre a pension of over three thousand a year; above ten 
 times the amount, as has been said, which, in Lord Rock- 
 ingham's own judgment, as expressed in the new Bill, 
 ought henceforth to be granted to any one person what- 
 ever. This shortcoming, however, does not detract from 
 * Letter to a Noble Lord. 
 
96 BUEKE. [chap. 
 
 Burke's merit. He was not responsible for it. The elo- 
 quence, ingenuity, diligence, above all, the sagacity and the 
 justice of this great effort of 1780, are none the less wor- 
 thy of our admiration and regard because, in 1782, his 
 chiefs, partly perhaps out of a newborn deference for the 
 feelings of their royal master, showed that the possession 
 of office had sensibly cooled the ardent aspirations proper 
 to Opposition. 
 
 The events of the twenty months between the resigna- 
 tion of Lord North (1782) and the accession of Pitt to the 
 office of Prime Minister (December, 1783) mark an im- 
 portant crisis in political history, and they mark an impor- 
 tant crisis in Burke's career and hopes. Lord Eocking- 
 ham had just been three months in office when he died 
 (July, 1782). This dissolved the bond that held the two 
 sections of the ministry together, and let loose a flood of 
 rival ambitions and sharp animosities. Lord Shelburne 
 believed himself to have an irresistible claim to the chief 
 post in the administration ; among other reasons, because 
 he might have had it before Lord Rockingham three 
 months earlier, if he had so chosen. The King supported 
 him, not from any partiality to his person, but because he 
 dreaded and hated Charles Fox. The character of Shel- 
 burne is one of the perplexities of the time. His views on 
 peace and free trade make him one of the precursors of 
 the Manchester School. JSTo minister was so well inform- 
 ed as to the threads of policy in foreign countries. He 
 was the intimate or the patron of men who now stand oat 
 as among the first lights of that time — of Morellet, of 
 Priestley, of Bentham. Yet a few months of power seem 
 to have disclosed faults of character which left him with- 
 out a single political friend, and blighted him with irrepa- 
 rable discredit. Fox, who was now the head of the Rock- 
 
v.] LORD SHELBURNE. 91 
 
 ingham section of the Whigs, had, before the death of the 
 late premier, been on the point of refusing to serve any 
 longer with Lord Shelburne, and he now very promptly 
 refused to serve under him. When Parliament met after 
 Rockingham's death, gossips noticed that Fox and Burke 
 continued, long after the Speaker had taken the chair, to 
 walk backwards and forwards in the Court of Requests, 
 engaged in earnest conversation. According to one story, 
 Burke was very reluctant to abandon an office whose emol- 
 uments were as convenient to him as to his spendthrift 
 colleague. According to another and more probable le- 
 gend, it was Burke who hurried the rupture, and stimula- 
 ted Fox's jealousy of Shelburne. The Duke of Richmond 
 disapproved of the secession, and remained in the govern- 
 ment. Sheridan also disapproved, but he sacrificed his 
 personal conviction to loyalty to Fox. 
 
 If Burke was responsible for the break-up of the gov- 
 ernment, then he was the instigator of a blunder that must 
 be pronounced not only disastrous but culpable. It low- ^ 
 ered the legitimate spirit of party to the nameless spirit of 
 faction. The dangers from which the old liberties of the 
 realm had just emerged have been described by no one so 
 forcibly as by Burke himself. No one was so convinced 
 as Burke that the only way of Avithstanding the arbitrary 
 and corrupting policy of the Court was to form a strong 
 AVhig party. No one knew better than he the sovereign 
 importance and the immense difficulty of repairing the 
 ruin of the last twelve years by a good peace. The Rock- 
 ingham or Foxite section were obviously unable to form 
 an effective party with serious expectation of power, un- 
 less they had allies. They might, no doubt, from person- 
 al dislike to Lord Shelburne, refuse to work under him ; 
 but personal dislike could be no excuse for formally and 
 5* 
 
98 BUEKE. [chap. 
 
 violently working against him, when his policy was their 
 own, and when its success was recognized by them no less 
 than by him as of urgent moment. Instead of either 
 working with the other section of their party, or of sup- 
 porting from below the gangway that which was the poli- 
 cy of both sections, they sought to return to power by 
 coalescing with the very man whose criminal subservience 
 to the King's will had brought about the catastrophe that 
 Shelburne was repairing. Burke must share the blame of 
 this famous transaction. He was one of the most furious 
 assailants of the new ministry. He poured out a fresh in- 
 vective against Lord Shelburne every day. Cynical con- 
 temporaries laughed as they saw him in search of more 
 and more humiliating parallels, ransacking all literature 
 from the Bible and the Roman history down to Mother 
 Goose's tales. His passion carried him so far as to breed 
 a reaction in those who listened to him. " I think," wrote 
 Mason from Yorkshire, where Burke had been on a visit 
 to Lord Fitzwilliam in the autumn of 1782, "that Burke's 
 mad obloquy against Lord Shelburne, and these insolent 
 pamphlets in which he must have had a hand, will do 
 more to fix him (Shelburne) in his ofiice than anything 
 else." 
 
 This result would have actually followed, for the nation 
 was ill pleased at the immoral alliance between the Fox- 
 ites and the man whom, if they had been true to their 
 opinions a thousand times repeated, they ought at that 
 moment to have been impeaching. The Dissenters, who 
 had hitherto been his enthusiastic admirers, but who are 
 rigid above other men in their demand of political con- 
 sistency, lamented Burke's fall in joining the Coalition, as 
 Priestley told him many years after, as the fall of a friend 
 and a brother. But Shelburne threw away the game. 
 
v.] THE COALITION. 99 
 
 " His falsehoods," says Horace AValpole, " his flatteries, 
 duplicity, insincerity, arrogance, contradictions, neglect of 
 his friends, with all the kindred of all these faults, were 
 the daily topics of contempt and ridicule; and his folly 
 shut his eyes, nor did he perceive that so very rapid a fall 
 must have been owing to his own incapacity." This is 
 the testimony of a hostile witness. It is borne out, how- 
 ever, by a circumstance of striking significance. When 
 the King recovered the reins at the end of 1783, not only 
 did he send for Pitt instead of for Shelburne, but Pitt 
 himself neither invited Shelburne to join him, nor in any 
 w^ay ever consulted him then or afterwards, though he 
 had been Chancellor of the Exchequer in Shelburne's own 
 administration. 
 
 Whatever the causes may have been, the administration 
 fell in the spring of 1783. It was succeeded by the mem- 
 orable ministry of the Coalition, in which Fox and Lord 
 North divided the real power under the nominal lead of 
 the Duke of Portland. Members saw Lord North squeezed 
 up on the Treasury bench between two men who had a 
 year before been daily menacing him with the axe and 
 the block ; and it was not North whom they blamed, but 
 Burke and Fox. Burke had returned to the Pay Office. 
 His first act there was unfortunate. He restored to their 
 position two clerks who had been suspended for malversa- 
 tion, and against whom proceedings were then pending. 
 When attacked for this in the House, he showed an irri- 
 tation which would have carried him to gross lengths, if 
 Fox and Sheridan had not by main force pulled him down 
 into his seat by the tails of his coat. The restoration of 
 the clerks was an indefensible error of judgment, and its 
 indiscretion was heightened by the kind of defence which 
 Burke tried to set up. When we wonder at Burke's ex- 
 
100 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 elusion from great offices, this case of Powell and Bern- 
 bridge should not be forgotten. 
 
 The decisive event in the history of the Coalition Gov- 
 ernment was the India Bill. The Reports of the various 
 select committees upon Indian affairs — the most important 
 of them all, the ninth and eleventh, having been drawn up 
 by Burke himself — had shown conclusively that the ex- 
 isting system of government was thoroughly corrupt and 
 thoroughly inadequate. It is ascertained pretty conclu- 
 sively that the bill for replacing that system was conceived 
 and drawn by Burke, and that to him belongs whatever 
 merit or demerit it might possess. It was Burke who in- 
 fected Fox w4th his own ardour, and then, as Moore just- 
 ly says, the self-kindling powder of Fox's eloquence threw 
 such fire into his defence of the measure, that he forgot, 
 and his hearers never found out, that his views were not 
 originally and spontaneously his owm. The novelty on 
 which the great stress of discussion w^as laid, was that the 
 bill withdrew power from the Board of Directors, and vest- 
 ed the government for four years in a commission of seven 
 persons named in the bill, and not removable by the House. 
 
 Burke was so convinced of the incurable iniquity of the 
 Company, so persuaded that it was not only full of abuses, 
 but, as he said, one of the most corrupt and destructive 
 tyrannies that probably ever existed in the world, as to be 
 content with nothing short of the absolute deprivation of 
 its power. He avowed himself no lover of names, and 
 that he only contended for good government, from what- 
 ever quarter it might come. But the idea of good gov- 
 ernment coming from the Company he declared to be 
 desperate and untenable. This intense animosity, which, 
 considering his long and close familiarity with the infa- 
 mies of the rule of the Company's servants, was not un- 
 
v.] FOX'S INDIA BILL. 101 
 
 natural, must be allowed, however, to have blinded hira to 
 the grave objections which really existed to his scheme. 
 In . the first place, the Bill was indisputably inconsistent 
 with the spirit of his revered Constitution. ' For the legis- 
 lature to assume the power of naming the members of an 
 executive body, was an extraordinary and mischievous in- 
 novation. Then, to put patronage, which has been esti- 
 mated by a sober authority at about three hundred thou- 
 sand pounds a year, into the hands of the House of Com- 
 mons, was still more mischievous and still less justifiable. 
 AVorst of all, from the point of view of the projectors 
 themselves, after a certain time the nomination of the 
 Commissioners would fall to the Crown, and this might in 
 certain contingencies increase to a most dangerous extent 
 the ascendancy of the royal authority. If Burke's measure 
 had been carried, moreover, the patronage would have been 
 transferred to a body much less competent than the Direct- 
 ors to judge of the qualities required in the fulfilment of this 
 or that administrative charge. Indian promotion would 
 have followed parliamentary and party interest. In the 
 hands of the Directors there was at least a partial security, 
 in their professional knowledge, and their personal interest 
 in the success of their government, that places would not 
 be given away on irrelevant considerations. Their system, 
 with all its faults, insured the acquisition of a certain con- 
 siderable competency in administration, before a servant 
 reached an elevation at which he could do much harm. 
 
 Burke defended the bill (December 1, 1Y83) in one of 
 the speeches which rank only below his greatest, and it 
 contains two or three passages of unsurpassed energy and 
 impressiveness. Everybody knows the fine page about 
 Fox as the descendant of Henry IV. of France, and the 
 happy quotation from Silius Italicus. Every book of Brit- 
 
102 BUKKE. [chap. 
 
 ish eloquence contains tlie magnificent description of the 
 young magistrates who undertake the government and the 
 spoliation of India; how, "animated with all the avarice 
 of age and all the impetuosity of youth, they roll in one 
 after another, wave after wave ; and there is nothing be- 
 fore the eyes of the natives but an endless, hopeless pros- 
 pect of new flights of birds of prey and of passage, with 
 appetites continually renewing for a food that is con- 
 tinually wasting." How they return home laden with 
 spoil ; " their prey is lodged in England ; and the cries of 
 India are given to seas and winds, to be blown about, in 
 every breaking up. of the monsoon, over a remote and un- 
 hearing ocean." How in India all the vices operate by 
 which sudden fortune is acquired; while in England are 
 often displayed by the same person the virtues which dis- 
 pense hereditary wealth, so that "here the manufacturer 
 and the husbandman will bless the just and punctual hand 
 that in India has torn the cloth from the loom, or wrested 
 the scanty portion of rice and salt from the peasant of 
 Bengal, or wrung from him the very opium in which he 
 forgot his oppression and his oppressors." 
 
 No degree of eloquence, however, could avail to repair 
 faults alike in structure and in tactics. The whole design 
 was a masterpiece of hardihood, miscalculation, and mis- 
 management. The combination of interests against the 
 bill was instant, and it was indeed formidable. The great 
 army of returned nabobs, of directors, of proprietors of 
 East India stock, rose up in all its immense force. Every 
 member of every corporation that enjoyed privilege by 
 charter felt the attack on the Company as if it had been 
 a blow directed against himself. The general public had 
 no particular passion for purity or good government, and 
 the best portion of the public was disgusted with the 
 
v.] FALL OF THE WHIGS. 103 
 
 Coalition. The King saw his chance. With politic audac- 
 ity he put so strong a personal pressure on the peers, that 
 they threw out the Bill (December, 1783). It was to no 
 purpose that Fox compared the lords to the Janissaries of 
 a Turkish Sultan, and the King's letter to Temple to the 
 rescript in which Tiberius ordered the upright Sejanus to 
 be destroyed. Ministers were dismissed, the young Pitt 
 was installed in their place, and the Whigs were ruined. :^ 
 As a party, they had a few months of office after Pitt's 
 death, but they were excluded from power for half a century. 
 
CHAPTER yi. 
 
 BURKE AND HIS FRIENDS. 
 
 Though Burke had, at a critical period of his life, definite- 
 ly abandoned the career of letters, he never withdrew from 
 close intimacy with the groups who still live for us in the 
 pages of Boswell, as no other literary group in our history 
 lives. Goldsmith's famous li)|es in RetalmUmi show how 
 they all deplored that he should to party give up what 
 was meant for mankind. They often told one another 
 that Edmund Burke was the man whose genius pointed 
 him out as the triumphant champion of faith and sound 
 philosophy against deism, atheism, and David Hume. 
 They loved to see him, as Goldsmith said, wind into his 
 subject like a serpent. Everybody felt at the Literary 
 Club that he had no superior in knowledge, and in col- 
 loquial dialectics only one equal. Garrick was there, and 
 of all the names of the time he is the man whom one 
 would perhaps most willingly have seen, because the gifts 
 which threw not only Englishmen, but Frenchmen like 
 Diderot, and Germans like Lichtenberg, into amazement 
 and ecstasy, are exactly those gifts which literary descrip- 
 tion can do least to reproduce. Burke was one of his 
 strongest admirers, and there was no more zealous attend- 
 ant at the closing series of performances in which the 
 great monarch of the stage abdicated his throne. In the 
 last pages that he wrote, Burke refers to his ever dear 
 
CHAP. VI.] THE LITERARY CIRCLE. 105 
 
 friend Garrick, dead nearly twenty years before, as the first 
 of actors, because he was the acutest observer of nature 
 that he had ever known. 
 
 Among men who pass for being more serious than 
 players, Robertson was often in London society, and he 
 attracted Burke by his largeness and breadth. He sent 
 a copy of his history of America, and Burke thanked 
 him with many stately compliments for having employed 
 philosophy to judge of manners, and from manners hav- 
 ing drawn new resources of philosophy. Gibbon was 
 there, but the bystanders felt what was too crudely ex- 
 pressed by Mackintosh, that Gibbon might have been taken 
 from a corner of Burke's mind without ever being missed. 
 Though Burke and Gibbon constantly met, it is not like- 
 ly that, until the Revolution, there was much intimacy be- 
 tween them, in spite of the respect which each of them 
 mio'ht well have had for the vast knowledo-e of the other. 
 When the Decline and Fall was published, Burke read it 
 as everybody else did; but he told Reynolds that he dis- 
 liked the style, as very affected, mere frippery and tinsel. 
 Sir Joshua himself was neither a "man of letters nor a keen 
 politician ; but he was full of literary ideas and interests, 
 and he was among Burke's warmest and most constant 
 friends, following; him with an admiration and reverence 
 that even Johnson sometimes thought excessive. The 
 reader of Reynolds's famous Discourses will probably share 
 the wonder of his contemporaries, that a man whose time 
 was so absorbed in the practice of his art should have 
 proved himself so excellent a master in the expression of 
 some of its principles. Burke was commonly credited 
 with a large share in their composition, but the evidence 
 goes no further than that Reynolds used to talk them over 
 with him. The friendsliin between the pair was full and 
 
106 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 unalloyed. What Burke admired in the great artist was 
 liis sense and his morals, no less than his genius ; and to a 
 man of his fervid and excitable temper there was the most 
 attractive of all charms in Sir Joshua's placidity, gentle- 
 ness, evenness, and the habit, as one of his friends described 
 it, of being the same all the year round. When Reynolds 
 died in 1792, he appointed- Burke one of his executors, 
 and left him a legacy of two thousand pounds, besides 
 cancelling a bond of the same amount. 
 
 Johnson, however, is the only member of that illustrious 
 company who can profitably be compared with Burke in 
 strength and impressiveness of personality, in a large sensi- 
 bility at once serious and genial, in brooding care for all 
 the fulness of human life. This striking pair were the 
 two complements of a single noble and solid type, holding 
 tenaciously, in a century of dissolvent speculation, to the 
 best ideas of a society that was slowly passing. They 
 were powerless to hinder the inevitable transformation. 
 One of them did not even dimly foresee it. But both of 
 them help us to understand how manliness and reverence, 
 strength and tenderness, love of truth and pity for man, 
 all flourished under old institutions and old ways of think- 
 ing, into which the forces of the time were even then 
 silently breathing a new spirit. The friendship between 
 Burke and Johnson lasted as long as they lived; and if 
 we remember that Johnson was a strong Tory, and de- 
 clared that the first Whig was the devil, and habitually 
 talked about cursed Whigs and bottomless Whigs, it is 
 an extraordinary fact that his relations with the greatest 
 Whig writer and politician of his day were marked by a 
 cordiality, respect, and admiration that never varied nor 
 wavered. "Burke," he said in a well-known passage, "is 
 such a man that if you met him for the first time in the 
 
VI.] BURKE AND DR. JOHNSON. 107 
 
 street, where you were stopped by a drove of oxen, and 
 you and he stepped aside to take shelter but for five min- 
 utes, he'd talk to you in sncli a manner that, when you 
 parted, you would say. This is an extraordinary man. He 
 is never what we would call humdrum ; never unwilling to 
 begin to talk, nor in haste to leave off." That Burke was 
 as good a listener as he was a talker, Johnson never would 
 allow. *' So desirous is he to talk," he said, " that if one 
 is talking at this end of the table, he'll talk to somebody 
 at the other end." Johnson was far too good a critic, 
 and too honest a man, to assent to a remark of Robert- 
 son's, that Burke had wit. " No, sir," said the sage, most 
 truly, "he never succeeds there. 'Tis low, 'tis conceit." 
 Wit apart, he described Burke as the only man whose 
 common conversation corresponded to his general fame in 
 the world ; take up whatever topic you might please, he 
 was ready to meet you. "When Burke found a seat in 
 Parliament, Johnson said, "Now we who know Burke, 
 know that he will be one of the first men in the country." 
 He did not grudge that Burke should be the first man in 
 the House of Commons, for Burke, he said, was always 
 the first man everywhere. Once when he was ill, some- 
 body mentioned Burke's name. Johnson cried out, " That 
 fellow calls forth all my powers ; were I to see Burke 
 now it would kill me." 
 
 Burke heartily returned this high appreciation. When 
 some flatterer hinted that Johnson had taken more than 
 his right share of the evening's talk, Burke said, " Nay, 
 it is enough for me to have rung the bell for him." Some 
 one else spoke of a successful imitation of Johnson's style. 
 Burke with vehemence denied the success: the perform- 
 ance, he said, had the pomp, but not the force of the orig- 
 inal ; the nodosities of the oak, but not its strength ; the 
 
108 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 contortions of the sibyl, but none of the inspiration. 
 When Burke showed the old sage of Bolt Court over his 
 fine house and pleasant gardens at Beaconsfield, Non in- 
 video equidem, Johnson said, with placid good-will, miror 
 magis. They always parted in the deep and pregnant 
 phrase of a sage of our own day, except hi opinion not dis- 
 "^ agreeing. In truth, the explanation of the sympathy be- 
 tween them is not far to seek. We may well believe that 
 Johnson was tacitly alive to the essentially conservative 
 spirit of Burke even in his most Whiggish days. And 
 Burke penetrated the liberality of mind in a Tory, who 
 called out with loud indio-nation that the Irish were in a 
 most unnatural state, for there the minority prevailed over 
 the majority, and the severity of the persecution exercised by 
 the Protestants of Ireland against the Catholics, exceeded 
 that of the ten historic persecutions of the Christian Church. 
 The parties at Beaconsfield, and the evenings at the 
 Turk's Head in Gerard Street, were contemporary with the 
 famous days at Holbach's country house at Grandval. 
 W^hen we think of the reckless themes that were so reck- 
 lessly discussed by Holbach, Diderot, and the rest of that 
 indefatigable band, we feel that, as against the French 
 philosophic party, an English Tory like Johnson and an 
 English Whig like Burke would have found their own 
 differences too minute to be worth considering. If the 
 group from the Turk's Head could have been transported 
 for an afternoon to Grandval, perhaps Johnson would have 
 been the less impatient and disgusted of the two. He had 
 the capacity of the more genial sort of casuist for playing 
 with subjects, even moral subjects, with the freedom, ver- 
 satility, and ease that are proper to literature. Burke, on 
 the contrary, would not have failed to see, as indeed we 
 know that he did not fail to see, that a social pandemo- 
 
VI.] BURKE AND DR. JOHNSOX. 109 
 
 nium was bein^^ prepared in this intellectual paradise of 
 open questions, where God and a future life, marriage and 
 the family, every dogma of religion, every prescription of 
 morality, and all those mysteries and pieties of human life 
 which have been sanctified by the reverence of ages, were 
 being busily pulled to pieces, as if they had been toys in 
 the hands of a company of sportive children. Even the 
 Beggar'' s Opera Burke could not endure to hear praised 
 for its wit or its music, because his mind was filled by 
 thought of its misplaced levity, and he only saw the mis- 
 chief which such a performance tended to do to society. 
 It would be hard to defend his judgment in this particular 
 case, but it serves to show how Burke was never content 
 with the literary point of view, and how ready and vigilant 
 he was for effects more profound than those of formal 
 criticism. It is true that Johnson was sometimes not less 
 austere in condemning a great work of art for its bad 
 morality. The only time when he was really angry with 
 Hannah More was on his finding that she had read Tom 
 Jones — that vicious book, he called it ; he hardly knew a 
 more corrupt work. Burke's tendency towards severity 
 of moral judgment, however, never impaired the geniality 
 and tenderness of his relations with those whom he loved. 
 Bennet Langton gave Boswell an affecting account of 
 Burke's last interview with Johnson. A few days before 
 the old man's death, Burke and four or five other friends 
 were sitting round his bedside. " Mr. Burke said to him, 
 * I am afraid, sir, such a number of us may be oppressive 
 to you.' ' No, sir,' said Johnson, ' it is not so ; and I must 
 be in a wretched state, indeed, when your company is not 
 a delight to me.' Mr. Burke, in a tremulous voice, expres- 
 sive of being very tenderly affected, replied, ' My dear sir, 
 you have always been too good to me.' Immediately af- 
 
110 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 terwards he went away. This was the last circumstance 
 in the acquaintance of these two eminent men." r 
 
 One of Burke's strongest political intimacies was only- 
 less interesting and significant than his friendship with 
 Johnson. "William Dowdeswell had been Chancellor of 
 the Exchequer in the short Rockingham administration of 
 1765. He had no brilliant gifts, but he had what was 
 then thought a profound knowledge both of the principles 
 and details of the administration of the national revenue. 
 He was industrious, steadfast, clear-headed, inexorably up- 
 right. " Immersed in the greatest affairs," as Burke said 
 in his epitaph, " he never lost the ancient, native, genuine, 
 English character of a country gentleman." And this 
 was the character in which Burke now and always saw 
 not only the true political barrier against despotism on 
 the one hand and the rabble on the other, but the best 
 moral type of civic virtue. Those who admire Burke, but 
 cannot share his admiration for the country gentleman, 
 will perhaps justify him by the assumption that he clothed 
 his favourite with ideal qualities which ought, even if they 
 did not, to have belonged to that position. 
 
 In his own modest imitation and in his own humble 
 scale, he was a pattern of the activity in public duty, the 
 hospitality towards friends, the assiduous protection of 
 neglected worth, which ought to be among the chief virt- 
 ues of high station. It would perhaps be doubly unsafe 
 to take for granted that many of our readers have both 
 turned over the pages of Crabbe's Borough, and carried 
 away in their minds from that moderately affecting poem, 
 the description of Eusebius — 
 
 That pious moralist, that reasoning saint ! 
 Can I of worth hke thine, Eusebius, speak ? 
 The man is willing, but the muse is weak. 
 
Ti.] CRABBE. Ill 
 
 Eusebius is intended for Burke, and the portrait is a lit- 
 erary tribute for more substantial services. When Crabbe 
 came up from his native Aldborough, with three pounds 
 and a case of surgical instruments in his trunk, he fondly 
 believed that a great patron would be found to watch over 
 his transformation from an unsuccessful apothecary into a 
 popular poet. He wrote to Lord North and Lord Shel- 
 burne, but they did not answer his letters ; booksellers re- 
 turned his copious manuscripts ; the three pounds gradu- 
 ally disappeared ; the surgical instruments went to the 
 pawnbroker's ; and the poet found himself an outcast on 
 the world, without a friend, without employment, and 
 without bread. He owed money for his lodging, and was 
 on the very eve of being sent to prison, when it occurred 
 to him to write to Burke. It Avas the moment (1781) 
 when the final struggle with Lord North was at its fiercest, 
 and Burke might have been absolved if, in the stress of 
 conflict, he had neglected a begging-letter. As it was, the 
 manliness and simplicity of Crabbe's application touched 
 him. He immediately made an appointment with the 
 young poet, and convinced himself of his worth. He not 
 only relieved Crabbe's immediate distress with a sum of 
 money that, as we know, came from no affluence of his 
 own, but carried him off to Beaconsfield, installed him 
 there as a member of the family, and took as much pains 
 to 'find a printer for The Librcuy and The Village, as if 
 they had been his own poems. In time he persuaded the 
 Bishop of Norwich to admit Crabbe, in spite of his want 
 of a regular qualification, to holy orders. He then com- 
 mended him to the notice of Lord Chancellor Thurlow. 
 Crabbe found the Tiger less formidable than his terrifying 
 reputation, for Thurlow at their first interview presented 
 him with a hundred-pound note, and afterwards gave him 
 
112 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 a living. The living was of no great value, it is true ; and 
 it was Burke who, with untiring friendship, succeeded in 
 procuring something like a substantial position for him, by 
 inducing the Duke of Rutland to make the young parson 
 his chaplain. Henceforth Crabbe's career was assured, and 
 he never forgot to revere and bless the man to whose gen- 
 erous hand he owed his deliverance. 
 
 Another of Burke's clients, of whom we hardly know 
 whether to say that he is more or less known to our age 
 than Crabbe, is Barry, a painter of disputable eminence. 
 The son of a seafarer at Cork, he had been introduced to 
 Burke in Dublin in 1762, was brought over to England by 
 him, introduced to some kind of employment, and finally 
 sent, with funds provided by the Burkes, to study art on 
 the Continent. It was characteristic of Burke's willing- 
 ness not only to supply money, but, what is a far rarer 
 form of kindness, to take active trouble, that he should 
 have followed the raw student witli long and careful let- 
 ters of advice upon the proper direction of his studies. 
 For five years Barry was maintained abroad by the Burkes. 
 Most unhappily for himself, he was cursed with an irritable 
 and perverse temper, and he lacked even the elementary 
 arts of conduct. Burke was generous to the end, with 
 that difficult and uncommon kind of generosity which 
 moves independently of gratitude or ingratitude in the 
 receiver. 
 
 From his earliest days Burke had been the eager friend 
 of people in distress. While he was still a student at the 
 Temple, or a writer for the booksellers, he picked up a 
 curious creature in the park, in such unpromising circum- 
 stances that he could not forbear to take him under his 
 instant protection. This was Joseph Emin, the Armenian, 
 who had come to Europe from India with strange heroic 
 
VI.] BARRY, EMIN, AND BROCKLESBY. 113 
 
 ideas in his head as to the deliverance of his countrymen. 
 Burke instantly urged him to accept the few shillings that 
 he happened to have in his purse, and seems to have found 
 employment for him as a copyist, until fortune brought 
 other openings to the singular adventurer. For foreign 
 visitors Burke had always a singular considerateness. 
 Two Brahmins came to England as agents of Ragonaut 
 Rao, and at first underwent intolerable things rather from 
 the ignorance than the unkindness of our countrymen. 
 Burke no sooner found out what was passing, than he car- 
 ried them down to Beaconsfield, and as it was summer- 
 time he gave them for their separate use a spacious gar- 
 den-house, where they were free to prepare their food and 
 perform the rites as their religion prescribed. Nothing 
 was so certain to command his fervid sympathy as strict 
 adherence to the rules and ceremonies of an ancient and 
 sacred ordering. 
 
 If he never failed to perform the offices to which we 
 are bound by the common sympathy of men, it is satis- 
 factory to think that Burke in return received a measure 
 of these friendly services. Among those who loved him 
 best was Doctor Brocklesby, the tender physician who 
 watched and soothed the last hours of Johnson. When we 
 remember how Burke's soul was harassed by private cares, 
 chagrined by the untoward course of public events, and 
 mortified by neglect from friends no less than by virulent 
 reproach from foes, it makes us feel very kindly towards 
 Brocklesby, to read what he wrote to Burke in 1788 : 
 
 My very dear friend, — 
 
 My veneration of your public conduct for many years past, and 
 my real affection for j^our private virtues and transcendent worth, 
 made me yesterday take a liberty Avith you in a moment's conversa- 
 tion at my house, to make you an instant present of 1000/., which for 
 6 
 
114 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 years past I had by will destined as a testimony of my regard on 
 my decease. This you modestly desired me not to think* of ; but I 
 told you what I now repeat, that unfavoured as I have lived for a 
 long life, unnoticed professionally by any party of men, and though 
 unknown at court, I am rich enough to spare to virtue (what others 
 waste in vice) the above sum, and still reserve an annual income 
 greater than I spend. I shall receive at the India House a bill I 
 have discounted for lOOOl. on the 4th of next month, and then shall 
 be happy that you will accept this proof of my sincere love and es- 
 teem, and let me add, Si res ampla domi similisque affedibtis esset, I 
 should be happy to repeat the like every year." 
 
 The mere transcription of tlie friendly man's good letter 
 has something of the effect of an exercise of religion. And 
 it was only one of a series of kind acts on the part of the 
 same generous giver. 
 
 It is always interesting in the case of a great man to 
 know how he affected the women of his acquaintance. 
 AVomen do not usually judge character either so kindly or 
 so soundly as men do, for they lack that knowledge of the 
 ordeals of practical life, whicli gives both justice and char- 
 ity to such verdicts. But they are more susceptible than 
 most men are to devotion and nobility in character. The 
 little group of the blue-stockings of the day regarded the 
 great master of knowledge and eloquence with mixed feel- 
 ings. They felt for Burke the adoring reverence which 
 women offer, with too indiscriminate a trust, to men of 
 commandmg power. In his case it was the moral lofti- 
 ness of his character that inspired them, as much as the 
 splendour of his ability. Of Sheridan or of Fox they 
 could not bear to hear; of Burke they could not hear 
 enough. Hannali More, and Mrs. Elizabeth Carter, the 
 learned translator of Epictetus, and Fanny Burney, the au- 
 thor of Evelina and Cecilia, were all proud of his notice, 
 even while they glowed with anger at his sympathy with 
 
VI.] HANNAH MORE AND FKANCES BURNEY. 115 
 
 American rebels, his unkind words about the King, and his 
 cruel persecution of poor Mr. Hastings. It was at Mrs. 
 Yesey's evening parties, given on the Tuesdays on which 
 the Club dined at the Turk's Head, that he often had long 
 chats with Hannah More. She had to forget what she 
 called his political malefactions, before she could allow her- 
 self to admire his high spirits and good -humour. This 
 was after the events of the Coalition, and her Memoirs, 
 like the change in the mind of the Dissenters towards 
 Burke, show what a fall that act of faction was believed 
 to mark in his character. When he was rejected for Bris- 
 tol, she moralized on the catastrophe by the quaint reflec- 
 tion that Providence has wisely contrived to render all its 
 dispensations equal, by making those talents which set one 
 man so much above another of no esteem in the opinion 
 of those who are without them. 
 
 Miss Burney has described her flutter of spirits when 
 she first found herself in company with Burke (1782). It 
 was at Sir. Joshua's house on the top of Richmond Hill, 
 and she tells, with her usual effusion, how she was im- 
 pressed by Burke's noble figure and commanding air, his 
 penetrating and sonorous voice, his eloquent and copious 
 language, the infinite variety and rapidity of his discourse. 
 Burke had something to say on every subject, from bits 
 of personal gossip, up to the sweet and melting landscape 
 that lay in all its beauty before their windows on the ter- 
 race. He was playful, serious, fantastic, wise. When they 
 next met, the great man completed his conquest by ex- 
 pressing his admiration of Evelina. Gibbon assured her 
 that he had read the whole five volumes in a day ; but 
 Burke declared the feat was impossible, for he had himself 
 read it through without interruption, and it had cost him 
 three days. He showed his regard for the authoress in a 
 
116 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 more substantial way tlian by compliments and criticism. 
 His last act, before going out of office, in 1783, was to 
 procure for Dr. Burney tlie appointment of organist at the 
 cliapel of Chelsea. 
 
 We have spoken of tlie dislike of these excellent women 
 for Sheridan and Fox. In Sheridan's case Burke did not 
 much disagree with them. Their characters were as un- 
 like and as antipathetic as those of two men could be ; 
 and to antipathy of temperament was probably added a 
 kind of rivalry, which may justly have affected one of 
 them with an irritated humiliation. Sheridan was twenty 
 years younger than Burke, and did not come into Parlia- 
 ment until Burke had fought the prolonged battle of the 
 American war, and had achieved the victory of Economic 
 Reform. Yet Sheridan was immediately taken up by the 
 party, and became the intimate and counsellor of Charles 
 Fox, its leader, and of the Prince of Wales, its patron. 
 That Burke never failed to do full justice to Sheridan's 
 brilliant genius, or to bestow generous and unaffected 
 praise on his oratorical successes, there is ample evidence. 
 He was of far too high and veracious a nature to be ca- 
 pable of the disparaging tricks of a poor jealousy. The 
 humiliation lay in the fact that circumstances had placed 
 Sheridan in a position which made it natural for the world 
 to measure them with one another. Burke could no more 
 like Sheridan than he could like the Beggar's 0]jera. 
 Sheridan had a levity, a want of depth, a laxity, and dis- 
 persion of feeling, to which no degree of intellectual brill- 
 iancy could reconcile a man of such profound moral en- 
 ergy and social conviction as Burke. 
 
 The thought will perhaps occur to the reader that Fox 
 was not less lax than Sheridan, and yet for Fox Burke 
 long had the sincerest friendship. He was dissolute, in- 
 
Ti.] SHERIDAN AND FOX. IIY 
 
 dolent, irregular, and tlie most insensate gambler tliat ever 
 squandered fortune after fortune over the faro-table. It 
 ■svas liis vices as much as his politics, that made George 
 III. hate Fox as an English Catiline. How came Burke 
 to accept a man of this character, first for his disciple, 
 then for his friend, and next for his leader ? The answer 
 is a simple one. In spite of the disorders of his life. Fox, 
 from the time when his acquaintance with Burke began, 
 down to the time when it came to such disastrous end, 
 and for long years afterwards, was to the bottom of his- 
 heart as passionate for freedom, justice, and beneficence as 
 Burke ever was. These great ends were as real, as con- 
 stant, as overmastering in Fox as they were in Burke. 
 Kg man was ever more deeply imbued with the generous 
 impulses of great statesmanship, with chivalrous courage, 
 with the magnificent spirit of devotion to high imposing 
 causes. These qualities, we may be sure, and not his pow- 
 er as a debater and as a declaimer, won for him in Burke's 
 heart the admiration which found such splendid expres- 
 sion in a passage, that will remain as a stock piece of dec- 
 lamation for long generations after it was first poured out 
 as a sincere tribute of reverence and affection. Precisians, 
 like Lafayette, might choose to see their patriotic hopes 
 ruined rather than have them saved by Mirabeau, because 
 Mirabeau was a debauchee. Burke's public morality was 
 of stouter stuff, and he loved Fox because he knew that 
 under the stains and blemishes that had been left by a 
 deplorable education was that sterling, inexhaustible ore 
 in which noble sympathies are subtly compounded with 
 resplendent powers. 
 
 If he was warmly attached to his political friends, 
 Burke, at least before the Revolution, was usually on fair 
 terms in private life with his political opponents. There 
 
118 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 were few men whose policy he disliked more than he dis- 
 liked the policy of George Grenville. And we have seen 
 that he criticized Grenville in a pamphlet which did not 
 spare him. Yet Grenville and he did not refuse one an- 
 other's hospitality, and were on the best terms to the very 
 end. Wilberf orce, again, was one of the staunchest friends 
 of Pitt, and fought one of the greatest electioneering bat- 
 tles on Pitt's side in the struggle of 1784; but it made 
 no difference in Burke's relations with him. In 1787 a 
 coldness arose between them. Burke had delivered a 
 strong invective against the French Treaty. "VVilberforce 
 said, "We can make allowance for the honourable gen- 
 tleman, because we remember him in better days." The 
 retort greatly nettled Burke, but the feeling soon passed 
 away, and they both found a special satisfaction in the 
 dinner to which Wilberforce invited Burke every session. 
 " He was a great man," says "Wilberforce. " I could nev- 
 er understand how at one time he grew to be so entirely 
 neglected." 
 
 Outside of both political and literary circles, among 
 Burke's correspondents was that wise and honest traveller 
 whose name is as inseparably bound up with the prepara- 
 tion of the French Revolution, as Burke's is bound up 
 with its sanguinary climax and fulfilment. Arthur Young, 
 by his Farmer's Letters, and Farmer's Calendar, and his 
 account of his travels in the southern counties of England 
 and elsewhere — the story of the more famous travels in 
 France was not published until 1792 — had won a reputa- 
 tion as the best-informed agriculturist of his day. With- 
 in a year of his settlement at Beaconsfield, we find Burke 
 writing to consult Young on the mysteries of his new oc- 
 cupation. The reader may smile as he recognizes the 
 ardour, the earnestness, the fervid gravity of the political 
 
VI.] AT BEACOXSFIELD. 119 
 
 speeches, in letters which discuss the merits of carrots in 
 fattening porkers, and the precise degree to which they 
 should be boiled. Burke throws himself just as eagerly 
 into white peas and Indian corn, into cabbages that grow 
 into head and cabbages that shoot into leaves, into experi- 
 ments with pumpkin seed and wild parsnip, as if they had 
 been details of the Stamp Act, or justice to Ireland. AVhen 
 he complains that it is scarcely possible for him, with his 
 numerous avocations, to get his servants to enter fully into 
 his views as to the right treatment of his crops, we can 
 easily understand that his farming did not help him to 
 make money. It is impossible that he should have had 
 time or attention to spare for the effectual direction of 
 even a small farm. 
 
 Yet if the farm brought scantier profit than it ought to 
 have brought, it was probably no weak solace in the back- 
 ground of a life of harassing interests and perpetual dis- 
 appointments. Burke was happier at Beaconsfield than 
 anywhere else, and he was happiest there when his house 
 was full of guests. Nothing pleased him better than to 
 drive a visitor over to Windsor, where he would expatiate 
 with enthusiasm " on the proud Keep, rising in the maj- 
 esty of proportion, and girt with the double belt of its 
 kindred and coeval towers, overseeing and guarding the 
 subjected land." He delighted to point out the house 
 at Uxbrido;e where Charles I. had carried on the neo-otia- 
 tions with the Parliamentary Commissioners ; the beauti- 
 ful grounds of Bulstrode, where Judge Jefferies had once 
 lived; and the church-yard of Beaconsfield, where lay the 
 remains of Edmund Waller, the poet. He was fond of 
 talking of great statesmen — of AValpole, of Pulteney, and 
 of Chatham. Some one had said that Chatham knew 
 nothing whatever except Spenser's Faevy Queen. " No 
 
120 BURKE. [chap. ti. 
 
 matter how tliat was said," Burke replied to one of his 
 visitors, " whoever relishes and reads Spenser as he ought 
 to be read, will have a strong hold of the JEnglish lan- 
 guage." The delight of the host must have been at least 
 equalled by the delight of the guest in conversation which 
 was thus ever taldng new turns, branching into topical sur- 
 prises, and at all turns and on every topic was luminous, 
 high, edifying, full. 
 
 No guest was more welcome than the friend of his boy- 
 hood; and Richard Shacldeton has told how the friend- 
 ship, cordiality, and openness with which Burke embraced 
 him was even more than mighit be expected from long love. 
 The simple Quaker was confused by the sight of what 
 seemed to him so sumptuous and worldly a life, and he 
 went to rest uneasily, doubting whether God's blessing 
 could go with it. But when he awoke on the morrow of 
 his first visit, he told his wife, in the language of his sect, 
 how glad he was " to find no condemnation ; but on the 
 contrary, ability to put up fervent petitions with much 
 tenderness on behalf of this great luminary." It is at his 
 country home that we like best to think of Burke. It is 
 still a touching picture to the^ historic imagination to fol- 
 low him from the heat and violence of the House, where 
 tipsy squires derided the greatest genius of his time, down 
 to the calm shades of Beaconsfield, where he would with 
 his own hands give food to a starving beggar, or medicine 
 to a peasant sick of the ague ; where he would talk of the 
 weather, the turnips, and the hay with the team-men and 
 the farm-bailiff ; and where, in the evening stillness, he 
 would pace the walk under the trees, and reflect on the 
 state of Europe and the distractions of his country. 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THE NEW MINISTRY "WARREN HASTINGS BURKe's PUBLIC 
 
 POSITION. 
 
 The six years which followed the destruction of the Coali- 
 tion were, in some respects, the most mortifying portion 
 of Burke's troubled career. Pitt was more firmly seated 
 in power than Lord North had ever been, and he used his 
 power to carry out a policy against which it was impossi- 
 ble for the Whigs, on their own principles, to offer an ef- 
 fective resistance. For this is the peculiarity of the King's 
 first victory over the enemies who had done obstinate bat- 
 tle with him for nearly a quarter of a century. He had 
 driven them out of the field, but with the aid of an ally 
 who was as strongly hostile to the royal system as they 
 had ever been. The King l^ad vindicated his right against 
 the Whigs to choose his own ministers ; but the new min- 
 ister was himself a Whig by descent, and a reformer by 
 his education and personal disposition. 
 
 Ireland was the subject of the first great battle between 
 the ministry and their opponents. Here, if anywhere, we 
 might have expected from Burke at least his usual wisdom 
 and patience. We saw in a previous chapter (p. 23) what 
 the political condition of Ireland was when Burke went 
 there with Hamilton in 1763. The American war had 
 brought about a great change. The King had shrewdly 
 predicted that if America became free, Ireland would soon 
 6* 
 
122 BL^KKE. [chap. 
 
 follow the same plan and be a separate state. In fact, 
 along witli the American war we had to encounter an Irish 
 "war also ; but the latter was, as an Irish politician called 
 it at the time, a smothered war. Like the Americans, the 
 Anglo-Irish entered into non-importation compacts, and 
 they interdicted commerce. The Irish volunteers, first 
 forty, then sixty, and at last a hundred thousand strong, 
 were virtually an army enrolled to overawe the English 
 ministry and Parliament. Following the spirit, if not the 
 actual path, of the Americans, they raised a cry for com- 
 mercial and legislative independence. They were too 
 strong to be resisted, and in 1782 the Irish Parliament ac- 
 quired the privilege of initiating and conducting its own 
 business, without the sanction or control either of the 
 Privy Council or of the English Parliament. Dazzled by 
 the chance of acquiring legislative independence, they had 
 been content with the comparatively small commercial 
 boons obtained by Lord Nugent and Burke in 1778, and 
 with the removal of further restrictions by the alarmed 
 minister in the following year. After the concession of 
 their independence in 1782, they found that to procure 
 the abolition of the remainino- restrictions on their com- 
 merce — the right of trade, for instance, with America and 
 Africa — the consent of the English legislature was as nec- 
 essary as it had ever been. Pitt, fresh from the teaching 
 of Adam Smith and of Shelburne, brought forward in 
 1785 his famous commercial propositions. The theory of 
 his scheme was that Irish trade should be free, and that 
 Ireland should be admitted to a permanent participation 
 in commercial advantages. In return for this gain, after 
 her hereditary revenue passed a certain point, she was to 
 devote the surplus to purposes, such as the maintenance 
 of the navy, in which the two nations had a common in- 
 
vn.J PITT'S IRISH PROPOSITIONS. 123 
 
 terest. Pitt was to be believed when he declared that, of 
 all the objects of his political life, this was, in his opinion, 
 the most important that he had ever engaged in, and he 
 never expected to meet another that should rouse every 
 emotion in so strono- a deo-ree as this. 
 
 A furious battle took place in the Irish Parliament. 
 There, while nobody could deny that the eleven proposi- 
 tions would benefit the mercantile interests of the coun- 
 try, it was passionately urged that the last of the propo- 
 sitions, that which concerned' the apportionment of Irish 
 revenue to imperial purposes, meant the enslavement of 
 their unhappy island. Their fetters, they went on, were 
 clenched, if the English Government was to be allowed 
 thus to take the initiative in Irish legislation. The fac- 
 tious course pursued by the English Opposition was much 
 less excusable than the line of the Anglo -Irish leaders. 
 Fox, Avho was ostentatiously ignorant of political econ- 
 omy, led the charge. He insisted that Pitt's measures 
 w^ould annihilate English trade, would destroy the Navi- 
 gation Laws, and with them would bring our maritime 
 strength to the ground. Having thus won the favour of 
 the English manufacturers, he turned round to the Irish 
 Opposition, and conciliated them by declaring with equal 
 vehemence that the propositions were an insult to Ireland, 
 and a nefarious attempt to tamper with her new-born lib- 
 erties. Burke followed his leader. We may almost say 
 that for once he allowed his political integrity to be be- 
 wildered. In 1778 and 1779 he had firmly resisted the 
 pressure Avhich his mercantile constituents in Bristol had 
 endeavoured to put upon him ; he had warmly supported 
 the Irish claims, and had lost his seat in consequence. 
 The precise ground which he took up in 1785 was this. 
 He appears to have discerned in Pitt's proposals the germ 
 
124 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 of an attempt to extract revenue from Ireland, identical in 
 purpose, principle, and probable effect with tlie ever-mem- 
 orable attempt to extract revenue from tbe American Col- 
 onies. Whatever stress may be laid upon this, we find it 
 hard to vindicate Burke from the charge of factiousness. 
 Nothing can have been more unworthy of him than the 
 sneer at Pitt in the great speech on the Nabob of Arcot's 
 debts (1785), for stopping to pick up chaff and straws 
 from the Irish revenue, instead of checking profligate ex- 
 penditure in India. 
 
 Pitt's alternative was irresistible. Situated as Ireland 
 was, she must either be the subservient instrument of 
 English prosperity, or else she must be allowed to enjoy 
 the benefits of English trade, taking at the same time 
 a proportionate share of the common burdens. Adam 
 Smith had shown that there was nothing incompatible 
 with justice in a contribution by Ireland to the public 
 debt of Great Britain. That debt, he argued, had been 
 contracted in support of the government established by 
 the Revolution ; a government to which the Protestants 
 of Ireland owed not only the whole authority which they 
 enjoyed in their own country, but every security which 
 they possessed for their liberty, property, and religion. 
 The neio;hbourhood of Ireland to the shores of the mother 
 country introduced an element into the problem, which 
 must have taught every unimpassioned observer that the 
 American solution would be inadequate for a dependency 
 that lay at our very door. Burke could not, in his calmer 
 moments, have failed to recognize all this. Yet he lent 
 himself to the party cry that Pitt was taking his first 
 measures for the re-enslavement of Ireland. Had it not 
 been for what he himself called the delirium of the pre- 
 ceding session, and w^hich had still not subsided, he would 
 
VII.] INDIAN AFFAIRS. 125 
 
 Lave seen that Pitt was in truth taking his first measures 
 for the effective deliverance of Ireland from an unjust 
 and oppressive subordination. The same delirium commit- 
 ted him to another equally deplorable perversity, -svhen he 
 opposed, with as many excesses in temper as fallacies in 
 statesmanship, the wise treaty with France, in which Pitt 
 partially anticipated the commercial policy of an ampler 
 treaty three-quarters of a century afterwards. 
 
 A great episode in Burke's career now opened. It was 
 in 1785 that Warren Hastings returned from India, after 
 a series of exploits as momentous and far-reaching, for 
 good or evil, as have ever been achieved by any English 
 ruler. For years Burke had been watching India. With 
 rising wonder, amazement,- and indignation he had steadily 
 followed that long train of intrigue and crime which had 
 ended in the consolidation of a new empire. AVith the 
 return of Hastings he felt that the time had come for 
 striking a severe blow and making a signal example. He 
 gave notice (June, 1785) that he would, at a future day, 
 make a motion respecting the conduct of a gentleman just 
 returned from India. 
 
 Among minor considerations, we have to remember that 
 Indian affairs entered materially into the great battle of 
 parties. It was upon an Indian bill that the late ministry 
 had made shipwreck. It w^as notoriously by the aid of po- 
 tent Indian interests that the new ministry had acquired 
 a portion of its majority. To expose the misdeeds of 
 our agents in India was at once to strike the minister 
 who had dexterously secured their support, and to at- 
 tack one of the great strongholds of parliamentary cor- 
 ruption. The proceedings against Hastings were, in the 
 first instance, regarded as a sequel to the struggle over 
 Fox's East India Bill. That these considerations were 
 
126 liUKKE, [chap. 
 
 present in Burke's thouglit there is no doubt, but they 
 were purely secondary. It was India itself that stood 
 above all else in his imagination. It had filled his mind 
 and absorbed his time while Pitt was still an under-gradu- 
 ate at Cambrido-e, and Burke was lookino; forward to match 
 his plan of economic reform with a greater plan of Indian 
 reform. In the Ninth Report, the Eleventh Report, and 
 in his speech on the India Bill of 1783, he had shown both 
 how thoroughly he had mastered the facts, and how pro- 
 foundly they had stirred his sense of wrong. The master- 
 piece known as the Speech on the Nabob of Arcot's debts, 
 delivered in Parliament on a motion for papers (1785), 
 handles matters of account, of interest turned into princi- 
 pal, and principal superadded to principal ; it deals with 
 a hundred minute technicalities of teeps and tuncaws, of 
 gomastahs and soucaring ; all with such a suffusion of in- 
 terest and colour, with such nobility of idea and expres- 
 sion, as could only have come from the addition to genius 
 of a deep morality of nature and an overwhelming force 
 of conviction. A space less than one of these pages con- 
 tains such a picture of the devastation of the Carnatic by 
 Hyder Ali as may fill the young orator or the young 
 writer with the same emotions of enthusiasm, emulation, 
 and despair that torment the artist who first gazes on the 
 Madonna at Dresden, or the figures of Night and Dawn 
 and the Penseroso at Florence. The despair is only too 
 well founded. No conscious study could pierce the secret 
 of that just and pathetic transition from the havoc of 
 Hyder Ali to the healing duties of a virtuous government, 
 to the consolatory celebration of the mysteries of justice 
 and humanity, to the warning to the unlawful creditors to 
 silence their inauspicious tongues in presence of the holy 
 work of restoration, to the generous proclamation against 
 
VII.] NATURE OF BURKE'S SENSIBILITY. 127 
 
 them that in every country the first creditor is the plough . 
 The emotions which make the hidden force of such pict- 
 ures come not by observation. They grow from the sed- 
 ulous meditation of long years, directed by a powerful in- 
 tellect and inspired by an interest in human well-being, 
 which of its own virtue bore the orator into the sustainino- 
 air of the upper gods. Concentrated passion and exhaust- 
 ive knowledge have never entered into a more formidable 
 combination. Yet, when Burke made his speech on the 
 Nabob of Arcot's debts, Pitt and Grenville consulted to- 
 gether whether it was worth ansvrering, and came to the 
 conclusion that they need not take the trouble. 
 
 Neither the scornful neglect of his opponents, nor the 
 dissuasions of some who sat on his own side, could check 
 the ardour with which Burke pressed on, as he said, to the 
 relief of afflicted nations. The fact is, that Burke was not 
 at all a philanthropist as Clarkson and Wilberforce were 
 philanthropists. His sympathy was too strongly under 
 the control of true political reason. In 1780, for instance, 
 the slave-trade had attracted his attention, and he had even 
 proceeded to sketch out a code of regulations which pro- 
 vided for its immediate mitigation and ultimate suppres- 
 sion. After mature consideration he abandoned the at- 
 tempt, from the conviction that the strength of the West 
 India interest would defeat the utmost efforts of his party. 
 And he was quite right in refusing to hope from any po- 
 litical action what could only be effected after the moral 
 preparation of the bulk of the nation. And direct moral 
 or philanthropic apostleship was not his function. 
 
 Macaulay, in a famous passage of dazzling lustre and 
 fine historic colour, describes Burke's holy rage against the 
 misdeeds of Hastings as due to his sensibility. But sensi- 
 bility to what ? Not merely to those common impressions 
 
 y/ 
 
128 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 of hum an suffering "which, kindle the flame of ordinary 
 philanthropy, always attractive, often so beneficent, but 
 often so capricious and so laden with secret detriment. 
 This was no part of Burke's type. Nor is it enough to 
 say that Burke liad what is the distinctive mark of the 
 true statesman — a passion for good, wise, and orderly gov- 
 ernment. He had that in the strongest degree. All that 
 Avore the look of confusion he held in abhorrence, and he 
 detected the seeds of confusion with a penetration that 
 made other men marvel. He was far too wise a man to 
 have any sympathy wdth the energetic exercise of power 
 for power's sake. He knew well that triumphs of violence 
 are for the most part little better than temporary make- 
 shifts, which leave all the work of government to be en- 
 countered afterwards by men of essentially greater capacity 
 than the hero of force without scruple. But he regarded 
 those whom he called the great bad men of the old stamp, 
 Cromwell, Kichelieu, the Guises, the Oondes, with a cer- 
 tain tolerance, because " though the virtues of such men 
 were not to be taken as a balance to their crimes, yet they 
 had long views, and sanctified their ambition by aiming at 
 the orderly rule, and not the destruction of their country." 
 What he valued was the deep-seated order of systems that 
 Avorked by the accepted uses, opinions, beliefs, prejudices 
 of a community. 
 
 This love of right and stable order was not all. That 
 was itself the growth from a deeper root, partly of convic- 
 tion and partly of sympathy ; the conviction of the rare 
 and difficult conjunctures of circumstance which are need- 
 ed for the formation of even the rudest forms of social 
 union among mankind ; and then the sympathy that the 
 best men must always find it hard to withhold from any 
 hoary fabric of belief, and any venerated system of gov- 
 
Til.] NATURE OF BURKE'S SENSIBILITY. 129 
 
 ernment, tliat has cherished a certain order, and shed even 
 a ray of the faintest dawn, among the violences and the 
 darkness of the race. It was reverence rather than sensi- 
 bility, a noble and philosophic conservatism rather than 
 philanthropy, which raised that storm in Burke's breast 
 against the rapacity of English adventurers in India, and 
 the imperial crimes of Hastings. Exactly the same tide of 
 emotion which afterwards filled to the brim the cup of 
 prophetic anger against the desecrators of the church and 
 the monarchy of France, now poured itself out against 
 those who in India had "tossed about, subverted and tore 
 to pieces, as if it were in the gambols of boyish unlucki- 
 ness and malice, the most established rights, and the most 
 ancient and most revered institutions of ages and nations." 
 From beginning to end of the fourteen years in which 
 Burke pursued his campaign against Hastings, we see in 
 every page that the India which ever glowed before his 
 vision was not the home of picturesque usages and melo- 
 dramatic costume, but rather, in his own words, the land 
 of princes once of great dignity, authority, and opulence ; 
 of an ancient and venerable priesthood, the guides of the 
 people while living, and their consolation in death ; of a 
 nobility of antiquity and renown ; of millions of ingenious 
 mechanics, and millions of diligent tillers of the earth ; and 
 finally, the land where might be found almost all the re- 
 ligions professed by men — the Brahminical, the Mussul- 
 man, the Eastern and the AVestern Christian. When he 
 published his speech on the Nabob of Arcot, Burke pre- 
 fixed to it an admirable quotation from one of the letters 
 of the Emperor Julian. And Julian too, as we all know, 
 had a strong feeling for the past. But what in that re- 
 markable figure was only the sentimentalism of reaction, 
 in Burke was a reasoned and philosophic veneration for all 
 
ISO BURKE. ■ [chap. 
 
 old and settled order, whether in the free Parliament of 
 Great Britain, in the ancient absolutism of Versailles, or in 
 the secular pomp of Oude, and the inviolable sanctity of 
 Benares, the holy city and the garden of God. 
 
 It would be out of place here to attempt to follow the 
 details of the impeachment. Every reader has heard that 
 great tale in our history, and everybody knows that it was 
 Burke's tenacity and power which caused that tale to be 
 told. The House of Commons would not, it is true, have 
 directed that Hastings should be impeached, unless Pitt 
 had given his sanction and approval, and how it was that 
 Pitt did give his sanction and approval so suddenly and 
 on grounds ostensibly so slender, remains one of the se- 
 crets of history. In no case would the impeachment have 
 been pressed upon Parliament by the Opposition, and as- 
 sented to by ministers, if Burke had not been there with 
 his prodigious industry, his commanding comprehensive 
 vision, his burning zeal, and his power of kindling in men 
 so different from him and from one another as Fox, Sher- 
 idan, Windham, Grey, a zeal only less intense than his 
 own. 
 
 It was in the spring of 1786 that the articles of charge 
 of Hastings's high crimes and misdemeanours, as Burke 
 had drawn them, were presented to the House of Commons. 
 It was in February, 1788, that Burke opened the vast 
 cause in the old historic hall at Westminster, in an oration 
 in which at points he was wound up to such a pitch of 
 eloquence and passion that every listener, including the 
 great criminal, held his breath in an agony of horror ; that 
 women were carried out fainting; that the speaker himself 
 became incapable of saying another word, and the specta- 
 tors of the scene began to wonder whether he would not, 
 like the mighty Chatham, actually die in the exertion of 
 
\ii.] OPENING OF THE IMPEACHMENT. 131 
 
 his overwhelming powers. Among the illustrious crowd 
 -who thronged Westminster Hall in the opening days of 
 the impeachment, was Fanny Burney. She was then in 
 her odious bondage at Court, and was animated by that 
 admiration and pity for Hastings which at Court was the 
 fashion. Windham used to come up from the box of the 
 managers of the impeachment to talk over with her the 
 incidents of the day, and she gave him her impressions of 
 Burke's speech, Avhich w^ere probably those of the majority 
 of his hearers, for the majority were favourable to Has- 
 tings. " I told him," says Miss Burney, " that Mr. Burke's 
 opening had struck me with the highest admiration of his 
 powers, from the eloquence, the imagination, the fire, the 
 diversity of expression, and the ready flow of language 
 with which he seemed gifted, in a most superior manner, 
 for any and every purpose to which rhetoric could lead." 
 "And when he came to his two narratives," I continued, 
 " when he related the particulars of those dreadful mur- 
 ders, he interested, he engaged, he at last overpowered me ; 
 I felt my cause lost. I could hardly keep on my seat. 
 My eyes dreaded a single glance towards a man so accused 
 as Mr. Hastings ; I wanted to sink on the floor, that they 
 might be saved so painful a sight. I had no hope he 
 could clear himself ; not another wish in his favour re- 
 mained. But when from this narration Mr. Burke pro- 
 ceeded to his own comments and declamation — when the 
 charges of rapacity, cruelty, tyranny, were general, and 
 made with all the violence of personal detestation, and 
 continued and aggravated without any further fact or il- 
 lustration ; then there appeared more of study than of 
 truth, more of invective than of justice ; and, in short, so 
 little of proof to so much of passion, that in a very short 
 time I began to lift up my head, my seat was no longer 
 
132 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 uneasy, my eyes Avere indifferent wliich way they looked, 
 or -what object caught them, and before I was myself 
 aware of the declension of Mr. Burke's powers over my 
 feelings, I found myself a mere spectator in a public place, 
 and looking all around it, with my opera -glass in my 
 hand !" 
 
 In 1795, six years after Burke's opening, the Lords were 
 ready with their verdict. It had long been anticipated. 
 Hastings was acquitted. This was the close of the four- 
 teen years of labour, from the date of the Select Commit- 
 tee of 1781. "If I were to call for a reward," Burke 
 said, " it w^ould be for the services in which for fourteen 
 years, without intermission, I showed the most industry 
 and had the least success. I mean the affairs of India ; 
 they are those on which I value myself the most ; most for 
 the importance ; most for the labour ; most for the judg- 
 ment ; most for constancy and perseverance in the pursuit." 
 
 The side that is defeated on a particular issue, is often 
 victorious in the wide and general outcome. Looking 
 back across the ninety years that divide us from that 
 memorable scene in Westminster Hall, we may see that 
 Burke had more success than at first appeared. If he did 
 not convict the man, he overthrew a system, and stamped 
 its principles with lasting censure and shame. Burke had 
 perhaps a silent conviction that it wo aid have been better 
 for us and for India, if Clive had succeeded in his attempt 
 to blow out his own brains in the Madras counting-house, 
 or if the battle of Plassy had been a decisive defeat instead 
 of a decisive victory. " All these circumstances," he once 
 said, in reference to the results of the investigation of the 
 Select Committee, " are not, I confess, very favourable to 
 the idea of our attempting to govern India at all. But 
 there we are : there we are placed by the Sovereign Dis- 
 
vn.] EFFECT OF THE IMPEACHMENT. 133 
 
 poser, and we must do the best we can in our situation. 
 The situation of man is the preceptor of his duty." If 
 that situation is better understood now than it was a cen- 
 tury ago, and that duty more loftily conceived, the result 
 is due, so far as such results can ever be due to one man's 
 action apart from the confluence of the deep impersonal 
 elements of time, to the seeds of justice and humanity 
 which were sown by Burke and his associates. Nobody 
 now believes that Clive was justified in tricking Omichund 
 by forging another man's name; that Impey was justified 
 in hanging Nuncomar for committing the very offence for 
 which Clive was excused or applauded, although forgery 
 is no grave crime according to Hindoo usage, and it is the 
 gravest according to English usage ; that Hastings did 
 well in selling English troops to assist in the extermina- 
 tion of a brave people with w^hom he was at peace; that 
 Benfield did well in conniving with an Eastern prince in 
 a project of extortion against his subjects. The whole 
 drift of opinion has changed, and it is since the trial of 
 Hastings that the change has taken place. The question 
 in Burke's time was whether oppression and corruption 
 were to continue to be the guiding maxims of English 
 policy. The personal disinterestedness of the ruler who 
 had been the chief founder of this policy, and had most 
 openly set aside all pretence of righteous principle, was 
 dust in the balance. It was impossible to suppress the 
 policy without striking a deadly blow at its most eminent 
 and powerful instrument. That Hastings was acquitted, 
 was immaterial. The lesson of his impeachment had been 
 taught with sufficiently impressive force — the great lesson 
 that Asiatics have rights, and that Europeans have obliga- 
 tions ; that a superior race is bound to observe the highest 
 current morality of the time in all its dealings with the 
 
134 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 subject race. Burke is entitled to our lasting reverence as 
 the first apostle and great upholder of integrity, mercy, 
 and honour in the relation between his countrymen and 
 their humble dependents. 
 
 He shared the common fate of those who dare to strike 
 a blow for human justice against the prejudices of national 
 egotism. But he was no longer able to bear obloquy and 
 neglect, as he had borne it through tlie war with the col- 
 onies. When he opened the impeachment of Hastings at 
 Westminster, Burke was very near to his sixtieth year. 
 Hannah More noted in 1786 that his vivacity had dimin- 
 ished, and that business and politics had impaired his 
 agreeableness. The simpletons in the House, now that 
 they had at last found in Pitt a political chief who could 
 beat the W'hig leaders on their own ground of eloquence, 
 knowledge, and dexterity in debate, took heart as they had 
 never done under Lord North. They now made deliberate 
 attempts to silence the veteran by unmannerly and brutal 
 interruptions, of which a mob of lower class might have 
 been ashamed. Then suddenly came a moment of such 
 excitement as has not often been seen in the annals of 
 party. It became known one day, in the autumn of 1788, 
 that the King had gone <5ut of his mind. 
 
 The news naturally caused the liveliest agitation among 
 the Whigs. When the severity of the attack forced the 
 ministry to make preparations for a Regency, the friends 
 of the Prince of Wales assumed that they wonld speedily 
 return to power, and hastened to form their plans accord- 
 ingly. Fox was travelling in Italy with Mrs. Armitage, 
 and he had been two months away without hearing a word 
 from England. The Duke of Portland sent a messenger 
 in search of him, and after a journey of ten days the mes- 
 senger found him at Bologna. Fox instantly set off in all 
 
VII.] THE KING'S ILLNESS. 135 
 
 haste for London, which he reached in nine days. The 
 three months that followed were a time of unsurpassed 
 activity and bitterness, and Burke was at least as active 
 and as bitter as the rest of them. He was the waiter of 
 the Prince of Wales's letter to Pitt, sometimes set down 
 to Sheridan, and sometimes to Gilbert Elliot. It makes us 
 feel how naturally the style of ideal kingship, its dignity, 
 calm, and high self-consciousness all came to Burke. Al- 
 though we read of his thus drawing up manifestoes and 
 protests, and deciding minor questions for Fox, which Fox 
 was too irresolute to decide for himself, yet we have it on 
 Burke's own authority that some time elapsed after the 
 return to England before he even saw Fox ; that he was 
 not consulted as to the course to be pursued in the grave 
 and difficult questions connected with the Regency ; and 
 that he knew as little of the inside of Carlton House, 
 where the Prince of Wales lived, as of Buckingham House, 
 where the King lived. " I mean to continue here," he 
 says to Charles Fox, " until you call upon me ; and I find 
 myself perfectly easy, from the implicit confidence that I 
 have in you and the Duke, and the certainty that I am in 
 that you two will do the best for the general advantage of 
 the cause. In that state of mind I feel no desire what- 
 soever of interfering." Yet the letter itself, and others 
 which follow, testify to the vehemence of Burke's interest 
 in'the matter, and to the persistency with which he would 
 have had them follow his judgment, if they would have 
 listened. It is as clear that they did not listen. 
 
 Apart from the fierce struggle against Pitt's Regency 
 Bill, Burke's friends were intently occupied with the re- 
 construction of the Portland cabinet, which the King had 
 so unexpectedly dismissed five years before. This was a 
 sphere in which Burke's gifts were neither required nor 
 
136 BURKE. [CHAP. 
 
 sought. We are ratlier in distress, Sir Gilbert Elliot 
 writes, for a proper man for tlie office of Cliancellor of 
 tlie Exchequer. " Lord J. Cavendish is very unwilling to 
 engage again in public affairs. Fox is to be Secretary of 
 State. Burke, it is thought, would not be approved of, 
 Sheridan has not the public confidence, and so it comes 
 down therefore to Grey, Pelham, myself, and perhaps 
 Windham." Elliot was one of Burke's most faithful and 
 attached friends, and he was intimately concerned in all 
 that was going on in the inner circle of the party. It is 
 worth while, therefore, to reproduce his account, from a 
 confidential letter to Lady Elliot, of the way in which 
 Burke's claim to recognition was at this time regarded 
 and dealt with. 
 
 Although I can tell you nothing positive about my own situation, 
 I was made very happy indeed yesterday by co-operating in the set- 
 tlement of Burke's, in a manner which gives us great Joy as well as 
 comfort. The Duke of Portland has felt distressed how to arrange 
 Burke and his family in a manner equal to Burke's merits, and to 
 the Duke's own wishes, and at the same time so as to be exempt 
 from the many difficulties Avhich seem to be in the way. He sent 
 for Pelham and me, as Burke's friends and his own, to advise with 
 us about it ; and we dined yesterday with him and the Duchess, that 
 we might have time to talk the thing over at leisure and without in- 
 terruption after dinner. "We stayed, accordingly, engaged in that 
 subject till almost twelve at night, and our conference ended most 
 happily, and excessively to the satisfaction of us all. The Duke of 
 Portland has the veneration for Burke that Windham, Pelham, my- 
 self, and a few more have, and he thinks it impossible to do too 
 much for him. He considers the reward to be given to Burke as a 
 credit and honour to the nation, and he considers the neglect of him 
 and his embarrassed situation as having been long a reproach to the 
 country. The unjust prejudice and clamour which has prevailed 
 against him and his family only determine the Duke the more to do 
 him Justice. The question was how ? First, his brother Richard, 
 who was Secretary to the Treasury before, Avill have the same office 
 
VII. J PATvIY ARK.\AGEMENTS. 131 
 
 now, but the Duke intends to give him one of the first offices which 
 falls vacant, of about 1000^. a year for life in the Customs, and he 
 will then resign the Secretary to the Treasury, which, however, in the 
 meanwhile is worth 3000?. a year. Edmund Burke is to have the 
 Pay Office, 4000?. a year; but as that is precarious and he can leave 
 no provision for his son, it would, in fact, be doing little or nothing 
 of any real or substantial value unless some permanent provision is 
 added to it. In this view the Duke is to grant him on the Irish es- 
 tablishment a pension of 2000?. a year clear for his own life, and the 
 other half to Mrs. Burke for her life. This will make Burke com- 
 pletely happy, by leaving his wife and son safe from want after his 
 death, if they should survive him. The Duke's affectionate anxiety 
 to accomplish this object, and his determination to set all clamour at 
 defiance on this point of justice, was truly affecting, and increases 
 my attachment for the Duke. . . . The Duke said the only objection 
 to this plan was that he thought it was due from this country, and 
 that he grudged the honour of it to Ireland ; but as nothing in Eng- 
 land was ready, this plan was settled. You may think it strange 
 that to this moment Burke does not know a word of all this, and his 
 family are indeed, I believe, suffering a little under the apprehension 
 that he may be neglected in the general scramble. I believe there 
 never were three cabinet counsellors more in harmony on any sub- 
 ject than we were, nor three people happier in their day's work.^ 
 
 This leaves the apparent puzzle where it was. Why- 
 should Burke not be approved of for Chancellor of the 
 Exchequer ? What were the many difficulties described as 
 seeming to be in the way of arranging for Burke, in a 
 manner equal to Burke's merits and the Duke of Port- 
 land's wishes ? His personal relations with the chiefs of 
 his party were at this time extremely cordial and intimate. 
 He was constantly a guest at the Duke of Portland's most 
 private dinner-parties. Fox had gone down to Beacons- 
 field to recruit himself from the fatigues of his rapid jour- 
 ney from Bologna, and to spend some days in quiet with 
 Windham and the master of the house. Elliot and Wind- 
 * Life and Letters of Sir G. Elliot, i. 261-3. 
 1 
 
138 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 ham, who were talked about for a post for which one of 
 them says that Burke would not have been approved, vied 
 with one another in adoring Burke. Finally, Elliot and 
 the Dake think themselves happy in a day's work which 
 ended in consigning the man who not only was, but was 
 admitted to be, the most powerful genius of their party, 
 to a third-rate post, and that most equivocal distinction, a 
 pension on the Irish establishment. The common expla- 
 nation that it illustrates Whig exclusiveness cannot be se- 
 riously received as adequate. It is probable, for one thing, 
 that the feelings of the Prince of AVales had more to do 
 with it than the feelings of men like the Duke of Portland 
 or Fox. We can easily imagine how little that most 
 worthless of human creatures would appreciate the great 
 qualities of such a man as Burke. The painful fact which 
 we are unable to conceal from ourselves is, that the com- 
 mon opinion of better men than the Prince of Wales 
 leaned in the same direction. His violence in the course 
 of the Regency debates had produced strong disapproval 
 in the public and downright consternation in his own par- 
 ty. On one occasion he is described by a respectable ob- 
 server as having " been wilder than ever, and laid himself 
 and his party more open than ever speaker did. He is 
 folly personified, but shaking his cap and bells under the 
 laurel of genius. He finished his wild speech in a manner 
 next to madness." Moore believes that Burke's indiscre- 
 tions in these trying and prolonged transactions sowed the 
 seeds of the alienation between him and Fox two years af- 
 terwards. Burke's excited state of mind showed itself in 
 small things as well as great. Going with Windham to 
 Carlton House, Burke attacked him in the coach for a dif- 
 ference of opinion about the affairs of a friend, and be- 
 haved with such unreasonable passion and such furious 
 
vil] BURKE'S PUBLIC POSITION. 139 
 
 rudeness of manner, that his magnanimous admirer had 
 some difficulty in obliterating the impression. The public 
 were less tolerant. Windham has told us that at this time 
 Burke was a man decried, persecuted, and proscribed, not 
 being much valued even by his own party, and by half the 
 nation considered as little better than an ingenious mad- 
 man.^ This is evidence beyond impeachment, for Wind- 
 ham loved and honoured Burke with the affection and rev- 
 erence of a son ; and he puts the popular sentiment on 
 record with grief and amazement. There is other testi- 
 mony to the same effect. The late Lord Lansdowne, who 
 must have heard the subject abundantly discussed by those 
 who were most concerned in it, was once asked by a very 
 eminent man of our own time why the Whigs kept Burke 
 out of their cabinets. " Burke I" he cried ; " he was so 
 violent, so overbearing, so arrogant, so intractable, that to 
 have got on with him in a cabinet would have been utterly 
 and absolutely impossible." 
 
 On the whole, it seems to be tolerably clear that the dif- 
 ficulties in the way of Burke's promotion to high office 
 were his notoriously straitened circumstances ; his ungov- 
 erned excesses of party zeal and political passion ; finally, 
 what Sir Gilbert Elliot calls the unjust prejudice and clam- 
 our against him and his family, and what Burke himself 
 once called the hunt of obloquy that pursued him all his 
 life. The first two of these causes can scarcely have op- 
 erated in the arrangements that were made in the Rock- 
 ingham and Coalition ministries. But the third, we may 
 be sure, was incessantly at work. It would have needed 
 social courage alike in 1782, 1783, and 1788 to give cabi- 
 net rank to a man round whose name there floated so 
 many disparaging associations. Social courage is exactly 
 * Windham's Diary, p. 213. 
 
140 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 the virtue in which the constructors of a government will 
 always think themselves least able to indulge. Burke, we 
 have to remember, did not stand alone before the world. 
 Elliot describes a dinner-party at Lord Fitzwilliams's, at 
 which four of these half -discredited Irishmen were present. 
 " Burke has now got such a train after him as w^ould sink 
 anybody but himself — his son, who is quite nauseated by 
 all mankind ; his brother, who is liked better than his son, 
 but is rather offensive with animal spirits and with brogue ; 
 and his cousin, Will Burke, who is just returned unexpect- 
 edly from India, as much ruined as when he went many 
 years ago, and who is a fresh charge on any prospects of 
 power that Burke may ever have." It was this train, and 
 the ideas of adventurership that clung to them, the inex- 
 tinguishable stories about papistry and Saint Omer's, the 
 tenacious calumny about the letters of Junius, the notori- 
 ous circumstances of embarrassment and neediness — it was 
 all these things which combined with Burke's own defects 
 of temper and discretion, to give the Whig grandees as de- 
 cent a reason as they could have desired for keeping all 
 the great posts of state in their own hands. 
 
 It seems difficult to deny that the questions of the Re- 
 gency had caused the germs of a sort of dissatisfaction 
 and strain in the relations between Fox and Burke. Their 
 feelings to one another have been well compared to the 
 mutual discontent between partners in unsuccessful play, 
 where each suspects that it is the mistakes of the other 
 that lost the game. Whether Burke felt conscious of the 
 failures in discretion and temper, which were the real or 
 pretended excuse for neglect, we cannot tell. There is one 
 passage that reveals a chagrin of this kind. A few days 
 after the meeting between the Duke of Portland and El- 
 liot, for the purpose of settling his place in the new minis- 
 
vn.] BUKKE'S CHAGRIN. 141 
 
 try, Burke went down to Beaconsfield. In writing (January 
 24th, 1789) to invite Windham and Pelham to come to 
 stay a night, with promise of a leg of mutton cooked by a 
 dairy-maid who was not a bad hand at a pinch, he goes on 
 to say that his health has received some small benefit from 
 his journey to the country. "But this view to health, 
 though far from unnecessary to me, was not the chief 
 cause of my present retreat. I began to find that I was 
 grown rather too anxious ; and had begun to discover to 
 myself and to others a solicitude relative to the present 
 state of affairs, which, though their strange condition 
 might well warrant it in others, is certainly less suitable 
 to my time of life, in which all emotions are less allowed ; 
 and to which, most certainly, all human concerns ought in 
 reason to become more indifferent, than to those who have 
 work to do, and a good deal of day, and of inexhausted 
 strength, to do it in."^ 
 
 The King's unexpected restoration to health two or three 
 weeks later, brought to nought all the hope and ambition 
 of the Whigs, and confirmed Pitt in power for the rest of 
 Burke's lifetime. But an event now came to pass in the 
 world's history which transformed Burke in an instant 
 from a man decried, persecuted, proscribed, into an object 
 of exultant adoration all over Europe. 
 
 * Correspondence^ iii. 89. 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 
 
 We have now come to the second of the two momen- 
 tous changes in the world's affairs, in which Burke played 
 an imposing and historic part. His attitude in the first of 
 them, the struggle for American independence, commands 
 almost without alloy the admiration and reverence of pos- 
 terity. His attitude in the second of them, the great rev- 
 olution in France, has raised controversies which can only 
 be compared in heat and duration to the master contro- 
 versies of theology. If the history of society were writ- 
 ten as learned men write the history of the Christian faith 
 and its churches, Burke would figure in the same strong 
 prominence, whether deplorable or glorious, as Arius and 
 Athanasius, Augustine and Sabellius, Luther and Ignatius. 
 If we ask how it is that now, nearly a century after the 
 event, men are still discussing Burke's pamphlet on the 
 Revolution as they are still discussing Bishop Butler's 
 Analogy y the answer is that in one case as in the other the 
 questions at issue are still unsettled, and that Burke offers 
 in their highest and most comprehensive form all the con- 
 siderations that belong to one side of the dispute. He 
 was not of those of whom Coleridge said that they pro- 
 ceeded with much solemnity to solve the riddle of the 
 French Revolution by anecdotes. He suspended it in the 
 
# 
 
 CHAP.vm.] BURKE'S EARLY DISTRUST. 143 
 
 same light of great social ideas and wide principles, in 
 which its authors and champions professed to represent it. 
 Unhappily he advanced from criticism to practical exhor- 
 tation, in our opinion the most mischievous and indefensi- 
 ble that has ever been pressed by any statesman on any 
 nation. But the force of the criticism remains, its fore- 
 sight remains, its commemoration of valuable elements of 
 life which men were forgetting, its discernment of the lim- 
 itations of things, its sense of the awful emergencies of the 
 problem. When our grandchildren have made up their 
 minds, once for all, as to the merits of the social transfor- 
 mation which dawned on Europe in 1789, then Burke's 
 Reflections will become a mere literary antiquity, and not 
 before. 
 
 From the very beginning Burke looked upon the pro- 
 ceedings in France with distrust. He had not a moment 
 of enthusiasm or sympathy of which to repent. When 
 the news reached England that the insurgents of Paris had 
 stormed the Bastille, Fox exclaimed with exultation, how 
 much it was the greatest event that had ever happened in 
 the world, how much the best. Is it an infirmity to wish, 
 for an instant, that some such phrase of generous hope had 
 escaped from Burke ; that he had for a day or an hour un- 
 dergone that fine illusion which was lighted up in the spir- 
 its of men like AVordsworth and Coleridge ? Those great 
 poets, who were destined one day to preach even a wiser 
 and a loftier conservatism than his own, have told us what 
 they felt — 
 
 When France in wrath her giant limbs upreared, 
 And with that oath, which smote air, earth, and sea, 
 Stamped her strong foot, and said she would be free. 
 
 Burke from the first espied the looming shadow of a 
 catastrophe. In August he wrote to Lord Charlemont 
 
144 BUKKK [chap. 
 
 that tlie events in France had something paradoxical and 
 raysterions about them ; that the outbreak of the old Pa- 
 risian ferocity might be no more than a sudden explosion, 
 but if it should happen to be character rather than acci- 
 dent, then the people would need a strong hand like that 
 of their former masters to coerce them ; that all depended 
 upon the French having wise heads among them, and upon 
 these wise heads, if such there were, acquiring an authority 
 to match their wisdom. There is nothing here but a calm 
 and sagacious suspense of judgment. It soon appeared 
 that the old Parisian ferocity was still alive. In the events 
 of October, 17 89, when the mob of Paris marched out 
 to Yersailles and marched back again with the King and 
 Queen in triumphal procession, Burke felt in his heart that 
 the beginning of the end had come, and that the catastro- 
 phe was already at hand. In October he wrote a long letr 
 ter to the French gentleman to whom he afterwards^ a(3- 
 dressed the Mejlections. " You hope, sir," he said, " that I 
 think the French deserving of libeity. I certainly do. I 
 certaiflly think that all men who desire it deserve it. We 
 cannot forfeit our right to it, but by what forfeits our title 
 to the privileges of our kind. The liberty I mean is soeial 
 freedom. It is that state of tjiings in which liberty is se- 
 cured by equality of restraint. This kind c^ liberty is,'in- 
 deed, but another name for justice. Wkmever a separation 
 is made between liberty and, justice, neither is in mP opinion 
 safe" The weightiest and most important of all political 
 truths, and worth half the fine things that poets have sung 
 about* freedom — if it could only have been respected, how 
 different the course of the Revolution ! But the engineer 
 who attempts to deal with the abysmal rush of the falls 
 of Niagara must put aside the tools that constructed the 
 Bridge water Canal and the Chelsea Waterworks. Nobody 
 
 % 
 
vni.] HIS UNIFORM CONSERVATISM. 145 
 
 recognised so early as Burke that France had really em- 
 barked among cataracts and boiling gulfs, and the pith 
 of all his first criticisms, including the Reflections^ was 
 the proposition that to separate freedom from justice was 
 nothing else than to steer the ship of state direct into the 
 Maelstrom. It is impossible to deny that this was true. 
 Unfortunately it was a truth which the wild spirits that 
 were then abroad in the storm made of no avail. 
 
 Destiny aimed an evil stroke when Burke, whose whole 
 soul was bound up in order, peace, and gently enlarged 
 precedent, found himself face to face with the portentous 
 man-devouring Sphinx, He, who could not endure that a 
 few clergymen should be allowed to subscribe to the Bible 
 instead of to the Articles, saw the ancient Church of Chris- 
 tendom prostrated, its possessions confiscated, its 'priests 
 proscribed, and Christianity itself officially superseded. 
 The economical reformer, who when his zeal was hottest 
 declined to discharge a tide-waiter or a scullion in the 
 royal kitchen, who should have acquired the shadow of a 
 vested interest in his post, beheld two great orders stripped 
 of their privileges and deprived of much of their lands, 
 though their possession had been sanctified by the express 
 voice of the laws and the prescription of many centuries. 
 He, who was full of apprehension and anger at the pro- 
 posal to take away a member of Parliament from St. Mi- 
 chael's or Old Sarum, had to look on while the most au- 
 gust monarchy in Europe w^as overturned. The man who 
 dreaded fanatics, hated atheists, despised political theoris- 
 ers, and was driven wild at the notion of applying meta- 
 physical rights and abstract doctrines to public affairs, sud- 
 denly beheld a whole kingdom given finally np to fanat- 
 ics, atheists, and theorisers, who talked of nothing but the 
 rights of man, and deliberately set as wide a gulf as ruin 
 
146 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 and bloodshed could make between themselves and every 
 incident or institution in the history of their land. The 
 statesman who had once declared, and habitually proved, 
 his preference for peace over even truth, who had all his 
 life surrounded himself with a mental paradise of order 
 and equilibrium, in a moment found himself confronted by 
 the stupendous and awful spectre which a century of dis- 
 order had raised in its supreme hour. It could not have 
 been difficult for any one who had studied Burke's charac- 
 ter and career, to foretell all that now came to pass with 
 him. 
 
 It was from an English, and not from a French point 
 of view, that Burke was first drawn to write upon the 
 Revolution. The 4th of November was the anniversary 
 of the landing of the Prince of Orange, and the first act 
 in the Revolution of 1688. The members of an associa- 
 tion which called itself the Revolution Society, chiefly 
 composed of Dissenters, but not without a mixture of 
 Churchmen, including a few peers and a good many mem- 
 bers of the House of Commons, met as usual to hear a 
 sermon in commemoration of the glorious day. Dr. 
 Price was the preacher, and both in the morning sermon 
 and in the speeches which followed in the festivities of 
 the afternoon the French were held up to the loudest ad- 
 miration, as having carried the principles of our own 
 Revolution to a loftier height, and having opened bound- 
 less hopes to mankind. By these harmless proceedings 
 Burke's anger and scorn were aroused to a pitch which 
 must seem to us, as it seemed to not a few of his contem- 
 poraries, singularly out of all proportion to its cause. 
 Deeper things were doubtless in silent motion within him. 
 He set to work upon a denunciation of Price's doctrines, 
 with a velocity that reminds us of Aristotle's comparison 
 
VIII.] ORIGIN OF THE REFLECTIONS. 147 
 
 of anger to the over-hasty servant, who runs off with all 
 speed before he has listened to half the message. This 
 was the origin of the Reflections. The design grew as the 
 writer went on. His imagination took fire ; his memory 
 quickened a throng of impressive associations ; his excited 
 vision revealed to him a band of vain, petulant upstarts 
 persecuting the ministers of a sacred religion, insulting a 
 virtuous and innocent sovereign, and covering with hu- 
 miliation the august daughter of the Caesars ; his mind 
 teemed with the sage maxims of the philosophy of things 
 established, and the precepts of the gospel of order. Ev- 
 ery courier that crossed the Channel supplied new mate- 
 rial to his contempt and his alarm. He condemned the 
 whole method and course of the French reforms. His 
 judgment was in suspense no more. He no longer dis- 
 trusted ; he hated, despised, and began to dread. 
 
 Men soon began to whisper abroad that Burke thought 
 ill of what was going on over the water. When it trans- 
 pired that he was writing a pamphlet, the world of letters 
 was stirred with the liveliest expectation. The name of 
 the author, tlie importance of the subject, and the singu- 
 larity of his opinions, so Mackintosh informs us, all in- 
 flamed the public curiosity. Soon after Parliament met 
 for tke session (1790), the army estimates were brought 
 up. Fox criticised the increase of our forces, and inci- 
 dentally hinted something in praise of the Frencb army, 
 which had shown that a man could be a soldier without 
 ceasing to be a citizen. Some days afterwards the sub- 
 ject was revived, and Pitt, as well as Fox, avowed himself 
 hopeful of the good effect of the Revolution upon the or- 
 der and government of France. Burke followed in a very 
 different vein, openly proclaiming that dislike and fear of 
 the Revolution which was to be the one ceaseless refrain of 
 
148 BUKKE. [char 
 
 all that lie spoke or wrote for tlie rest of his life. He de- 
 plored Fox's praise of the army for breaking their lawful 
 allegiance, and then he proceeded with ominous words to 
 the effect that, if any friend of his should concur in any 
 measures which should tend to introduce such a democracy 
 as that of France, he would abandon his best friends and 
 join with his worst enemies to oppose either the means 
 or the end. This has unanimously been pronounced one 
 of the most brilliant and effective speeches that Burke 
 ever made. Fox rose with distress on every feature, and 
 made the often-quoted declaration of his debt to Burke : 
 "If all the political information I have learned from 
 books, all which I have gained from science, and all which 
 my knowledge of the world and its affairs has taught me, 
 were put into one scale, and the improvement which I 
 have derived from my right honourable friend's instruc- 
 tion and conversation were placed in the other, I should 
 be at a loss to decide to which to give the preference. I 
 have learnt more from my right honourable friend than 
 from all the men with whom I ever conversed." All 
 seemed likely to end in a spirit of conciliation, until Sheri- 
 dan rose, and in the plainest terms that he could find ex- 
 pressed his dissent from everything that Burke had said. 
 Burke immediately renounced his friendship. For the 
 first time in his life he found the sympathy of the House 
 vehemently on his side. 
 
 In the following month (March, 1790) this unpromis- 
 ing incident was succeeded by an aberration which no ra- 
 tional man will now undertake to defend. Fox brought 
 forward a motion for the repeal of the Test and Corpora- 
 tion Acts. He did this in accordance with a recent sug- 
 gestion of Burke's own, that he should strengthen his po- 
 litical position by winning the support of the Dissenters. 
 
Till.] SPEECH ON THE ESTIMATES. 149 
 
 Burke himself had always denounced the Test Act as 
 bad, and as an abuse of sacred things. To the amaze- 
 ment of everybody, and to the infinite scandal of his par- 
 ty, he now pronounced the Dissenters to be disafiEected 
 citizens, and refused to relieve them. Well might Fox 
 say that Burke's words had filled him with grief and 
 shame. 
 
 Meanwhile the great rhetorical fabric gradually arose. 
 Burke revised, erased, moderated, strengthened, emphasized, 
 wrote and re-wrote with indefatigable industry. With the 
 manuscript constantly under his eyes, he lingered busily, 
 pen in hand, over paragraphs and phrases, antitheses and 
 apophthegms. The Reflections was no superb improvisa- 
 tion. Its composition recalls Palma Giovine's account of 
 the mighty Titian's way of working; how the master 
 made his preparations with resolute strokes of a heavily- 
 laden brush, and then turned his picture to the wall, and 
 by -and -by resumed again, and then again and again, re- 
 dressing, adjusting, modelling the light with a rub of his 
 finger, or dabbing a spot of dark colour into some corner 
 with a touch of his thumb, and finally working all his 
 smirches, contrasts, abruptnesses, into the glorious harmony 
 that we know. Burke was so unwearied in this insatiable 
 correction and alteration, that the printer found it neces- 
 sary, instead of making the changes marked upon the 
 proof-sheets, to set up the whole in type afresh. The 
 work was upon the easel for exactly a year. It was No- 
 vember (1790) before the result came into the hands of 
 the public. It was a small octavo of three hundred and 
 fifty-six pages, in contents rather less than twice the pres- 
 ent volume, bound in an unlettered wrapper of grey paper, 
 and sold for five shillings. In less than twelve months it 
 reached its eleventh edition, and it has been computed 
 
150 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 that not many short of thirty thousand copies were sold 
 within the next six years. 
 
 The first curiosity had languished in the course of the 
 long delay, but it was revived in its strongest force when 
 fthe book itself appeared. A remarkable effect instantly 
 followed. Before the Reflections was published, the pre- 
 dominant sentiment in England had been one of mixed 
 astonishment and sympathy. Pitt had expressed this 
 common mood both in the House of Commons and in 
 private. It was impossible for England not to be amazed 
 at the uprising of a nation whom they had been accus- 
 tomed to think of as willing slaves, and it was impossible 
 for her, when the scene did not happen to be the American 
 colonies or Ireland, not to profess good wishes for the 
 cause of emancipation all over the world. Apart from 
 the natural admiration of a free people for a neighbour 
 struggling to be free, England saw no reason to lament a 
 blow to a sovereign and a government who had interfered 
 on the side of her insurgent colonies. To this easy state 
 of mind Burke's book put an immediate end. At once, 
 as contemporaries assure us, it divided the nation into two 
 parties. On both sides it precipitated opinion. With a 
 long-resounding blast on his golden trumpet Burke had 
 unfurled a new flag, and half the nation hurried to rally 
 to it — that half which had scouted his views on America, 
 which had bitterly disliked his plan of Economic Reform, 
 which had mocked his ideas on religious toleration, and 
 which a moment before had hated and reviled him beyond 
 all men living, for his fierce tenacity in the impeachment 
 of Warren Hastings. The King said to everybody who 
 came near him that the book was a good book, a very 
 good book, and every gentleman ought to read it. The 
 universities began to think of offering the scarlet gown of 
 
VIII.] EFFECT OF THE REFLECTIONS. 151 
 
 their most honourable degree to the assailant of Price and 
 the Dissenters. The great army of the indolent good, the 
 people who lead excellent lives and never use their reason, 
 took violent alarm. The timorous, the weak-minded, the 
 bigoted, were suddenly awakened to a sense of what they 
 owed to themselves. Burke gave them the key which 
 enabled them to Interpret the Revolution in harmony with 
 their usual ideas and their temperament. 
 
 Reaction quickly rose to a high pitch. One preacher 
 in a parish church in the neighbourhood of London cele- 
 brated the anniversary of the Restoration of King Charles 
 II. by a sermon, in which the pains of eternal damnation 
 were confidently promised to political disaffection. Romil- 
 ly, mentioning to a friend that the Reflections had got 
 into a fourteenth edition, wondered whether Burke was 
 not rather ashamed of his success. It is when we come 
 to the rank and file of reaction that we find it hard to for- 
 give the man of genius who made himself the organ of 
 their selfishness, their timidity, and their blindness. We 
 know, alas ! that the parts of his writings on French affairs 
 to which they would fly were not likely to be the parts 
 which calm men now read with sympathy, but the scold- 
 ings, the screamings, the unworthy vituperation with which, 
 especially in the latest of them, he attacked everybody who 
 took part in the Revolution, from Condorcet and Lafay- 
 ette down to Marat and Couthon. It was the feet of clay 
 that they adored in their image, and not the head of fine 
 gold and the breasts and the arms of silver. 
 
 On the continent of Europe the excitement was as great 
 among the ruling classes as it was at home. Mirabeau, 
 who had made Burke's acquaintance some years before in 
 England, and even been his guest at Beaconsfield, now 
 made the Reflections the text of more than one tremen- 
 
152 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 dous philippic. Louis XYI. is said to have translated the 
 book into French with his own hand. Catherine of 
 Eussia, Voltaire's adored Semirarais of the North, the 
 benefactress of Diderot, the ready helper of the philo- 
 sophic party, pressed her congratulations on the great 
 pontiff of the old order, who now thundered anathema 
 against the philosophers and all their works. 
 
 It is important to remember the stage which the Revo- 
 lution had reached when Burke was composing his attack 
 upon it. The year 1790 was precisely the time when the 
 hopes of the best men in France shone most brightly, and 
 seemed most reasonable. There had been disorders, and 
 Paris still had ferocity in her mien. But Robespierre was 
 an obscure figure on the back benches of the Assembly. 
 Nobody had ever heard of Danton. The name of Repub- 
 lic had never been so much as whispered. The King still 
 believed that constitutional monarchy would leave him as 
 much power as he desired. He had voluntarily gone to 
 the National Assembly, and in simple language had ex- 
 horted them air to imitate his example by professing the 
 single opinion, the single interest, the single wish — attach- 
 ment to the new constitution, and ardent desire for the 
 peace and happiness of France. The clergy, it is true, 
 were violently irritated by the spoliation of their goods, 
 and the nobles had crossed the Rhine, to brood impotent- 
 ly in the safety of Coblenz over projects of a bloody re- 
 venge upon their country. But France, meanwhile, paid 
 little heed either to the anger of the clergy or the menaces 
 of the emigrant nobles, and at the very moment when 
 Burke was writing his most sombre pages, Paris and the 
 provinces were celebrating with transports of joy and en- 
 thusiasm the civic oath, the federation, the restoration of 
 concord to the land, the final establishment of freedom 
 
vm.] DATE OF THE REFLECTIONS. 153 
 
 and justice in a regenerated France. This was the happy 
 scene over which Burke suddenly stretched out the right 
 arm of an inspired prophet, pointing to the cloud of thun- 
 der and darkness that was gathering on the hills, and pro* 
 claiming to them the doom that had been written upon 
 the wall by the fingers of an inexorable hand. It is no 
 wonder that when the cloud burst and the doom was ful- 
 filled, men turned to Burke, as they went of old to Ahith- 
 ophel, whose counsel was as if a man had inquired of the 
 oracle of God. 
 
 It is not to our purpose to discuss all the propositions 
 advanced in the Reflections^ much less to reply to them. 
 The book is like some temple, by whose structure and de- 
 sign we allow ourselves to be impressed, without being 
 careful to measure the precise truth or fitness of the wor- 
 ship to which it was consecrated by its first founders. 
 Just as the student of the Politics of Aristotle may well 
 accept all the wisdom of it, without caring to protest at 
 every turn against slavery as the basis of a society, so we 
 may well cherish all the wisdom of the Reflections, at this 
 distance of time, without marking as a rubric on every 
 page that half of these impressive formulae and inspiring 
 declamations were irrelevant to the occasion which called 
 them forth, and exercised for the hour an influence that 
 was purely mischievous. Time permits to us this profita- 
 ble lenity. In reading this, the first of his invectives, it 
 is important for the sake of clearness of judgment to put 
 from our minds the practical policy which Burke after- 
 wards so untiringly urged upon his countrymen. As yet 
 there is no exhortation to England to interfere, and we 
 still listen to the voice of the statesman, and are not deaf- 
 ened by the passionate cries of the preacher of a crusade. 
 When Burke wrote the Reflections, he was justified in crit- 
 
154 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 icising the Revolution as an extraordinary movement, but 
 still a movement professing to be conducted on the prin- 
 ciples of rational and practicable politics. They were the 
 principles to which competent onlookers like Jefferson 
 and Morris had expected the Assembly to conform, but to 
 which the Assembly never conformed for an instant. It 
 was on the principles of rational politics that Fox and 
 Sheridan admired it. On these principles Burke con- 
 demned it. He declared that the methods of the Constit- 
 uent Assembly, up to the summer of 1790, were unjust, 
 precipitate, destructive, and without stability. Men had 
 chosen to build their house on the sands, and the winds 
 and the seas would speedily beat against it and over- 
 throw it. 
 
 His prophecy was fulfilled to the letter. What is still 
 more important for the credit of his foresight is, that not 
 only did his prophecy come true, but it came true for the 
 reasons that he had fixed upon. It was, for instance, the 
 constitution of the Church, in which Burke saw the worst 
 of the many bad mistakes of the Assembly. History, now 
 slowly shaking herself free from the passions of a centu- 
 ry, agrees that the civil constitution of the clergy was the 
 measure which, more than any other, decisively put an end 
 to whatever hopes there might have been of a peaceful 
 transition from the old order to the new. A still more 
 striking piece of foresight is the prediction of the despot- 
 ism of the Napoleonic Empire. Burke had compared the 
 levelling policy of the Assembly in their geometrical divis- 
 ion of the departments, and their isolation from one an- 
 other of the bodies of the state, to the treatment which a 
 conquered country receives at the hands of its conquerors. 
 Like Romans in Greece or ]\Iacedon, the French innovators 
 had destroyed the bonds of union, under color of provid- 
 
VIII.] INSTANCES OF FORESIGHT. 155 
 
 ing for the independence of eacli of their cities. *' If the 
 present project of a Republic should fail," Burke said, with 
 a prescience really profound, *' all securities to a moder- 
 ate freedom fail with it. All the indirect restraints which 
 mitigate despotism are removed ; insomuch that, if mon- 
 archy should ever again obtain an entire ascendancy in 
 France under this or any other dynasty, it will probably 
 be, if not voluntarily tempered at setting out by the wise 
 and virtuous counsels of the prince, the most completely 
 arbitrary power that ever appeared on earth." Almost at 
 the same moment Mirabeau was secretly writing to the 
 King, that their plan of reducing all citizens to a single 
 class would have delighted Richelieu. This equal surface, 
 he said, facilitates the exercise of power, and many reigns 
 in an absolute government would not have done as much 
 as this single year of revolution for the royal authority. 
 Time showed that Burke and Mirabeau were right. 
 
 History ratifies nearly all Burke's strictures on the levi- 
 ty and precipitancy of the first set of actors in the revo- 
 lutionary drama. No part of the Reflections is more en- 
 ergetic than the denunciation of geometric and literary 
 methods; and these are just what the modern explorer 
 hits upon, as one of the fatal secrets of the catastrophe. 
 De Tocqueville's chapter on the causes which made literary 
 men the principal persons in France, and the effect which 
 this had upon the Revolution (Bk. iii. ch. i.), is only a lit- 
 tle too cold to be able to pass for Burke's own. Quinet's 
 work on the Revolution is one long sermon, full of elo- 
 quence and cogency, upon the incapacity and blindness of 
 the men who undertook the conduct of a tremendous cri- 
 sis upon mere literary methods, without the moral cour- 
 age to obey the logic of their beliefs, with the student's 
 ignorance of the eager passion and rapid imagination of 
 
156 BUHKE. [chap. 
 
 multitudes of men, witli the pedant's misappreciation of a 
 people, of whom it has been said by one of themselves 
 that there never was a nation more led by its sensations, 
 and less by its principles. Comte, again, points impres- 
 sively to the Kevolution as the period which illustrates 
 more decisively than another the peril of confounding the 
 two great functions of speculation and political action; 
 and he speaks with just reprobation of the preposterous 
 idea in the philosophic politicians of the epoch, that so- 
 ciety was at their disposal, independent of its past develop- 
 ment, devoid of inherent impulses, and easily capable of 
 being morally regenerated by the mere modification of leg- 
 islative rules. 
 
 What then was it that, in the midst of so much per- 
 spicacity as to detail, blinded Burke, at the time when he 
 wrote the Reflections^ to the true nature of the movement ? 
 Is it not this, that he judges the Revolution as the solu- 
 tion of a merely political question? If the Revolution 
 had been merely political, his judgment would have been 
 adequate. The question was much deeper. It was a so- 
 cial question that burned under the surface of what seem- 
 ed no more than a modification of external arrangements. 
 That Burke was alive to the existence of social problems, 
 and that he was even tormented by them, we know from 
 an incidental passage in the Reflections. There he tells 
 us how often he had reflected, and never reflected without 
 feeling, upon the innumerable servile and degrading occu- 
 pations to which, by the social economy, so many wretches 
 are inevitably doomed. He had pondered whether there 
 could be any means of rescuing these unhappy people 
 from their miserable industry, without disturbing the natu- 
 ral course of things, and impeding the great wheel of cir- 
 culation which is turned by their labour. This is the vein 
 
VIII.] THE SOCIAL QUESTION. 157 
 
 of that striking passage in his first composition, which I 
 have already quoted (p. 16). Burke did not yet see, and 
 probably never saw, that one key to the events which as- 
 tonished and exasperated him, was simply that the per- 
 sons most urgently concerned had taken the riddle which 
 perplexed him into their own hands, and had in fiery ear- 
 nest set about their own deliverance. The pith of the Rev- 
 olution, up to 1790, was less the political constitution, of 
 which Burke says so much, and so much that is true, but 
 the social and economic transformation, of which he says 
 so little. It was not a question of the power of the King, 
 or the measure of an electoral circumscription, that made 
 the Revolution ; it was the iniquitous distribution of the 
 taxes, the scourge of the militia service, the scourge of the 
 road service, the destructive tyranny exercised in the vast 
 preserves of wild game, the vexatious rights and imposts 
 of the lords of manors, and all the other odious burdens 
 and heavy impediments on the prosperity of the thrifty 
 and industrious part of the nation. If he had seen ever 
 so clearly that one of the most important sides of the 
 Revolution in progress was the rescue of the tiller of the 
 soil, Burke would still doubtless have viewed events with 
 bitter suspicion. For the process could not be executed 
 without disturbing the natural course of things, and with* 
 out violating his principle that all changes should find us 
 with our minds tenacious of justice and tender of prop- 
 erty. A closer examination than he chose to give, of the 
 current administration alike of justice and of property 
 under the old system, would have explained to him that 
 an hour had come in which the spirit of property and of 
 justice compelled a supersession of the letter. 
 
 If Burke had insisted on rigidly keeping sensibility to 
 the wrongs of the French people out of the discussion, on 
 
158' BURKE. [chap. 
 
 the ground that the whole subject was one for positive 
 knowledge and logical inference, his position would have 
 been intelligible and defensible. He followed no such 
 course. His pleading turns constantly to arguments from 
 feeling ; but it is always to feeling on one side, and to a 
 sensibility that is only alive to the concentrated force of 
 historic associations. How much pure and uncontrolled 
 emotion had to do with what ought to have been the rea- 
 soned judgments of his understanding, we know on his 
 own evidence. He had sent the proof-sheets of a part of 
 his book to Sir Philip Francis. They contained the fa- 
 mous passage describing the French Queen as he had seen 
 her seventeen years before at Versailles. Francis bluntly 
 wrote to him that, in his opinion, all Burke's eloquence 
 about Marie Antoinette was no better than pure foppery, 
 and he referred to the Queen herself as no better than 
 Messaliiia. Burke was so excited by this that his son, in a 
 rather officious letter, begged Francis not to repeat such 
 stimulating remonstrance. What is interesting in the in- 
 cident is Burke's own reply. He knew nothing, he said, 
 of the story of Messalina, and declined the obligation of 
 proving judicially the virtues of all those whom he saw 
 suffering wrong and contumely, before he endeavoured to 
 interest others in their sufferings, and before endeavouring 
 to kindle horror against midnight assassins at backstairs 
 and their more wicked abettors in pulpits. And then he 
 went on, " I tell you again that the recollection of the 
 manner in which I saw the Queen of France in the year 
 1*774 [l773], and the contrast between that brilliancy, 
 splendour, and beauty, with the prostrate homage of a 
 nation to her, and the abominable scene of 1789 which 
 I was describing, did draw tears from me and wetted 
 my paper. These tears came again into my eyes al- 
 
VIII.] HIS SENSIBILITY. 159 
 
 most as often as I looked at the description — they may 
 again." 
 
 The answer was obvious. It was well to pity the un- 
 merited agonies of Marie Antoinette, though as yet, we 
 must remember, she had suffered nothing beyond the in- 
 dignities of the days of October at Versailles. But did 
 not the protracted agonies of a nation deserve the tribute 
 of a tear? As Paine asked, were men to weep over the 
 plumage, and forget the dying bird ? The bulk of the 
 people must labour, Burke told them, " to obtain what by 
 labour can be obtained ; and when they find, as they com- 
 monly do, the success disproportioned to the endeavour, 
 they must be taught their consolation in the final propor- 
 tions of eternal justice." When we know that a Lyons 
 silk-weaver, working as hard as he could for over seventeen 
 hours a day, could not earn money enough to procure the 
 most bare and urgent necessaries of subsistence, we may 
 know witli what benignity of brow eternal justice must 
 have presented herself in the garret of that hapless wretch. 
 It was no idle abstraction, no metaphysical right of man, 
 for which the French cried, but only tbe practical right of 
 being permitted, by their own toil, to save themselves and 
 the little ones about their knees from hunger and cruel 
 death. The mainmortahle serfs of ecclesiastics are vari- 
 ously said to have been a million and a million and a half 
 at the time of the Kevolution. Burke's horror, as he 
 thought of the priests and prelates who left palaces and 
 dignities to earn a scanty living by the drudgery of teach- 
 ing their language in strange lands, should have been alle- 
 viated by the thought that a million or more of men were 
 rescued from ghastly material misery. Are we to be so 
 overwhelmed with sorrow over the pitiful destiny of the 
 men of exalted rank and sacred function, as to have no 
 
160 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 tears for the forty thousand serfs in the gorges of the 
 / Jura, who were held in dead-hand by the Bishop of Saint- 
 Claude? 
 
 The simple truth is that Burke did not know enough of 
 the subject about which he was writing. When he said, 
 for instance, that the French before 1789 possessed all the 
 elements of a constitution that might be made nearly as 
 good as could be wished, he said what many of his con- 
 temporaries knew, and what all subsequent investigation 
 and meditation have proved, to be recklessly ill-considered 
 and untrue. As to the social state of France, his informa- 
 tion was still worse. He saw the dano;ers and disorders 
 of the new system, but he saw a very little way indeed 
 into the more cruel dangers and disorders of the old. 
 Mackintosh replied to the Reflections with manliness and 
 temperance in the Vindicice GalUcce. Thomas Paine re- 
 plied to them with an energy, courage, and eloquence wor- 
 thy of his cause, in the Rights of Man. But the substan- 
 tial and decisive reply to Burke came from his former 
 correspondent, the farmer at Bradfield, in Suffolk. Arthur 
 Young published his Travels in France some eighteen 
 months after the Reflections (1792), and the pages of the 
 twenty-first chapter, in which he closes his performance, 
 as a luminous criticism of the most important side of the 
 Revolution, are worth a hundred times more than Burke, 
 Mackintosh, and Paine all put together. Young after- 
 wards became panic-stricken, but his book remained. There 
 the writer plainly enumerates without trope or invective 
 the intolerable burdens under which the great mass of the 
 French people had for long years been groaning. It was 
 the removal of these burdens that made the very heart's 
 core of the Revolution, and gave to France that new life 
 which so soon astonished and terrified Europe. Yet 
 
 I 
 
VIII.] HIS INSUFFICIENT KNOWLEDGE. 161 
 
 Burke seems profoundly unconscious of the whole of 
 them. He even boldly asserts that, when the several or- 
 ders met in their bailliages in 1789, to choose their repre- 
 sentatives and draw up their grievances and instructions, 
 in no one of these instructions did they charge, or even . 
 hint at, any of those things which had drawn upon the 
 usurping Assembly the detestation of the rational part of 
 mankind. He could not have made a more enormous 
 blunder. There was not a single great change made by 
 the Assembly which had not been demanded in the lists 
 of grievances that had been sent up by the nation to Ver- 
 sailles. The division of the kingdom into districts, and 
 the proportioning of the representation to taxes and pop- 
 ulation ; the suppression of the intendants ; the suppres- 
 sion of all monks, and the sale of their goods and estates ; 
 the abolition of feudal rights, duties, and services ; the 
 alienation of the King's domains ; the demolition of the 
 Bastille ; these and all else we're in the prayers of half the 
 petitions that the country had laid at the feet of the King. 
 If this were merely an incidental blunder in a fact, it 
 might be of no importance. But it was a blunder which 
 went to the very root of the discussion. The fact that 
 France was now at the back of the Assembly, inspiring 
 its counsels and ratifying its decrees, was the cardinal 
 element, and that is the fact which at this stage Burke 
 systematically ignored. That he should have so ignored 
 it, left him in a curious position, for it left him without 
 any rational explanation of the sources of the policy which 
 kindled his indignation and contempt. A publicist can 
 never be sure of his position, until he can explain to him- 
 self even what he does not wish to justify to others. 
 Burke thought it enough to dwell upon the immense 
 number of lawyers in the Assembly, and to show that 
 
162 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 lawyers are naturally bad statesmen. He did not look 
 the state of things steadily in the face. It was no easy 
 thing to do. But Burke was a man who ought to have 
 done it. He set all down to the ignorance, folly, and 
 wickedness of the French leaders. This was as shallow 
 as the way in which his enemies, the philosophers, used 
 to set down the superstition of eighteen centuries to the 
 craft of priests, and all defects in the government of Eu- 
 rope to the cruelty of tyrants. How it came about that 
 priests and tyrants acquired their irresistible power over 
 men's minds, they never inquired. And Burke never in- 
 quired into the enthusiastic acquiescence of the nation, 
 and, what was most remarkable of all, the acquiescence of 
 the army, in the strong measures of the Assembly. Burke 
 was, in truth, so appalled by the magnitude of the enter- 
 prise on which France had embarked, that he utterly for- 
 got for once the necessity in political affairs, of seriously 
 understanding the originating conditions of things. He 
 was strangely content with the explanations that came 
 from the malignants at Coblenz, and he actually told 
 Francis that he charged the disorders not on the mob, 
 but on the Duke of Orleans and Mirabeau, on Barnave 
 and Bailly, on Lameth and Lafayette, who had spent im- 
 mense sums of money, and used innumerable arts, to stir 
 up the populace throughout France to the commission of 
 the enormities that were shocking the conscience of Eu- 
 rope. His imagination broke loose. His practical reason 
 was mastered by something that was deeper in him than 
 reason. 
 
 This brings me to remark a really singular trait. In 
 spite of the predominance of practical sagacity, of the 
 habits and spirit of public business, of vigorous actuality 
 in Burke's character, yet at the bottom of all his thoughts 
 
VIII.] BURKE'S POLITICAL MYSTICISM. 163 
 
 about communities and governments there lay a certain 
 mysticism. It was no irony, no literary trope, when he 
 talked of our having taught the American husbandman 
 " piously to believe in the mysterious virtue of wax and 
 parchment." He was using no otiose epithet, when he 
 described the disposition of a stupendous wisdom, "mould- 
 ing together the great mysterious incorporation of the hu- 
 man race." To him there actually was an clement of mys- 
 tery in the cohesion of men in societies, in political obedi- 
 ence, in the sanctity of contract ; in all that fabric of law 
 and charter and obligation, whether written or unwritten, 
 which is the sheltering bulwark between civilization and 
 barbarism. AVhen reason and history had contributed all 
 that they could to the explanation, it seemed to him as 
 if the vital force, the secret of organization, the binding 
 framework, must still come from the impenetrable regions 
 beyond reasoning and beyond history. There was anoth- 
 er great conservative writer of that age, whose genius was 
 aroused into a protest against the revolutionary spiiit, as 
 vehement as Burke's. This was Joseph de Maistre, one of 
 the most learned, witty, and acute of all reactionary philos- 
 ophers. De Maistre Avrote a book on the Generative Prin- 
 ciple of Political Constitutions. He could only find this 
 principle in the operation of occult and supernatural forces, 
 producing the half-divine legislators who figure mysteriously 
 in the early history of nations. Hence he held, and with 
 astonishing ingenuity enforced, the doctrine that nothing 
 else could deliver Europe from the Satanic forces of revo- 
 lution — he used the word Satanic in all literal seriousness 
 — save the divinely inspired supremacy of the Pope. No 
 natural operations seemed at all adequate either to produce 
 or to maintain the marvel of a coherent society. We are 
 reminded of a professor who, in the fantastic days of geol- 
 
164 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 ogy, explained the Pyramids of Egypt to be the remains 
 of a volcanic eruption, which had forced its way upwards 
 by a slow and stately motion ; the hieroglyphs were crys- 
 talline formations; and the shaft of the great Pyramid 
 was the air-hole of a volcano. De Maistre preferred a sim- 
 ilar explanation of the monstrous structures of modern 
 society. The hand of man could never have reared, and 
 could never uphold them. If we cannot say that Burke 
 laboured in constant travail with the same perplexity, it is 
 at least true that he was keenly alive to it, and that one of 
 the reasons why he dreaded to see a finger laid upon a 
 single stone of a single political edifice, was his conscious- 
 ness that he saw no answer to the perpetual enigma how 
 any of these edifices had ever been built, and how the pas- 
 sion, violence, and waywardness of the natural man had 
 ever been persuaded to bow their necks to the strong yoke 
 of a common social discipline. Never was mysticism more 
 unseasonable; never was an hour when men needed more 
 carefully to remember Burke's own wise practical precept, 
 when he was talking about the British rule in India, that 
 we must throw a sacred veil over the beginnings of gov- 
 ernment. Many woes might perhaps have been saved to 
 Europe, if Burke had applied this maxim to the govern- 
 ment of the new France. 
 
 Much has always been said about the inconsistency be- 
 tween Burke's enmity to the Revolution, and his enmity 
 to Lord North in one set of circumstances, and to Warren 
 Hastings in another. The pamphleteers of the day made 
 selections from the speeches and tracts of his happier time, 
 and the seeming contrast had its effect. More candid op- 
 ponents admitted then, as all competent persons admit 
 now, that the inconsistency was merely verbal and super- 
 ficial. Watson, the Bishop of Llandaff, was only one of 
 
VIII.] ALLEGED INCONSISTENCY. 165 
 
 many who observed very early that this was the unmistak- 
 able temper of Burke's mind. " I admired, as everybody 
 did," he said, " the talents, but not the principles of Mr. 
 Burke; his opposition to the Clerical Petition [for relax- 
 ation of subscription, 1772], first excited my suspicion of 
 his being a High-Churchman in religion, and a Tory, per- 
 haps an aristocratic Tory, in the state." Burke had, indeed, 
 never been anything else than a conservative. He was like 
 Falkland, who had bitterly assailed Strafford and Finch on 
 the same principles on which, after the outbreak of the 
 civil war, he consented to be secretary of state to King 
 Charles. Coleridge is borne out by a hundred passages, 
 when he says that in Burke's writings at the beginning of 
 the American Revolution and in those at the beginning of 
 the French Revolution, the principles are the same and the 
 deductions are the same; the practical inferences are al- 
 most opposite in the one case from those drawn in the 
 other, yet in both equally legitimate. It would be better 
 to say that they would have been equally legitimate, if 
 Burke had been as right in his facts, and as ample in his 
 knowledge in the case of France, as he was in the case of 
 America. We feel, indeed, that, partly from want of this 
 knowledge, he has gone too far from some of the wise 
 maxims of an earlier time. What has become of the doc- 
 trine that all great public collections of men — he w^as then 
 speaking of the House of Commons — " possess a marked 
 love of virtue and an abhorrence of vice."^ Why was the 
 French Assembly not to have the benefit of this admirable 
 generalisation ? What has become of all those sayings 
 about the presumption, in all disputes between nations and 
 rulers, " being at least upon a par in favour of the people ;" 
 and a populace never rebelling from passion for attack, but 
 ^ American Taxation. 
 
166 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 from impatience of suffering? And where is now that 
 strong dictum, in the letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol, that 
 "general rebellions and revolts of a w^hole people never 
 were encouraged, now or at any time ; they are always 
 provolced P 
 
 When all these things have been noted, to hold a man 
 to his formulae without reference to their special applica- 
 tion, is pure pedantry. Burke was the last man to lay 
 down any political proposition not subject to the ever va- 
 rying interpretation of circumstances, and independently of 
 the particular use which was to be made of it. Nothing 
 universal, he had always said, can be rationally affirmed on 
 any moral or political subject. The lines of morality, 
 again, are never ideal lines of mathematics, but are broad 
 and deep as well as long, admitting of exceptions, and de- 
 manding modifications. "These exceptions and modifi- 
 cations are made, not by the process of logic, but by the 
 rules of prudence. Prudence is not only first in rank of 
 the virtues, political and moral, but she is the director, the 
 regulator, the standard of them all. As no moral ques- 
 tions are ever abstract questions, this, before I judge upon 
 any abstract proposition, must be embodied in circum- 
 stances; for, since things are right and wrong, morally 
 speaking, only by their relation and connection with other 
 things, this very question of what it is politically right to 
 grant, depends upon its relation to its effects." " Circum- 
 stances," he says, never weary of laying down his great 
 notion of political method, " give, in reality, to every po- 
 litical principle its distinguishing colour and discriminat- 
 ing effect. The circumstances are what render every civil 
 and political scheme beneficial or obnoxious to mankind." 
 
 This is at once the weapon with which he would have 
 defended his own consistency, and attacked the absolute 
 
VIII.] HIS METHOD. 167 
 
 proceedings in France. He changed Ins front, but he 
 never changed his ground. He was not more passionate 
 against the proscription in France than he had been against 
 the suspension of Habeas Corpus in the American war. " I 
 flatter myself," he said in the Reflections, " that I love a 
 manly, moral, regulated liberty." Ten years before he had 
 said, " The liberty, the only liberty I mean, is a liberty con- 
 nected with order," The court tried to regulate liberty 
 too severely. It found in him an inflexible opponent. 
 Demagogues tried to remove the regulations of liberty. 
 They encountered in him the bitterest and most unceasing 
 of all remonstrants. The arbitrary majority in the House 
 of Commons forgot for whose benefit they held power, 
 from W'hom they derived their authority, and in what de- 
 scription of government it was that they had a place. 
 Burke was the most valiant and strenuous champion in the 
 ranks of the independent minority. He withstood to the 
 face the King and the King's friends. He withstood to the 
 face Charles Fox and the Friends of the People. He may 
 have been w^rong in both, or in either, but it is unreasona- 
 ble to tell us that he turned back in his course ; that he 
 was a revolutionist in lllO, and a reactionist in 1790; 
 that he was in his sane mind when he opposed the suprem- 
 acy of the Court, but that his reason was tottering when 
 he opposed the supremacy of the Faubourg Saint Antoine. 
 There is no part of Burke's career at which we may not 
 find evidence of his instinctive and undying repugnance to 
 the critical or revohitionary spirit and all its works. From 
 the early days when he had parodied Bolingbroke, down 
 to the later time when he denounced Condorcet as a fanat- 
 ical atheist, with " every disposition to the lowest as well 
 as the highest and most determined villanies," he invaria- 
 bly suspected or denounced everybody, virtuous or vicious, 
 
168 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 high-minded or ignoble, who inquired with too keen a 
 scrutiny into the foundations of morals, of religion, of so- 
 cial order. To examine with a curious or unfavourable eye 
 the bases of established opinions, was to show a leaning 
 to anarchy, to atheism, or to unbridled libertinism. Al- 
 ready we have seen how, three years after the publication 
 of his Thoughts on the Present Discontents^ and seven- 
 teen years before the composition of the Reflections, he 
 denounced the philosophers with a fervour and a vehe- 
 mence which he never afterwards surpassed. When some 
 of the clergy petitioned to be relieved from some of the 
 severities of subscription, he had resisted them on the bold 
 ground that the truth of a proposition deserves less atten- 
 tion than the effect of adherence to it upon the established 
 order of things. " I will not enter into the question," he 
 told the House of Commons, " how much truth is prefera- 
 ble to peace. Perhaps truth may be far better. But as 
 we have scarcely ever the same certainty in the one that 
 we have in the other, I would, unless the truth were evi- 
 dent indeed, hold fast to peace." In that intellectual rest- 
 lessness, to which the world is so deeply indebted, Burke 
 could recognize but scanty merit. Himself the most in- 
 dustrious and active-minded of men, he was ever sober in 
 cutting the channels of his activity, and he would have 
 had others equally moderate. Perceiving that plain and 
 righteous conduct is the end of life in this world, he 
 prayed men not to be over-curious in searching for, and 
 handling, and again handling, the theoretic base on which 
 the prerogatives of virtue repose. Provided that there 
 was peace, that is to say, so much of fair happiness and 
 content as is compatible with the conditions of the human 
 lot, Burke felt that a too great inquisitiveness as to its 
 foundations was not only idle but cruel. 
 
VIII.] PHILOSOPHICAL REACTION. 169 
 
 If the world continues to read the Refiections, and reads 
 it with a new admiration that is not diminished by the 
 fact that on the special issue its tendency is every day 
 more clearly discerned to have been misleading, we may be 
 sure that it is not for the sake of such things as the pre- 
 cise character of the Revolution of 1688, where, for that 
 matter, constitutional writers have shown abundantly that 
 Burke was nearly as much in the wrong as Dr. Sacheverell. 
 Nor has the book lived merely by its gorgeous rhetoric 
 and high emotions, though these have been contributing 
 elements. It lives because it contains a sentiment, a meth- 
 od, a set of informal principles, which, awakened into new 
 life after the Revolution, rapidly transformed the current 
 ways of thinking and feeling about all the most serious 
 objects of our attention, and have powerfully helped to 
 give a richer substance to all modern literature. In the 
 Reflections we have the first great sign that the ideas on 
 government and philosophy which Locke had been the 
 chief agent in setting into European circulation, and which 
 had carried all triumphantly before them throughout the 
 century, did not comprehend the whole truth nor the deep- 
 est truth about human character — the relations of men and 
 the union of men in society. It has often been said that 
 the armoury from which the French philosophers of the 
 eighteenth century borrowed their weapons was furnished 
 from England, and it may be added as truly that the re- 
 action against that whole scheme of thought came from 
 England. In one sense we may call the Reflections a po- 
 litical pamphlet, but it is much more than this, just as the 
 movement against which it was levelled was much more 
 than a political movement. The Revolution rested on a 
 philosophy, and Burke confronted it with an antagonistic 
 philosophy. Those are but superficial readers who fail to 
 8* 
 
IIQ BURKE. [chap. 
 
 see at liow many points Burke, while seeming only to deal 
 with the French monarchy and the British constitution, 
 with Dr. Price and Marie Antoinette, was in fact, and ex- 
 actly because he dealt with them in the comprehensive 
 spirit of true philosophy, turning men's minds to an atti- 
 tude from which not only the political incidents of the 
 hour, but the current ideas about religion, psychology, the 
 very nature of human knowledge, would all be seen in a 
 changed light and clothed in new colour. All really pro- 
 found speculation about society comes in time to touch the 
 heart of every other object of speculation, not by directly 
 contributing new truths or directly corroborating old ones, 
 but by setting men to consider the consequences to life of 
 different opinions on these abstract subjects, and their rela- 
 tions to the great paramount interests of society, however 
 those interests may happen at the time to be conceived. 
 Burke's book marks a turning-point in literary history, 
 because it was the signal for that reaction over the whole 
 field of thought, into which the Revolution drove many of 
 the finest minds of the next generation, by showing the 
 supposed consequences of pure individualistic rationalism. 
 We need not attempt to work out the details of this ex- 
 tension of a political reaction into a universal reaction in 
 philosophy and poetry. Any one may easily think out 
 for himself what consequences in act and thought, as well 
 as in government, would be likely to flow, for example, 
 from one of the most permanently admirable sides of 
 Burke's teaching — his respect for the collective reason of 
 men, and his sense of the impossibility in politics and 
 morals of considering the individual apart from the expe- 
 rience of the race. " We are afraid," he says, " to put 
 men to live and trade each on his own private stock of 
 reason, because we suspect that this stock in each man is 
 
VIII.] PHILOSOPHICAL REACTION. 171 
 
 small, and that the individuals would do better to avail 
 themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and 
 of ages. Many of our men of speculation^ instead of ex- 
 ploding general prejudices^ employ their sagacity to discov- 
 er the latent wisdom which prevails in them. If they find 
 what they seek, and they seldom fail, they think it more 
 wise to continue the prejudice with the reason involved, 
 than to cast away the coat of prejudice, and to leave noth- 
 ing but the naked reason : because prejudice with its rea- 
 son has a motive to give action to that reason, and an af- 
 fection which will give it permanence. Prejudice is of 
 ready application in the emergency ; it previously engages 
 the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and 
 does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of deci- 
 sion, sceptical, puzzled, and unresolved. Prejudice renders 
 a man's virtue his habit, and not a series of unconnected 
 acts. Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his 
 nature." Is not this to say, in other words, that in every 
 man the substantial foundations of action consist of the 
 accumulated layers which various generations of ancestors 
 have placed for him ; that the greater part of our senti- 
 ments act most effectively when they act most mechanical- 
 ly, and by the methods of an unquestioned system ; that 
 although no rule of conduct or spring of action ought to 
 endure which does not repose in sound reason, yet this 
 naked reason is in itself a less effective means of influenc- 
 ing action than when it exists as one part of a fabric of 
 ancient and endeared association ? Interpreted by a mo- 
 bile genius and expanded by a poetic imagination, all this 
 became the foundation from which the philosophy of 
 Coleridge started, and, as Mill has shown in a famous es- 
 say, Coleridge was the great apostle of the conservative 
 spirit in England in its best form. 
 
172 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 Though Burke here, no doubt, found a true base for the 
 philosophy of order, yet perhaps Condorcet or Barnave 
 might have justly asked him whether, when we thus real- 
 ize the strong and immovable foundations which are laid 
 in our character before we are born, there could be any oc- 
 casion, as a matter of fact, for that vehement alarm which 
 moved Burke lest a few lawyers, by a score of parchment 
 decrees, should overthrow the venerated sentiments of Eu- 
 rope about justice and about property? Should he not 
 have known better than most men the force of the self- 
 protecting elements of society ? 
 
 This is not a convenient place for discussing the issues 
 between the school of order and the school of progress. 
 It is enough to have marked Burke's position in one of 
 them. The Reflections places him among the great Con- 
 servatives of history. Perhaps the only Englishman with 
 whom in this respect he may be compared is Sir Thomas 
 More, that virtuous and eloquent reactionist of the six- 
 teenth century. More abounded in light, in intellectual 
 interests, in single-minded care for the common weal. He 
 was as anxious as any man of his time for the improved 
 ordering of the Church, but he could not endure that ref- 
 ormation should be bought at the price of breaking up 
 the ancient spiritual unity of Europe. He was willing to 
 slay and be slain rather than he would tolerate the de- 
 struction of the old faith, or assent to the violence of the 
 new statecraft. He viewed Thomas Cromwell's policy of 
 reformation just as Burke viewed Mirabeau's policy of 
 revolution. Burke too, we may be very sure, would as 
 willingly have sent Mirabeau and Bailly to prison or the 
 "block as More sent Phillips to the Tower and Bainham to 
 the stake. For neither More nor Burke was of the gentle 
 contemplative spirit, which the first disorder of a new so- 
 
 r 
 
VIII.] SIR THOMAS MORE. 173 
 
 ciety just bursting into life merely overshadows with sad- 
 dening regrets and poetic gloom. The old harmony was 
 to them so bound up with the purpose and meaning of 
 life, that to Avage active battle for the gods of their rever- 
 ence was the irresistible instinct of self-preservation. More 
 had an excuse which Burke had not, for the principle of 
 persecution was accepted by the best minds of the six- 
 teenth century, but by the best minds of the eighteenth it 
 was emphatically repudiated. 
 
 Another illustrious name of Burke's own era rises to 
 our lips, as we ponder mentally the too scanty list of those 
 who have essayed the great and hardy task of reconciling 
 order with progress. Turgot is even a more imposing- 
 figure than Burke himself. The impression made upon 
 us by the pair is indeed very different, for Turgot was 
 austere, reserved, distant, a man of many silences, and 
 much suspense ; while Burke, as we know, was imagina- 
 tive, exuberant, unrestrained, and, like some of the great- 
 est actors on the stage of human affairs, he had associated 
 his own personality with the prevalence of right ideas and 
 good influences. In Turgot, on the other hand, we dis- 
 cern something of the isolation, the sternness, the disdain- 
 ful melancholy of Tacitus. He even rises out of the eager, 
 bustling, shrill-tongued crowd of the Yoltairean age with 
 some of that austere moral indignation and haughty as- 
 tonishment with which Dante had watched the stubborn 
 ways of men centuries before. On one side Turgot shared 
 the conservatism of Burke, though, perhaps, he would 
 hardly have given it that name. He habitually corrected 
 the headlong insistence of the revolutionary philosophers, 
 his friends, by reminding them that neither pity, nor be- 
 nevolence, nor hope can ever dispense with justice ; and 
 he could never endure to hear of great changes being 
 
IH BUEKE. [chap. 
 
 wronglit at the cost of this sovereign quality. Like Burke, 
 he held fast to the doctrine that everything must be done 
 for the multitude, but nothing by them. Like Burke, he 
 realized how close are the links that bind the successive 
 generations of men, and make up the long chain of human 
 history. Like Burke, he never believed that the human 
 mind has any spontaneous inclination to welcome pure 
 truth. Here, however, is visible between them a hard line 
 of division. It is not error, said Turgot, which opposes 
 the progress of truth ; it is indolence, obstinacy, and the 
 spirit of routine. But then Turgot enjoined upon us to 
 make it the aim of life to do battle in ourselves and others 
 with all this indolence, obstinacy, and spirit of routine in 
 the world; while Burke, on the contrary, gave to these 
 bad things gentler names, he surrounded them with the 
 picturesque associations of the past, and in the great world- 
 crisis of his time he threw all his passion and all his genius 
 on their side. Will any reader doubt which of these two 
 types of the school of order and justice, both of them no- 
 ble, is the more valuable for the race, and the worthier and 
 more stimulating ideal for the individual ? 
 
 It is not certain that Burke was not sometimes for a 
 moment startled by the suspicion that he might unawares 
 be fighting against the truth. In the midst of flaming 
 and bitter pages, we now and again feel a cool breath from 
 the distant region of a half -pensive tolerance. " I do not 
 think," he says at the close of the Meflections, to the per- 
 son to whom they were addressed, "that my sentiments 
 are likely to alter yours. I do not know that they ought. 
 You are young ; you cannot guide, but must follow, the 
 fortune of your country. But hereafter they may be of 
 some use to you, in some future form which your com- 
 monwealth may take. In the present it can hardly re- 
 
VIII.] TURGOT. ITS 
 
 main ; but before its final settlement, it may be obliged to 
 pass, as one of our poets says, * through great varieties of 
 untried being,' and in all its transmigrations to be purified 
 by fire and blood." 
 
 He felt in the midst of his hate that what he took for 
 seething chaos might after all be the struggle upwards of 
 the germs of order. Among the later words that he wrote 
 on the Revolution were these : " If a great change is to 
 be made in human affairs, the minds of men will be fitted 
 to it; the general opinions and feelings will draw that 
 way. Every fear, every hope, will forward it ; and then 
 they who persist in opposing this mighty current in human 
 affairs will appear rather to resist the decrees of Provi- 
 dence itself than the mere designs of men." We can only 
 regret that these rays of the mens divinior did not shine 
 with a more steadfast light ; and that a spirit which, amid 
 the sharp press of manifold cares and distractions, had ever 
 vibrated with lofty sympathies, was not now more constant 
 to its faith in the beneficent powers and processes of the 
 Unseen Time. 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 
 BURKE AND HIS PARTY PROaRESS OF THE REVOLUTION — ■ 
 
 IRELAND LAST YEARS. 
 
 For some montlis after the publication of the Reflections^ 
 Burke kept up the relations of an armed peace with his 
 old political friends. The impeachment went on, and in 
 December (1790) there was a private meeting on the busi- 
 ness connected with it, between Pitt, Burke, Fox, and Dun- 
 das, at the house of the Speaker. It was described by one 
 who knew as most snug and amiable, and there seems to 
 have been a general impression in the world at this mo- 
 ment that Fox might by some means be induced to join 
 Pitt. What troubled the slumbers of good Whigs like 
 Gilbert Elliot was the prospect of Fox committing himself 
 too strongly on French affairs. Burke himself was in the 
 deepest dejection at the prospect ; for Fox did not cease 
 to express the most unqualified disapproval of the Reflec- 
 tions; he thought that, even in point of composition, it 
 was the worst thing that Burke had ever published. It 
 was already feared that his friendship for Sheridan w^as 
 drawing him further away from Burke, with whom Sheri- 
 dan had quarrelled, into a course of politics that would 
 both damage his own reputation, and break up the strong 
 union of which the Duke of Portland was the nominal 
 head. 
 
 New floods in France had not yet carried back the ship 
 
CHAP. IX.] THE RUSSIAN ARMAMENT. 177 
 
 of state into raging waters. Pitt was thinking so little of 
 danger from that country, that he had plunged into a pol- 
 icy of intervention in the affairs of eastern Europe. When 
 writers charge Burke with breaking violently in upon Pitt's 
 system of peace abroad and reform at home, they overlook 
 the fact that before Burke had begun to preach his cru- 
 sade against the Jacobins, Pitt had already prepared a war 
 with Russia. The nation refused to follow. They agreed 
 with Fox that it was no concern of theirs whether or not 
 Russia took from Turkey the country between the Boug 
 and Dniester; they felt that British interests would be 
 more damaged by the expenses of a war than by the ac- 
 quisition by Russia of Ockzakow. Pitt was obliged to 
 throw up the scheme, and to extricate himself as well as 
 he could from rash engagements with Prussia. It was on 
 account of his services to the cause of peace on this oc- 
 casion that Catharine ordered the Russian ambassador to 
 send her a bust of Fox in white marble, to be placed in 
 her colonnade between Demosthenes and Cicero. We may 
 take it for granted that after the Revolution rose to its full 
 height, the bust of Fox accompanied that of Voltaire down 
 to the cellar of the Hermitage. 
 
 While the affair of the Russian armament was still oc- 
 cupying the minister, an event of signal importance hap- 
 pened in the ranks of his political adversaries. The alli- 
 ance which had lasted between Burke and Fox for five-and- 
 twenty years came to a sudden end, and this rift gradual- 
 ly widened into a destructive breach throughout the party. 
 There is no parallel in our parliamentary history to the 
 fatal scene. In Ireland, indeed, only eight years before, 
 Flood and Grattan, after fighting side by side for many 
 years, had all at once sprung upon one another in the 
 Parliament House with the furv of vultures : Flood had 
 
lis BURKE. [chap. 
 
 screamed to Grattan that lie was a mendicant patriot, and 
 Grattan had called Flood an ill-omened bird of night, with 
 a sepulchral note, a cadaverous aspect, and a broken beak. 
 The Irish, like the French, have the art of making things 
 dramatic, and Burke was the greatest of Irishmen. On 
 the opening of the session of 1791, the government had 
 introduced a bill for the better government of Canada. It 
 introduced questions about church establishments and he- 
 reditary legislators. In discussing these. Fox made some 
 references to France. It was impossible to refer to France 
 without touching the Rejlections on the French Revolution. 
 Burke was not present, but he heard what Fox had said, 
 and before long Fox again introduced French affairs in a 
 debate on the Russian armament. Burke rose in violent 
 heat of mind to reply, but the House wo aid not hear him. 
 He resolved to speak when the time came for the Canada 
 Bill to be recommitted. Meanwhile some of his friends 
 did all that they could to dissuade him from pressing the 
 matter further. Even the Prince of Wales is said to have 
 written him a letter. There were many signs of the rupt- 
 ure that was so soon to come in the Whig ranks. Men 
 so equally devoted to the common cause as Windham and 
 Elliot nearly came to a quarrel at a dinner-party at Lord 
 Malmesbury's, on the subject of Burke's design to speak ; 
 and Windham, who for the present sided with Fox, enters 
 in his diary that he was glad to escape from the room 
 without speaking to the man whom, since the death of 
 Dr. Johnson, he revered before all others. 
 
 On the day appointed for the Canada Bill, Fox called at 
 Burke's house, and after some talk on Burke's intention to 
 speak, and on other matters, they walked down to West- 
 minster and entered the House together, as they had so 
 many a time done before, but were never to do again. 
 
IX.] QUARREL WITH FOX. 179 
 
 They found that the debate had been adjourned, and it 
 was not until May 6th that Burke had an opportunity of 
 explaining himself on the Revolution in France. He had 
 no sooner risen, than interruptions broke out from his 
 own side, and a scene of great disorder followed. Burke 
 was incensed beyond endurance by this treatment, for even 
 Fox and AVindham had taken part in the tumult against 
 him. With much bitterness he commented on Fox's pre- 
 vious eulogies of the Revolution, and finally there came the 
 fatal words of severance. "It is indiscreet," he said, " at 
 any period, but especially at my time of life, to provoke 
 enemies, or give my friends occasion to desert me. Yet 
 if my firm and steady adherence to the British Constitu- 
 tion place me in such a dilemma, I am ready to risk it, 
 and with my last words to exclaim, ' Fly from the French 
 Constitution.' " Fox at this point eagerly called to him 
 that there was no loss of friends. " Yes, yes," cried Burke, 
 " there is a loss of friends. I know the price of my con- 
 duct. I have done my duty at the price of my friend. 
 Our friendship is at an end." 
 
 The members who sat on the same side were aghast at 
 proceedings which went beyond their worst apprehensions. 
 Even the ministerialists were shocked. Pitt agreed much 
 more with Fox than with Burke, but he would have been 
 more than human if he had not watched with complacency 
 his two most formidable adversaries turning- their swords 
 against one another. Wilberforce, who was more disin- 
 terested, lamented the spectacle as shameful. In the gal- 
 leries there w^as hardly a dry eye. Fox, as might have 
 been expected from his warm and generous nature, was 
 deeply moved, and is described as weeping even to sob- 
 bing. He repeated his former acknowledgment of his 
 debt to Burke, and he repeated his former expression of 
 
180 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 faith in the blessings which the abolition of royal despot- 
 ism would bring to France. With unabated vehemence 
 Burke again rose to denounce the French Constitution — 
 "a building composed of untempered mortar — the work 
 of Goths and Vandals, where everything was disjointed 
 and inverted." After a short rejoinder from Fox, the 
 scene came to a close, and the once friendly intercourse 
 between the two heroes was at an end. When they met 
 in the Manao-ers' box in Westminster Hall on the business 
 of Hastings's trial, they met with the formalities of stran- 
 gers. There is a story that when Burke left the House 
 on the night of the quarrel it was raining, and Mr. Cur- 
 wen, a member of the Opposition, took him home in his 
 carriage. Burke at once began to declaim against the 
 French. Curwen dropped some remark on the other side. 
 " What !" Burke cried out, grasping the check-string, " are 
 you one of these people ! Set me down." It needed all 
 Curwen's force to keep him where he was ; and when they 
 reached his house, Burke stepped out without saying a 
 single word. 
 
 We may agree that all this did not indicate the perfect 
 sobriety and self-control proper to a statesman, in what 
 was a serious crisis both to his party and to Europe. It 
 was about this time that Burke said to Addington, who 
 was then Speaker of the House of Commons, that he was 
 not well. " I eat too much. Speaker," he said, " I drink 
 too much, and I sleep too little." It is even said that he 
 felt the final breach with Fox as a relief from unendurable 
 suspense; and he quoted the lines about JEneas, after he 
 had finally resolved to quit Dido and the Carthaginian 
 shore, at last being able to snatch slumber in his ship's tall 
 stern. There can be no doubt how severe had been the 
 tension. Yet the performance to which Burke now ap- 
 
IX.] RESENTMENT OF THE PARTY. 181 
 
 plied himself is one of the gravest and most reasonable 
 of all his compositions. He felt it necessary to vindicate 
 the fundamental consistency between his present and his 
 past. We have no difficulty in imagining the abuse to 
 which he was exposed from those whose abuse gave him 
 pain. In a country governed by party, a politician who 
 quits the allies of a lifetime must expect to pay the pen- 
 alty. The Whig papers told him that he was expected to 
 surrender his seat in Parliament. They imputed to him 
 all sorts of sinister motives. His name was introduced 
 into ironical toasts. For a whole year there was scarcely 
 a member of his former party who did not stand aloof 
 from him. Windham, when the feeling was at its height, 
 sent w^ord to a host that he w^ould rather not meet Burke 
 at dinner. Dr. Parr, though he thought Mr. Burke the 
 greatest man upon earth, declared himself most indignant- 
 ly and most fixedly on the side of Mr. Sheridan and Mr. 
 Fox. The Duke of Portland, though always described as 
 strongly and fondly attached to him, and Gilbert Elliot, 
 who thought that Burke was right in his views on the Rev- 
 olution, and right in expressing them, still could not for- 
 give the open catastrophe, and for many months all the old 
 habits of intimacy among them were entirely broken off. 
 
 Burke did not bend to the storm. He went down to 
 Margate, and there finished the Appeal from the New to 
 the Old Whigs. Meanwhile he dispatched his son to 
 Coblenz to give advice to the royalist exiles, who were 
 then mainly in the hands of Calonne, one of the very 
 worst of the ministers whom Louis XVI. had tried be- 
 tween his dismissal of Turgot in 1774, and the meeting of 
 the States-General in 1789. This measure w^as taken at 
 the request of Calonne, who had visited Burke at Margate. 
 The English government did not disapprove of it, though 
 
182 BUKKE. [chap. 
 
 they naturally declined to invest either young Burke or 
 any one else with authority from themselves. As little 
 came of the mission as might have been expected from the 
 frivolous, unmanly, and enraged spirit of those to whom it 
 was addressed. 
 
 In August (1791), while Richard Burke was at Coblenz, 
 the Appeal was published. This was the last piece that 
 Burke wrote on the Revolution, in which there is any pre- 
 tence of measure, sobriety, and calm judgment in face of 
 a formidable and perplexing crisis. Henceforth it is not 
 political philosophy, but the minatory exhortation of a 
 prophet. We deal no longer with principles and ideas, 
 but with a partisan denunciation of particular acts, and a 
 partisan incitement to a given practical policy. We may 
 appreciate the policy as we choose, but our appreciation of 
 Burke as a thinker and a contributor to political wisdom 
 is at an end. He is now only Demosthenes thundering 
 against Philip, or Cicero shrieking against Mark Antony. 
 
 The Reflections had not been published many months 
 before Burke wrote the Letter to a Member of the National 
 Assembly (January, 1791), in which strong disapproval had 
 grown into furious hatred. It contains the elaborate dia- 
 tribe against Rousseau, the grave panegyric on Cromwell 
 for choosing Hale to be Chief Justice, and a sound criti- 
 cism on the laxity and want of foresight in the manner in 
 which the States-General had been convened. Here first 
 Burke advanced to the position that it might be the duty 
 of other nations to interfere to restore the King to his 
 rightful authority, just as England and Prussia had inter- 
 fered to save Holland from confusion, as they had inter- 
 fered to preserve the hereditary constitution in the Aus- 
 trian Netherlands, and as Prussia had interfered to snatch 
 even the malignant and the turban'd Turk from the pounce 
 
IX.] BURKE ADVOCATES INTERFERENCE. 183 
 
 of the Russian eagle. Was not the King of France as 
 much an object of policy and compassion as the Grand 
 Seignior ? As this was the first piece in which Burke 
 hinted at a crusade, so it was the first in which he began 
 to heap upon the heads, not of Hebert, Fouquier-Tinville, 
 Billaud, nor even of Robespierre or Danton — for none of 
 these had yet been heard of — but of able and conscien- 
 tious men in the Constituent Assembly, language . of a 
 virulence which Fox once said seriously that Burke had 
 picked, even to the phrases of it, out of the wTitings of 
 Salmasius against Milton, but which is really only to be 
 paralleled by the much worse language of Milton against 
 Salmasius. It was in truth exactly the kind of incensed 
 speech which, at a later date, the factions in Paris level- 
 led against one another, when Girondins screamed for the 
 heads of Jacobins, and Robespierre denounced Danton, 
 and Tallien cried for the blood of Robespierre. 
 
 Burke declined most wisely to suggest any plan for the 
 National Assembly. " Permit me to say " — this is in the 
 letter of January, 1791, to a member of the Assembly — 
 "that if I were as confident as I ought to be difladent in 
 my own loose general ideas, I never should venture to 
 broach them, if but at twenty leagues' distance from the 
 centre of your affairs. I must see with my own eyes; I 
 must in a manner touch with my own hands, not only the 
 fixed, but momentary circumstances, before I could venture 
 to suggest any political project whatsoever. I must know 
 the power and disposition to accept, to execute, to perse- 
 vere. I must see all the aids and all the obstacles. I 
 must see the means of correcting the plan, where correc- 
 tives would be wanted. I must see the things : I must 
 see the men. Without a concurrence and adaptation of 
 these to the design, the very best speculative projects 
 
184 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 might become not only useless but mischievous. Plans 
 must be made for men. People at a distance must judge 
 ill of men. They do not always answer to their reputa- 
 tion when you approach them. Nay, the perspective va- 
 ries, and shows tbem quite other than you thougbt tbem. 
 At a distance, if we judge uncertainly of men, we must 
 judge worse of opportunities, which continually vary their 
 shapes and colours, and pass away like clouds." Our ad- 
 miration at such words is quickly stifled when we recall 
 the confident, unsparing, immoderate criticism which both 
 preceded and followed this truly rational exposition of the 
 danger of advising, in cases where we know neither the 
 men nor the opportunities. Why was savage and unfal- 
 tering denunciation any less unbecoming than, as he ad- 
 mits, crude prescriptions would have been unbecoming ? 
 
 By the end of 1791, when he wrote the Thoughts on 
 French Affairs, he had penetrated still farther into the es- 
 sential character of the Revolution. Any notion of a re- 
 form to be effected after the decorous pattern of 1688, so 
 conspicuous in the first great manifesto, had wholly disap- 
 peared. The changes in France he allowed to bear little 
 resemblance or analogy to any of those which had been 
 previously brought about in Europe. It is a revolution, 
 he said, of doctrine and theoretic dogma. The Reforma- 
 tion was the last revolution of this sort which had happen- 
 ed in Europe; and he immediately goes on to remark a 
 point of striking resemblance between them. The effect 
 of the Reformation was " to introduce other interests into 
 all countries than those which arose from their locality 
 and natural circumstances." In like manner other sources 
 of faction were now opened, combining parties among the 
 inhabitants of different countries into a single connection. 
 ^From these sources, effects were likely to arise fully as im- 
 
IX.] HIS FINAL POLICY. 185 
 
 portant as those whicli had formerly arisen from the jar- 
 ring interests of the religious sects. It is a species of fac- 
 tion which " breaks the locality of public affections."^ 
 
 He was thus launched on the full tide of his policy. 
 The French Revolution must be hemmed in by a cordon 
 of fire. Those who sympathised w^ith it in England must 
 be gagged, and if gagging did not suffice, they must be 
 taught respect for the constitution in dungeons and on the 
 gallows. His cry for war abroad and arbitrary tyranny at 
 home waxed louder every day. As Fox said, it was lucky 
 that Burke took the royal side in the Revolution, for his 
 violence would certainly have got him hanged if he had 
 happened to take the other side. 
 
 It was in the early summer of 1792 that Miss Burney 
 again met Burke at Mrs. Crewe's villa at Hampstead. He 
 entered into an animated conversation on Lord Macartney 
 and the Chinese expedition, reviving all the old enthusiasm 
 of his companion by his allusions and anecdotes, his brill- 
 iant fancies and wide information. When politics were 
 introduced, he spoke with an eagerness and a vehemence 
 that instantly banished the graces, though it redoubled the 
 energies of his discourse. " How I wish," Miss Burney 
 writes, " that you could meet this wonderful man when he 
 is easy, happy, and with people he cordially likes. But 
 politics, even on his own side, must always be excluded ; 
 
 * De Tocqucviile has unconsciously imitated Burke's very phrases. 
 " Toutes les revolutions civiles et politiques ont eu une patrie, et s'y 
 sont enfermees. La Revolution fran9aise ... on I'a vue rapprocher 
 ou diviser les hommes en depit des lois, des traditions, des caract^res, 
 de langue, rendant parfois ennemis des compatriotes, et fr^res des 
 etrangers ; ou plutot elle a forme audesstis de toutes les nationalites par- 
 ticulieres^ une patrie intellectuelJe commune dont les hom,mes de toutes les 
 nations ont pu devenir citoyens.''^ — Ancien Regime, p. 15. 
 9 
 
186 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 his irritability is so terrible on that tboDie, that it gives 
 immediately to his face the expression of a man who is 
 going to defend himself from murderersy 
 
 Burke still remained witbout a following, but the ranks 
 of his old allies gradually began to show signs of waver- 
 ing. His panic about the Jacobins within the gates slowly 
 spread. His old faith, about w4iich he had once talked so 
 much, in the ancient rustic, manly, home-bred sense of the 
 English people, he dismissed as if it had been some idle 
 dream that had come to him through the ivory gate. His 
 fine comparison of the nation to a majestic herd, browsing 
 in peace amid the importunate chirrupings of a thousand 
 crickets, became so little appropriate, that he was now 
 beside himself with apprehension that the crickets were 
 about to rend the oxen in pieces. Even then the herd 
 stood tranquilly in their pastures, only occasionally turn- 
 ing a dull eye, now to France, and now to Burke. In the 
 autumn of 1791, Burke dined with Pitt and Lord Gren- 
 ville, and he found them resolute for an honest neutrality 
 in the affairs of France, and " quite out of all apprehen- 
 sions of any effect from the French Kevolution in this 
 kingdom, either at present or any time to come." Fran- 
 cis and Sheridan, it is true, spoke as if they almost wished 
 for a domestic convulsion ; and cool observers who saw 
 liim daily, even accused Sheridan of wishing to stir up the 
 lower ranks of the people by the hope of plundering their 
 betters. But men who afterwards became alarmists are 
 found, so late as the spring of 1792, declaring in their 
 most confidential correspondence that the party of confu- 
 sion made no way with the country, and produced no ef- 
 fect. Home Tooke was its most conspicuous chief, and 
 nobody pretended to fear the subversion of the realm by 
 Home Tooke. Yet Burke, in letters where he admits that 
 
IX.] STATE OF ENGLISH FEELIXG. 187 
 
 the democratic party is entirely discountenanced, and that 
 the Jacobin faction in England is under a heavy cloud, 
 was so possessed by the spectre of panic, as to declare 
 that the Duke of Brunswick was as much fighting the 
 battle of the crown of England as the Duke of Cumber- 
 land fought that battle at Culloden. 
 
 Time and events, meaiTtvhile, had been powerfully tell- 
 ing for Burke. While he was writing his Appeal, the 
 French King and Queen had destroyed whatever confi- 
 dence sanguine dreamers might have had in their loyalty 
 to the new order of things, by attempting to escape over 
 the frontier. They were brought back, and a manful at- 
 tempt was made to get the new constitution to work, in 
 the winter of 1791-92. It was soon found out that 
 Mirabeau had been right, when he said that for a mon- 
 archy it was too democratic, and for a republic there was 
 a king too much. This was Burke's Reflections in a nut- 
 shell. But it was foreign intervention that finally ruined 
 the King, and destroyed the hope of an orderly issue. 
 Frederick the Great had set the first example of what 
 some call iniquity and violence in Europe, and others in 
 milder terms call a readjustment of the equilibrium of 
 nations. He had taken Silesia from the House of Aus- 
 tria, and he had shared in the first partition of Poland. 
 Catharine H. had followed him at the expense of Poland, 
 Sweden, and Turkey. However we may view these trans- 
 actions, and whether we describe them by the stern words 
 of the moralist, or the more deprecatory words of the 
 diplomatist, they are the first sources of that storm of law- 
 less rapine which swept over every part of Europe for five- 
 and-twenty years to come. The intervention of Austria 
 and Prussia in the affairs of France was originally less a 
 deliberate design for the benefit of the old order than an 
 
188 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 interlude in the intrigues of eastern Europe, But the first 
 effect of intervention on behalf of the French monarchy 
 was to bring it in a few weeks to the ground. 
 
 In the spring of 1792 France replied to the prepara- 
 tions of Austria and Prussia for invasion by a declaration 
 of war. It w^as inevitable that the French people should 
 associate the court with the foreign enemy that was com- 
 ing to its deliverance. Everybody knew as well then as 
 we know it now, that the Queen was as bitterly incensed 
 against the new order of things, and as resolutely unfaith- 
 ful to it, as the most furious emigrant on the Rhine. Even 
 Burke himself, writing to his son at Coblenz, was con- 
 strained to talk about Marie Antoinette as that " most un- 
 fortunate woman, who was not to be cured of the spirit of 
 court intrigue even by a prison." The King may have 
 been loyally resigned to his position, but resignation will 
 not defend a country from the invader; and the nation 
 distrusted a chief who only a few months before had been 
 arrested in full flight to join the national enemy. Power 
 naturally fell into the hands of the men of conviction, en- 
 ergy, passion, and resource. Patriotism and republicanism 
 became synonymous, and the constitution against which 
 Burke had prophesied was henceforth a dead letter. The 
 spirit of insurrection that had slumbered since the fall 
 of the Bastille and the march to Versailles in 1789, now 
 awoke in formidable violence, and after the preliminary re- 
 hearsal of what is known in the revolutionary calendar as 
 the 20th of June (1792), the people of Paris responded to 
 the Duke of Brunswick's insensate manifesto by the more 
 memorable day of the 10th of August. Brunswick, ac- 
 cepting the hateful language which the French emigrants 
 put into bis mouth, had declared that every member of the 
 national guard taken with arms in his hands would be im- 
 
IX.] THE FEENCH KING'S DEATH. 189 
 
 mediately put to death ; that every inhabitant who should 
 dare to defend himself, would be put to death and his 
 house burnt to the ground; and that if the least insult 
 was offered to the royal family, then their Austrian and 
 Prussian majesties would deliver Paris to military execu- 
 tion and total destruction. This is the vindictive ferocity 
 which only civil war can kindle. To convince men that 
 the manifesto was not an empty threat, on the day of its 
 publication a force of nearly 140,000 Austrians, Prussians, 
 and Hessians entered France. The sections of Paris re- 
 plied by marching to the Tuileries, and after a furious con- 
 flict with the Swiss guards, they stormed the chateau. The 
 King and his family had fled to the National Assembly. 
 The same evening they were thrown into prison, whence 
 the King and Queen only came out on their way to the 
 scaffold. 
 
 It was the King's execution in January, 1793, that final- 
 ly raised feeling in England to the intense heat which 
 Burke had for so long been craving. The evening on 
 which the courier brouo-ht the news was never forgotten 
 by those who were in London at the time. The play- 
 houses were instantly closed, and the audiences insisted on 
 retiring with half the amusement for which they had paid. 
 People of the lowest and the highest rank alike put on 
 mourning. The French were universally denounced as 
 fiends upon earth. It was hardly safe for a Frenchman to 
 appear in the streets of London. Placards were posted on 
 every wall, calling for war, and the crowds who gathered 
 round them read them with loud hurrahs. 
 
 It would be a great mistake to say that Pitt ever lost 
 his head, but he lost his feet. The momentary passion of 
 the nation forced him out of the pacific path in which he 
 
190 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 would have cliosen to stay. Burke had become the great- 
 est power in the country, and was in closer communication 
 with the ministers than any one out of office. He went 
 once about this time with Windham and Elliot, to inform 
 Pitt as to the uneasiness of the public about the slackness 
 of our naval and military preparation. "Burke," says one 
 of the party, " gave Pitt a little political instruction in a 
 very respectful and cordial way, but with the authority of 
 an old and most informed statesman, and although nobody 
 ever takes the whole of Burke's advice, yet he often, or al- 
 w^ays rather, furnishes very important and useful matter, 
 some part of which sticks and does good. Pitt took it all 
 very patiently and cordially." 
 
 It was in the December of 1792 that Burke had enacted 
 that famous bit of melodrama out of place, known as the 
 Dagger Scene. The Government had brought in an Alien 
 Bill, imposing certain pains and restrictions on foreigners 
 coming to this country. Fox denounced it as a concession 
 to foolish alarms, and was followed by Burke, who began 
 to storm as usual against murderous atheists. Then, with- 
 out due preparation, he began to fumble in his bosom, sud- 
 denly drew out a dagger, and with an extravagant gesture 
 threw it on the floor of the House, crying that this was 
 what they had to expect from their alliance with France. 
 The stroke missed its mark, and there was a general incli- 
 nation to titter, until Burke, collecting himself for an ef- 
 fort, called upon them with a vehemence to which his lis- 
 teners could not choose but respond, to keep French prin- 
 ciples from their heads, and French daggers from their 
 hearts ; to preserve all their blandishments in life, and all 
 their consolations in death ; all the blessings of time, and 
 all the hopes of eternity. All this was not prepared long 
 beforehand, for it seems that the dagger had only been 
 
IX.] NEGOTIATIONS. 191 
 
 shown to Burke on his way to the House, as one that had 
 been sent to Birmingham to be a pattern for a large order. 
 Whether prepared or unprepared, the scene was one from 
 which we gladly avert our eyes. 
 
 Negotiations had been going on for some months, and 
 they continued in various stages for some months longer, 
 for a coalition between the two great parties of the state. 
 Burke was persistently anxious that Fox should join Pitt's 
 government. Pitt always admitted the importance of 
 Fox's abilities in the difficult affairs which lay before the 
 ministry, and declared that he had no sort of personal an- 
 imosity to Fox, but rather a personal good-will and good- 
 liking. Fox himself said of a coalition, "It is so damned 
 right, to be sure, that I cannot help thinking it must be." 
 But the difficulties were insuperable. The more rapidly 
 the government drifted in Burke's direction, the more im- 
 possible was it for a man of Fox's political sympathies 
 and convictions to have any dealings with a cabinet com- 
 mitted to a policy of irrational panic, to be carried out by 
 a costly war abroad and cruel repression at home. " What 
 a very wretched man /" was Burke's angry exclamation one 
 day, when it became certain that Fox meant to stand by 
 the old flag of freedom and generous common-sense. 
 
 When the coalition at length took place (1794), the 
 only man who carried Burke's principles to their fullest 
 extent into Pitt's cabinet was Windham. It is impossi- 
 ble not to feel the attraction of Windham's character, his 
 amiability, his reverence for great and virtuous men, his 
 passion for knowledge, the versatility of his interests. He 
 is a striking example of the fact that literature was a com- 
 mon pursuit and occupation to the chief statesmen of that 
 time (always excepting Pitt), to an extent that has been 
 gradually tending to become rarer. Windham, in the 
 
192 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 midst of his devotion to public affairs, to tlie business of 
 his country, and, let us add, a zealous attendance on every 
 prize-fight within reach, was never happy unless he was 
 working up points in literature and mathematics. There ' 
 was a literary and classical spirit abroad, and in spite of 
 the furious preoccupations of faction a certain ready dis- 
 engagement of mind prevailed. If Windham and Fox be- 
 gan to talk of horses, they seemed to fall naturally into 
 what had been said about horses by the old writers. Fox 
 held that long ears were a merit, and Windham met him 
 by the authority of Xenophon and Oppian in favour of 
 short ones, and finally they went off into what it was that 
 Yirgil meant, when he called a horse's head argutum 
 caput. Burke and Windham travelled in Scotland to- 
 gether in 1785, and their conversation fell as often on old 
 books as on Hastings or on Pitt. They discussed Virgil's 
 similes ; Johnson and L'Estrange, as the extremes of Eng- 
 lish style ; what Stephens and A. Gellius had to say about 
 Cicero's use of the word gratiosus. If they came to li- 
 braries, Windham ran into them with eagerness, and very 
 strongly enjoyed all *' the feel that a library usually ex- 
 cites." He is constantly reproaching himself with a re- 
 missness, which was purely imaginary, in keeping up his 
 mathematics, his Greek tragedies, his Latin historians. 
 There is no more curious example of the remorse of a 
 bookman impeded by affairs. "What progress might 
 men make in the several parts of knowledge," he says very 
 truly, in one of these moods, " if they could only pursue 
 them with the same eagerness and assiduity as are exerted 
 by lawyers in the conduct of a suit." But this distrac- 
 tion between the tastes of the bookman and the pursuits 
 of public business, united with a certain quality of his 
 constitution to produce one great defect in his character, 
 
ixrj WILLIAM WINDHAM. 193 
 
 and it was the worst defect that a statesman can have. 
 He became the most irresolute and vacillating* of men. 
 He wastes the first half of a day in deciding which of two 
 courses to take, and the second half in blaming himself 
 for not having taken the other. He is constantly late at 
 entertainments, because he cannot make up his mind in 
 proper time whether to go or to stay at home ; hesitation 
 whether he shall read in the red room or in the library, 
 loses him three of the best hours of a morning; the diffi- 
 culty of early rising he finds to consist less in rising early, 
 than in satisfying himself that the practice is wholesome ; 
 his mind is torn for a whole forenoon in an absurd con- 
 test with himself, whether he ought to indulge a strong 
 wish to exercise his horse before dinner. Every page of 
 his diary is a register of the symptoms of this unhappy 
 disease. When the Revolution came, he was absolutely 
 forced by the iron necessity of the case, after certain per- 
 turbations, to go either with Fox or with Burke, Under 
 this compulsion he took one headlong plunge into the 
 policy of alarm. Everybody knows how desperately an 
 habitually irresolute man is capable of clinging to a policy 
 or a conviction to which he has once been driven by dire 
 stress of circumstance. AYindham having at last made up 
 his mind to be frightened by the Revolution, was more 
 violently and inconsolably frightened than anybody else. 
 
 Pitt, after he had been forced into war, at least intend- 
 ed it to be a war on the good old-fashioned principles of 
 seizing the enemy's colonies and keeping them. He was 
 taunted by the alarmists with caring only for sugar isl- 
 ands, and making himself master of all the islands in the 
 world except Great Britain and Ireland. To Burke all 
 this was an abomination, and Windham followed Burke to 
 the letter. He even declared the holy rage of the Fourth 
 9* 
 
194 BUEKE. [chap. 
 
 Letter on a Regicide Peace, published after Burke's deatli, 
 to contain the purest wisdom and the most unanswerable 
 policy. It was through Windham's eloquence and perse- 
 verance that the monstrous idea of a crusade, and all 
 Burke's other violent and excited precepts, gained an effec- 
 tive place and hearing in the cabinet, in the royal closet, 
 and in the House of Commons, long after Burke himself 
 had left the scene. 
 
 We have already seen how important an element Irish 
 affairs became in the war with America. The same spirit 
 which had been stirred by the American war was inevita- 
 bly kindled in Ireland by the French Revolution. The 
 association of United Irishmen now came into existence, 
 with aims avowedly revolutionary. They joined the party 
 which was striving for the relief of the Catholics from 
 certain disabilities, and for their admission to the franchise. 
 Burke had watched all movements in his native country, 
 from the Whiteboy insurrection of 1761 downwards, with 
 steady vigilance, and he watched the new movement of 
 1792 with the keenest eyes. It made him profoundly 
 uneasy. He could not endure the thought of ever so mo- 
 mentary and indirect an association with a revolutionary 
 party, either in Ireland or any other quarter of the globe, 
 yet he was eager for a policy which should reconcile the 
 Irish. He was so for two reasons. One of them was his 
 political sense of the inexpediency of proscribing men by 
 whole nations, and excluding from the franchise on the 
 ground of religion a people as numerous as the subjects of 
 the King of Denmark or the King of Sardinia, equal to 
 the population of the United Netherlands, and larger than 
 were to be found in all the States of Switzerland. His 
 second reason was his sense of the urgency of facing trou- 
 ble abroad with a nation united and contented at home; 
 
IX.] IRELAND. 195 
 
 of abolishing in the heart of the country that "bank of 
 discontent, every hour accumulating, upon which every 
 description of seditious men may draw at pleasure." 
 
 In the beginning of 1792, Burke's son went to Dublin 
 as the agent and adviser of the Catholic Committee, who 
 at first listened to him with the respect due to one in 
 whom they expected to find the quaUties of his father. 
 They soon found out that he was utterly without either 
 tact or judgment; that he was arrogant, impertinent, vain, 
 and empty. Wolfe Tone declared him to be by far the 
 most impudent and opinionative fellow that he had ever 
 known in his life. Nothing could exceed the absurdity 
 of his conduct, and on one occasion he had a very narrow 
 escape of being taken into custody by the Serjeant-at-arms, 
 for rushing down from the gallery into the Irish House 
 of Commons, and attempting to make a speech in defence 
 of a petition which he had drawn up, and which was being 
 attacked by a member in his place. Richard Burke went 
 home, it is said, with two thousand guineas in his pocket, 
 which the Catholics had cheerfully paid as the price of 
 getting rid of him. He returned shortly after, but only 
 helped to plunge the business into further confusion, and 
 finally left the scene covered with odium and discredit. 
 His father's Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe (1792) re- 
 mains an admirable monument of wise statesmanship, a 
 sino-ular interlude of calm and solid reasonino- in the midst 
 of a fiery whirlwind of intense passion. Burke perhaps 
 felt that the state of Ireland was passing away from the 
 sphere of calm and solid reason, when he knew that 
 Dumouriez's victory over the allies at Yalmy, which filled 
 Beaconsfield with such gloom and dismay, was celebrated 
 at Dublin by an illumination. 
 
 Burke, who was now in his sixty -fourth year, had for 
 
196 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 some time announced his intention of leaving the House 
 of Commons, as soon as he had brought to an end the 
 prosecution of Hastings. In 1794 the trial came to a 
 close; the thanks of the House were formally voted to 
 the managers of the impeachment; and when the scene 
 was over, Burke applied for the Chiltern Hundreds. Lord 
 Fitzwilliam nominated Eichard Burke for the seat which 
 his father had thus vacated at Malton. Pitt was then 
 making arrangements for the accession of the Portland 
 Whigs to his government, and it was natural, in connexion 
 with these arrangements, to confer some favour on the 
 man who had done more than anybody else to promote 
 the new alliance. It was proposed to make Burke a peer 
 under the style of Lord Beaconsfield — a title in a later 
 age whimsically borrowed for himself by a man of genius, 
 who delighted in irony. To the title it was proposed to 
 attach a yearly income for two or more lives. But the 
 bolt of destiny was at this instant launched. Richard 
 Burke, the adored centre of all his father's hopes and af- 
 fections, was seized with illness, and died (August, 1794). 
 We cannot look without tragic emotion on the pathos of 
 the scene, which left the remnant of the old man's days 
 desolate and void. A Roman poet has described in touch- 
 ing words the woe of the aged Nestor, as he beheld the 
 funeral pile of his son, too untimely slain — 
 
 " Oro parumper 
 Attendas quantum de legibus ipse queratur 
 Fatorum et nimio de stamine, quum videt acris 
 Antilochi barbam ardeutem : quum quserit ab omni 
 Quisquis adest socius, cur baec in tempora duret, 
 Quod facinus dignum tam longo admiserit aevo." 
 
 Burke's grief finds a nobler expression. "The storm has 
 gone over me, and I lie like one of those old oaks which 
 
IX.] DEATH OF RICHARD BURKE. 19? 
 
 the late hurricane has scattered about me. I am stripped 
 of all my honours ; I am torn up by the roots and lie pros- 
 trate on the earth. ... I am alone. I have none to meet 
 my enemies in the gate. ... I live in an inverted order. 
 They who ought to have succeeded me have gone before 
 me. They who should have been to me as posterity, are 
 in the place of ancestors." 
 
 Burke only lived three years after this desolating blow. 
 The arrangements for a peerage, as a matter of course, 
 came to an end. But Pitt was well aware of the serious 
 embarrassments by which Burke was so pressed that he 
 saw actual beggary very close at hand. The King, too — 
 who had once, by the way, granted a pension to Burke's 
 detested Rousseau, though Rousseau was too proud to 
 draw it — seems to have been honourably interested in 
 making a provision for Burke. What Pitt offered was an 
 immediate grant of 1200/. a year from the Civil List for 
 Mrs. Burke's life, to be followed by a proposition to Par- 
 liament in a message from the King, to confer an annui- 
 ty of greater value upon a statesman who had served the 
 country to his own loss for thirty years. As a matter of 
 fact, the grant, 2500Z. a year in amount, much to Burke's 
 chagrin, was never brought before Parliament, but was con- 
 ferred directly by the Crown, as a charge on a certain stock 
 known as the West India four-and-a-half per cents. It 
 seems as if Pitt were afraid of challenging the opinion of 
 Parliament ; and the storm which the pension raised out 
 of doors, was a measure of the trouble which the defence 
 of it would have inflicted on the government inside the 
 House of Commons. According to the rumour of the 
 time, Burke sold two of his pensions upon lives for 
 27,000/., and there was left the third pension of 1200/. 
 for his wife's life. By and by, when the resentment of 
 
198 BFKKE. [chap. 
 
 the Opposition was roused to the highest pitch by the in- 
 famous Treason and Sedition Bills of 1795, the Duke of 
 Bedford and Lord Lauderdale, seeking to accumulate ev- 
 ery possible complaint against the government, assailed the 
 grant to Burke, as made without the consent of Parlia- 
 ment, and as a violent contradiction to the whole policy of 
 the plan for economic reform. The attack, if not unjusti- 
 fiable in itself, came from an unlucky quarter. A chief of 
 the house of Bedford was the most unfit person in the 
 world to protest against grants by favour of the Crown. 
 Burke was too practised a rhetorician not to see the open- 
 ing, and his Letter to a Nohle Lord is the most splendid 
 repartee in the English language. 
 
 It is not surprising that Burke's defence should have 
 provoked rejoinder. A cloud of pamphlets followed the 
 Letter to a Noble Lord — some in doggrel verse, others in 
 a magniloquent prose imitated from his own, others mere 
 poisonous scurrility. The nearest approach to a just stroke 
 that I can find, after turning over a pile of this trash, is an 
 expression of wonder that he, who was inconsolable for 
 the loss of a beloved son, should not have reflected how 
 many tender parents had been made childless in the pro- 
 fusion of blood, of which he himself had been the most 
 relentless champion. Our disgust at the pages of insult 
 which were here levelled at a great man is perhaps moder- 
 ated by the thought that Burke himself, who of all people 
 ought to have known better, had held up to public scorn 
 and obloquy men of such virtue, attainments, and real ser- 
 vice to mankind as Richard Price and Joseph Priestley. 
 
 It was during these months that he composed the Let- 
 ters on a Regicide Peace, though the third and fourth of 
 them were not published until after his death. There 
 have been those to whom these compositions appeared to 
 
IX.] THE REGICIDE PEACE. 199 
 
 be Burke's masterpieces. In fact they are deplorable. 
 They contain passages of fine philosophy and of skilful 
 and plausible reasoning, but such passages only make us 
 wonder how they come to be where they are. The reader 
 is in no humour for them. In splendour of rhetoric, in 
 fine images, in sustention, in irony, they surpass anything 
 that Burke ever wrote ; but of the qualities and principles 
 that, far more than his rhetoric, have made Burke so ad- 
 mirable and so great — of justice, of firm grasp of fact, of 
 a reasonable sense of the probabilities of things — there are 
 only traces enough to light up the gulfs of empty words, 
 reckless phrases, and senseless vituperations, that surge and 
 boil around them. 
 
 It is with the same emotion of " grief and shame " with 
 which Fox heard Burke argue against relief to Dissenters, 
 that we hear him abusing the courts of law because they 
 did not convict Hardy and Home Tooke. The pages 
 against divorce and civil marriage, even granting that they 
 point to the right judgment in these matters, express it 
 with a vehemence that is irrational, and in the dialect, not 
 of a statesman, but of an enraged Capucin. The highly- 
 wrought passage in which Burke describes external aggran- 
 disement as the original thought and the ultimate aim of 
 the earlier statesmen of the Revolution, is no better than 
 ingenious nonsense. The whole performance rests on a 
 gross and inexcusable anachronism. There is a contempt- 
 uous refusal to discriminate between groups of men who 
 were as different from one another as Oliver Cromwell was 
 different from James Nayler, and between periods which 
 were as unlike in all their conditions as the Athens of the 
 Thirty Tyrants was unlike Athens after Thrasybulus had 
 driven the Tyrants out. He assumes that the men, the 
 policy, the maxims of the French government are the men, 
 
200 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 the policy, and the maxims of the handful of obscure mis- 
 creants who had hacked priests and nobles to pieces at the 
 doors of the prisons four years before. Carnot is to him 
 merely "that sanguinary tyrant," and the heroic Hoche 
 becomes " that old practised assassin," while the Prince of 
 Wales, by the way, and the Duke of York are the hope 
 and pride of nations. To heap up that incessant iteration 
 about thieves, murderers, housebreakers, assassins, bandits, 
 bravoes with their hands dripping with blood and their 
 maw gorged with property, desperate paramours, bombas- 
 tical players, the refuse and rejected offal of strolling the- 
 atres, bloody buffoons, bloody felons— all this was as un- 
 just to hundreds of disinterested, honest, and patriotic men 
 who were then earnestly striving to restore a true order 
 and solid citizenship in France, as the foul-mouthed scur- 
 rility of an Irish Orangeman is unjust to millions of de- 
 vout Catholics. 
 
 Burke was the man who might have been expected be- 
 fore all others to know that in every system of govern- 
 ment, whatever may have been the crimes of its origin, 
 there is sure, by the bare necessity of things, to rise up a 
 party or an individual, whom their political instinct will 
 force into resistance to the fatalities of anarchy. Man is 
 too strongly a political animal for it to be otherwise. It 
 was so at each period and division in the Revolution. There 
 was always a party of order; and by 1796, when Burke 
 penned these reckless philippics, order was only too easy 
 in France. The Revolution had worn out the passion and 
 moral enthusiasm of its first years, and all the best men of 
 the revolutionary time had been consumed in a flame of 
 fire. When Burke talked about this war being wholly un- 
 like any war that ever was waged in Europe before, about 
 its being a war for justice on the one side, and a fanatical 
 
IX.] THE REGICIDE PEACE. 201 
 
 bloody propagandism on the other, he shut his eyes to 
 the plain fact that the Directory had after all really sunk 
 to the moral level of Frederick and Catharine, or, for that 
 matter, of Louis the Fourteenth himself. This war was 
 only too like the other great wars of European history. 
 The French government had become political, exactly in 
 the same sense in which Thugut and Metternich and Herz- 
 berg were political. The French Republic in 1797 was 
 neither more nor less aggressive, immoral, piratical, than 
 the monarchies which had partitioned Poland, and had in- 
 tended to redistribute the continent of Europe to suit their 
 own ambitions. The Coalition began the game, but France 
 proved too strong for them, and they had the worst of their 
 game. Jacobinism may have inspired the original j5re which 
 made her armies irresistible, but Jacobinism of that stamp 
 had now gone out of fashion, and to denounce a peace with 
 the Directory because the origin of their government was 
 regicidal, was as childish as it would have been in Mazarin 
 to decline a treaty of regicide peace with Oliver Cromwell. 
 What makes the Regicide Peace so repulsive is not that 
 it recommends energetic prosecution of the war, and not 
 that it abounds in glaring fallacies in detail, but that it is 
 in direct contradiction with that strong, positive, ration- 
 al, and sane method which had before uniformly marked 
 Burke's political philosophy. Here lay his inconsistency, 
 not in abandoning democratic principles, for he had never 
 held them, but in forgetting his own rules, that nations act 
 from adequate motives relative to their interests, and not 
 from metaphysical speculation; that we cannot draw an 
 indictment against a whole people, that there is a species 
 of hostile justice which no asperity of war wholly extin- 
 guishes in the minds of a civilized people. *' Steady in- 
 dependent minds " he had once said, " when they have an 
 
202 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 object of so serious a concern to mankind as government 
 under tlieir contemplation, will disdain to assume the part 
 of satirists and declaimers." Show the thing that you ask 
 for, he cried during the American war, to be reason, show 
 it to be common-sense. We have a measure of the rea- 
 son and common-sense of Burke's attitude in the Regicide 
 Peace, in the language which it inspired in Windham and 
 others, who denounce Wilberforce for canting when he 
 spoke of peace ; who stigmatized Pitt as weak, and a pan- 
 der to national avarice for thinking of the cost of the war ; 
 and who actually charged the liverymen of London who 
 petitioned for peace, with open sedition. 
 
 It is a striking illustration of the versatility of Burke's 
 moods, that immediately before sitting down to write the 
 flaming Letters on a Regicide Peace, he had composed one 
 of the most lucid and accurately meditated of all his tracts, 
 which, short as it is, contains ideas on free trade which 
 was only too far in advance of the opinion of his time. 
 In 1772 a Corn Bill had been introduced — it was passed 
 in the following year — of which Adam Smith said, that 
 it was like the laws of Solon, not the best in itself, but 
 the best which the situation and tendency of the times 
 would admit. In speaking upon this measure, Burke had 
 laid down those sensible principles on the trade in corn, 
 which he now in 1795 worked out in the Thoughts and 
 Details on Scarcity. Those who do not concern them- 
 selves with economics will perhaps be interested in the 
 singular passage, vigorously objected to by Dugald Stew- 
 art, in which Burke sets up a genial defence of the con- 
 sumption of ardent spirits. It is interesting as an argu- 
 ment, and it is most characteristic of the author. 
 
 The curtain was now falling. All who saw him, felt 
 that Burke's life was quickly drawing to a close. His 
 
IX.] VISIT TO BEACONSFIELD. 203 
 
 son's death Lad struck the final blow. We could only 
 wish that the years had brought to him, what it ought to 
 be the fervent prayer of us all to find at the close of the 
 long struggle with ourselves and with circumstance — a 
 disposition to happiness, a composed spirit to which time 
 has made things clear, an unrebellious temper, and hopes 
 undimmed for mankind. If this was not so, Burke at 
 least busied himself to the end in great interests. His 
 charity to the unfortunate emigrants from France was dil- 
 igent and unwearied. Among other solid services, he es- 
 tablished a school at Beaconsfield for sixty French boys, 
 principally the orphans of Quiberon, and the children of 
 other emigrants who had suffered in the cause. Almost 
 the last glimpse that we have of Burke is in a record of 
 a visit to Beaconsfield by the author of the Vindicice Gal- 
 licce. Mackintosh had written to Burke to express his ad- 
 miration for his character and genius, and recanting his old 
 defence of the Revolution. " Since that time," he said, " a 
 melancholy experience has undeceived me on many sub- 
 jects, in which I was then the dupe of my enthusiasm." 
 When Mackintosh went to Beaconsfield (Christmas, 1V97), 
 he was as much amazed as every one else with the exuber- 
 ance of his host's mind in conversation. Even then Burke 
 entered with cordial glee into the sports of children, roll- 
 ing about with them on the carpet, and pouring out in 
 his gambols the sublimest images, mixed with the most 
 wretched puns. He said of Fox, with a deep sigh, " He 
 is made to be loved." There was the irresistible outbreak 
 against "that putrid carcase, that mother of all evil — the 
 French Revolution." It reminded him of the accursed 
 things that crawled in and out of the mouth of the vile 
 hag in Spenser's Cave of Error ; and he repeated the nau- 
 seous stanza. Mackintosh was to be the faithful knight 
 
204 BURKE. [chap. ix. 
 
 of the romance, the brightness of whose sword was to flash 
 destruction on the filthy progeny. 
 
 It was on the 9th of July, 1797, that in the sixty-eighth 
 year of his age, preserving his faculties to the last moment, 
 he expired. With magnanimous tenderness, Fox proposed 
 that he should be buried among the great dead in West- 
 minster Abbey ; but Burke had left strict injunctions that 
 his funeral should be private, and he was laid in the little 
 church at Beaconsfield. It was a terrible moment in the 
 history of England and of Europe. An open mutiny had 
 just been quelled in the fleet. There had been signs of 
 disaffection in the army. In Ireland the spirit of revolt 
 was smouldering, which in a few months broke out in the 
 fierce flames of a great rebellion. And it was the year of 
 the political crime of Campo Formio, that sinister pacifi- 
 cation in which violence and fraud once more asserted their 
 unveiled ascendancy in Europe. These sombre shadows 
 were falling over the western world, when a life went out, 
 which, notwithstanding some grave aberrations, had made 
 great tides in human destiny very luminous. 
 
CHAPTER X. 
 
 burke's literary character. 
 
 A STORY is told that in the time when Burke was still at 
 peace with the Dissenters, he visited Priestley, and after 
 seeing his library and his laboratory, and hearing how his 
 host's hours were given to experiment and meditation, he 
 exclaimed that such a life must make him the happiest 
 and most to be envied of men. It must sometimes have 
 occurred to Burke to wonder whether he had made the 
 right choice when he locked away the fragments of his 
 history, and plunged into the torment of party and Par- 
 liament. But his interests and aptitudes were too strong 
 and overmastering for him to have been right in doing 
 otherwise. Contact with affairs was an indispensable con- 
 dition for the full use of his great faculties, in spite of 
 their being less faculties of affairs than of speculation. 
 Public life was the actual field in which to test, and work 
 out, and use with good effect the moral ideas which were 
 Burke's most sincere and genuine interests. And he was 
 able to bring these moral ideas into such effective use 
 because he was so entirely unfettered by the narrowing 
 spirit of formula. No man, for instance, who thought in 
 formulae would have written the curious passage that I 
 have already referred to, in which he eulogises gin, because 
 " under the pressure of the cares and sorrows of our mor- 
 tal condition, men have at all times and in all countries 
 
206 BUKKE. [chap. 
 
 called in some physical aid to tlieir moral consolation." 
 He valued words at tlieir proper rate ; that is to say, he 
 knew that some of the greatest facts in the life and char- 
 acter of man, and in the institutions of society, can find 
 no description and no measurement in words. Public life, 
 as we can easily perceive, with its shibboleths, its exclu- 
 sive parties, its measurement by conventional standards, its 
 attention to small expediencies before the larger ones, is 
 not a field where such characteristics are likely to make 
 an instant effect. 
 
 Though it is not wrong to say of Burke that, as an ora- 
 tor, he was transcendent, yet in that immediate influence 
 upon his hearers which is commonly supposed to be the 
 mark of oratorical success, all the evidence is that Burke 
 generally failed. We have seen how his speech against 
 Hastings affected Miss Burney, and how the speech on 
 the Nabob of Arcot's debts w^as judged by Pitt not to be 
 worth answering. Perhaps the greatest that he ever made ^ 
 was that on conciliation with America; the wisest in its j 
 temper, the most closely logical in its reasoning, the am- 
 plest in appropriate topics, the most generous and concili- 
 atory in the substance of its appeals. Yet Erskine, who \ 
 was in the House when this was delivered, said that it ^ 
 drove everybody away, including people who, when they 
 came to read it, read it over and over again, and could 
 hardly think of anything else. As Moore says rather too 
 floridly, but with truth — " In vain did Burke's genius put 
 forth its superb plumage, glittering all over with the hun- 
 dred eyes of fancy — the gait of the bird was heavy and 
 awkward, and its voice seemed rather to scare than attract." 
 Burke's gestures were clumsy ; he had sonorous but harsh 
 tones ; he never lost a strong Irish accent ; and his utter- 
 ance was often hurried and eager. Apart from these dis- 
 
X.] AS AN ORATOR. 207 
 
 advantages of accident which have been overcome by men 
 infinitely inferior to Burke, it is easy to perceive, from the 
 matter and texture of the speeches that have become Eng- 
 lish classics, that the very qualities which are excellences 
 in literature were drawbacks to the spoken discourses. A 
 listener in Westminster Hall or the House of Commons, 
 unlike the reader by his fireside in the next century, is al- 
 ways thinking of arguments and facts that bear directly 
 on the special issue before him. What he wishes to hear 
 is some particularity of event or inference which will ei- 
 ther help him to make up his mind, or will justify him if 
 his mind is already made up. Burke never neglected these 
 particularities, and he never w^ent so wide as to fall for an 
 instant into vagueness, but he went wide enough into the 
 generalities that lent force and light to his view, to weary 
 men who cared for nothing, and could not be expected to 
 care for anything, but the business actually in hand and 
 the most expeditious way through it. The contentious- 
 ness is not close enough and rapid enough to hold the in- 
 terest of a practical assembly, which, though it was a hun- 
 dred times less busy than the House of Commons to-day, 
 seems to have been eager in the inverse proportion of what 
 it had to do, to get that little quickly done. 
 
 Then we may doubt whether there is any instance of 
 an orator throwing his spell over a large audience, without 
 frequent resort to the higher forms of commonplace. Two 
 of the greatest speeches of Burke's time are supposed to 
 have been Grattan's on Tithes and Fox's on the Westmin- 
 ster Scrutiny, and these were evidently full of the splendid 
 commonplaces of the first-rate rhetorician. Burke's mind 
 was not readily set to these tunes. The emotion to which 
 he commonly appealed was that too rare one, the love of 
 wisdom ; and he combined his thoughts and knowledge in 
 
208 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 propositions of wisdom so weighty and strong, that the 
 minds of ordinary hearers were not on the instant pre- 
 pared for them. 
 
 It is true that Burke's speeches were not without effect 
 of an indirect kind, for there is good evidence that at the 
 time when Lord North's ministry was tottering, Burke had 
 risen to a position of the first eminence in Parliament. 
 When Boswell said to him that people would wonder how 
 he could bring himself to take so mucli pains with his 
 speeches, knowing with certainty that not one vote would 
 be gained by them, Burke answered that it is very well 
 worth while to take pains to speak well in Parliament; 
 for if a man speaks well, he gradually establishes a certain 
 reputation and consequence in the general opinion ; and 
 though an Act that has been ably opposed becomes law, 
 yet in its progress it is softened and modified to meet ob- 
 jections whose force has never been acknowledged directly. 
 " Aye, sir," Johnson broke in, " and there is a gratification 
 of pride. Though we cannot out-vote them, we will out- 
 argue them." 
 
 Out-arguing is not perhaps the right word for most of 
 Burke's performances. He is at heart thinking more of 
 the subject itself than of those on whom it was his appar- 
 ent business to impress a particular view of it. He sur- 
 renders himself wholly to the matter, and follows up, 
 though with a strong and close tread, all the excursions to 
 which it may give rise in an elastic intelligence — "mo- 
 tion," as De Quincey says, " propagating motion, and life 
 throwing off life." But then this exuberant way of think- 
 ing, this willingness to let the subject lead, is less apt 
 in public discourse than it is in literature, and from this 
 comes the literary quality of Burke's speeches. 
 
 With all his hatred for the book-man in politics, Burke 
 
X.] AS A WRITER. 209 
 
 owed mucli of his own distinction to that generous rich- 
 ness and breadth of judgment which had been ripened in 
 him by literature and his practice in it. Like some other 
 men in our histor}^ he showed that books are a better 
 preparation for statesmanship than early training in the 
 subordinate posts and among the permanent officials of a 
 public department. There is no copiousness of literary 
 reference in his works, such as over-abounded in civil and 
 ecclesiastical publicists of the seventeenth century. Nor 
 can we truly say that there is much, though there is cer- 
 tainly some, of that tact which literature is alleged to con- 
 fer on those who approach it in a just spirit and with the 
 true gift. The influence of literature on Burke lay partly 
 in the direction of emancipation from the mechanical for- 
 mula? of practical politics ; partly in the association which 
 it engendered, in a powerful understanding like his, be- 
 tween politics and the moral forces of the world, and be- 
 tween political maxims and the old and great sentences of 
 morals; partly in drawing him, even when resting his case 
 on prudence and expediency, to appeal to the widest and 
 highest sympathies ; partly, and more than all, in opening 
 his thoughts to the many conditions, possibilities, and " va- 
 rieties of untried being " in human character and situation, 
 and so giving an incomparable flexibiUty to his methods 
 of political approach. 
 
 This flexibility is not to be found in his manner and 
 composition. That derives its immense power from other 
 sources ; from passion, intensity, imagination, size, truth, 
 cogency of logical reason. If any one has imbued himself 
 ^\iih that exacting love of delicacy, measure, and taste in 
 expression, which was until our own day a sacred tradition 
 of the French, then he will not like Burke. Those who in- 
 sist on charm, on winningness in style, on subtle harmonies 
 10 
 
210 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 and exquisite suggestion, are disappointed in Burke ; they 
 even find him stiff and over-coloured. And there are 
 blemishes of this kind. His banter is nearly always un- 
 gainly, his wit blunt, as Johnson said of it, and very often 
 unseasonable. We feel that Johnson must have been right 
 in declaring that though Burke w^as always in search of 
 pleasantries, he never made a good joke in his life. As is 
 usual with a man who has not true humour, Burke is also 
 without true pathos. The thought of wrong or misery 
 moved him less to pity for the victim than to anger against 
 the cause. Again, there are some gratuitous and unre- 
 deemed vulo'arities : some imao*es whose barbaritv makes 
 us shudder, of creeping ascarides and inexpugnable tape- 
 worms. But it is the mere foppery of literature to suffer 
 ourselves to be long detained by specks like these. 
 
 The varieties of Burke's literary or rhetorical method 
 are very striking. It is almost incredible that the superb 
 imaginative amplification of the description of Hyder All's 
 descent upon the Carnatic should be from the same pen as 
 the grave, simple, unadorned Address to the King (1777), 
 where each sentence falls on the ear with the accent of 
 some golden-tongued oracle of the wise gods. His stride 
 is the stride of a giant, from the sentimental beauty of the 
 picture of Marie Antoinette at Versailles, or the red horror 
 of the tale of Debi Sing in Rungpore, to the learning, pos- 
 itiveness, and cool judicial mastery of the Report on the 
 Lords^ Journals (1794), which Philip Francis, no mean 
 judge, declared on the whole to be the " most eminent and 
 extraordinary " of all his productions. Even in the cool- 
 est and dryest of his pieces there is the mark of greatness, 
 of grasp, of comprehension. In all its varieties Burke's 
 style is noble, earnest, deep-flowing, because his sentiment 
 was lofty and fervid, and went with sincerity and ardent 
 
x] HIS STYLE. 211 
 
 disciplined travail of judgment. Fox told Francis Horner 
 that Dryden's prose was Burke's great favourite, and that 
 Burke imitated him more than anyone else. We may 
 well believe that he was attracted by Dryden's ease, his 
 copiousness, his gaiety, his manliness of style, but there 
 can hardly have been any conscious attempt at imitation. 
 Their topics were too different. Burke had the style of 
 his subjects, the amplitude, the weightiness, the laborious- 
 ness, the sense, the high flight, the grandeur, proper to a 
 man dealing with imperial themes, the freedom of nations, 
 the justice of rulers, the fortunes of great societies, the sa- 
 credness of law. Burke will always be read with delight 
 and edification, because in the midst of discussions on the 
 local and the accidental, he scatters apophthegms that take 
 us into the reo-ions of lastino' wisdom. In the midst of the 
 torrent of his most strenuous and passionate deliverances, 
 he suddenly rises aloof from his immediate subject, and in 
 all tranquillity reminds us of some permanent relation of 
 things, some enduring truth of human life or society. We 
 do not hear the organ tones of Milton, for faith and free- 
 dom had other notes in the seventeenth century. There 
 is none of the complacent and wise -browed sagacity of 
 Bacon, for Burke's were days of eager personal strife and 
 party fire and civil division. We are not exhilarated by 
 the cheerfulness, the polish, the fine manners of Boling- 
 broke, for Burke had an anxious conscience, and was ear- 
 nest and intent that the good should triumph. And yet 
 Burke is among the greatest of those who have wrought 
 marvels in the prose of our English tongue. 
 
 The inflnence of Burke on the publicists of the genera- 
 tion after the Revolution was much less considerable than 
 might have been expected. In Germany, where there has 
 been so much excellent writing about Staatswiss'enscliaft, 
 
213 BURKE. [chap. 
 
 with sucli poverty and darkness in the wisdom of practi- 
 cal pohtics, there is a long list of writers who have drawn 
 their inspiration from Burke. In France, publicists of the 
 sentimental school, like Chateaubriand, and the politico- 
 ecclesiastical school, like De Maistre, fashioned a track of 
 their own. In England Burke made a deep mark on con- 
 temporary opinion during the last years of his life, and 
 then his influence underwent a certain eclipse. The offi- 
 cial Whigs considered him a renegade and a heresiarch, 
 who had committed the deadly sin of breaking up the 
 party, and they never mentioned his name without bitter- 
 ness. To men like Godwin, the author of Political Jus- 
 tice, Burke was as antichrist. Bentham and James Mill 
 thought of him as a declaimer who lived upon applause, 
 and who, as one of them says, was for protecting every- 
 thing old, not because it was good but because it existed. 
 In one quarter only did he exert a profound influence. 
 His maxim that men might employ their sagacity in dis- 
 covering the latent wisdom which underlies general preju- 
 dices and old institutions, instead of exploding them, in- 
 spired Coleridge, as I have already said ; and the Coleridg- 
 ian school are Burke's direct descendants, whenever they 
 deal with the significance and the relations of Church and 
 State. But they connected these views so closely with 
 their views in metaphysics and theology, that the associa- 
 tion with Burke was effectually disguised. 
 
 The only English writer of that age whom we can name 
 along with Burke in the literature of enduring power, is 
 Wordsworth, that great representative in another and a 
 higher field, and with many rare elements added that were 
 all his own, of those harmonizing and conciliatory forces 
 and ideas that make man's destiny easier to him through 
 piety in* its oldest and best sense; through reverence for 
 
X.] HIS INFLUENCE. 213 
 
 tlie past, for duty, for institutioiis. He was born in the 
 year of the Present Discontents (l770) ; and when Burke 
 wrote the Reflections, Wordsworth was standing, with 
 France *' on the top of golden hours," listening with de- 
 lio'ht amonij the ruins of the Bastille, or on the banks of 
 the Loire, to "the homeless sound of joy that was in the 
 sky." When France lost faith and freedom, and Napoleon 
 had built his throne on their grave, he began to see those 
 stronof elements which for Burke had all his life been the 
 true and fast foundation of the social world. Wide as is 
 the difference between an oratorical and a declamatory 
 mind like Burke's, and the least oratorical of all poets, yet, 
 under this difference of form and temper, there is a strik- 
 ing likeness in spirit. There was the same energetic feel- 
 ing about moral ideas, the same frame of counsel and 
 prudence, the same love for the slowness of time, the same 
 slight account held of mere intellectual knowledge, and 
 even the same ruling sympathy with that side of the char- 
 acter of Englishmen which Burke exulted in, as " their aive 
 ofkings and reverence for priests,'''' " their sullen resistance 
 of innovation,'''' " their unalterable perseverance in the wis- 
 dom of prejudice.'''' 
 
 The conservative movement in England ran on for many 
 years in the ecclesiastical channel, rather than among ques- 
 tions where Burke's writings might have been brought to 
 bear. On the political side the most active minds, both 
 in practice and theory, w^orked out the principles of liber- 
 alism, and they did so on a plan and by methods from 
 which Burke's utilitarian liberalism and his historic con- 
 servatism were equally remote. . There are many signs 
 around us that this epoch is for the. .moment at an end. 
 The historic method, fitting in with certain dominant con- 
 ceptions in the region of natural science, is bringing men 
 
214 BUKKE. [chap. x. 
 
 round to*a way of looking at society for whicli Burke's 
 maxims are exactly suited ; and it seems probable that 
 he will be more frequently and more seriously referred to 
 within the next twenty years than he has been within the 
 whole of the last eighty. 
 
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