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BURKE

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Originally appearing in Volume V04, Page 835 of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.
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BURKE , See also:

EDMUND (1729—1797), See also:British statesman and See also:political writer. His is one of the greatest names in the See also:history of political literature. There have been many more important statesmen, for he was never tried in a position of supreme responsibility. There have been many more effective orators, for lack of imaginative suppleness prevented him from penetrating to the inner mind of his hearers; defects in delivery weakened the See also:intrinsic persuasiveness of his reasoning; and he had not that commanding authority of See also:character and See also:personality which has so often been the See also:secret of triumphant eloquence. There have been many subtler, more See also:original and more systematic thinkers about the conditions of the social See also:union. But no one that ever lived used the See also:general ideas of the thinker more success-fully to See also:judge the particular problems of the statesman. No one has ever come so See also:close to the details of See also:practical politics, and at the same See also:time remembered that these can only be under-stood and only dealt with by the aid of the broad conceptions of political See also:philosophy. And what is more than all for See also:perpetuity of fame, he was one of the See also:great masters of the high and difficult See also:art of elaborate See also:composition. A certain doubtfulness hangs over the circumstances of Burke's See also:life previous to the opening of his public career. The very date of his See also:birth is variously stated. The most probable See also:opinion is that he was See also:born at See also:Dublin on the 12th of See also:January 1729, new See also:style: Of his See also:family we know little more than his See also:father was a See also:Protestant See also:attorney, practising in Dublin, and that his See also:mother was a See also:Catholic, a.member of the family of Nagle. He had at least one See also:sister, from whom descended the only existing representatives of Burke's family; and he had at least two See also:brothers, See also:Garret Burke and See also:Richard Burke, the one older and the other younger than Edmund.

The sister, afterwards Mrs See also:

French, was brought up and remained throughout life in the religious faith of her mother; Edmund and his brothers followed that of their father. In 1741 the three brothers were sent to school at Ballitore in the See also:county of See also:Kildare, kept by See also:Abraham Shackleton, an Englishman, and a member of the Society of See also:Friends. He appears to have been an excellent teacher and a See also:good and pious See also:man. Burke always looked back on his own connexion with the school at Ballitore as among the most fortunate circumstances of his life. Between himself and a son of his instructor there sprang up a close and affectionate friendship, and, unlike so many of the exquisite attachments of youth, this was not choked by the dust of life, nor parted by divergence of pursuit. Richard Shackleton was endowed with a See also:grave, pure and tranquil nature, See also:constant and austere, yet not without those See also:gentle elements that often redeem the drier qualities of his religious persuasion. When Burke had become one of the most famous men in See also:Europe, no visitor to his See also:house was more welcome than the friend with whom See also:long years before he had tried poetic flights, and exchanged all the sanguine confidences of boyhood. And we are touched to think of the See also:simple-minded See also:guest secretly praying, in the solitude of his See also:room in the See also:fine house at See also:Beaconsfield, that the way of his anxious and overburdened See also:host might be guided by a divine See also:hand. In 1743 Burke became a student at Trinity See also:College, Dublin, where See also:Oliver See also:Goldsmith was also a student at the same time. But the serious See also:pupil of Abraham Shackleton would not be likely to see much of the See also:wild and squalid See also:sizar. See also:Henry See also:Flood, who was two years younger than Burke, had gone to See also:complete his See also:education at See also:Oxford. Burke, like Goldsmith, achieved no See also:academic distinction.

His character was never at any time of the academic See also:

cast. The See also:minor accuracies, the See also:limitation of range, the treading and re-treading of the same small patch of ground, the concentration of See also:interest in success before a See also:board of examiners, were all uncongenial to a nature of exuberant intellectual curiosity and of strenuous and self-reliant originality. His knowledge of See also:Greek and Latin was never thorough, nor had he any turn for See also:critical niceties. He could quote See also:Homer and See also:Pindar, and he had read See also:Aristotle. Like others who have gone through the conventional course of instruction, he kept a See also:place in his memory for the various charms of See also:Virgil and See also:Horace, of See also:Tacitus and See also:Ovid; but the See also:master whose See also:page by See also:night and by See also:day he turned with devout hand, was the copious, energetic, flexible, diversified and brilliant See also:genius of the declamations for See also:Archias the poet and for See also:Milo, against See also:Catiline and against Antony, the author of the disputations at See also:Tusculum and the orations against See also:Verres. See also:Cicero was ever to him the mightiest of the See also:ancient names. In See also:English literature See also:Milton seems to have been more See also:familiar to him than See also:Shakespeare, and See also:Spenser was perhaps more of a favourite with him than either. It is too often the See also:case to be a See also:mere See also:accident that men who become eminent for wide See also:compass of understanding and penetrating comprehension, are in their See also:adolescence unsettled and desultory. Of this Burke is a See also:signal See also:illustration. He See also:left Trinity in 1748, with no great stock of well-ordered knowledge. He neither derived the benefits nor suffered the drawbacks of systematic intellectual discipline. After taking his degree at Dublin he went in the See also:year 1750 to See also:London to keep terms at the See also:Temple.

The ten years that followed were passed in obscure See also:

industry. Burke was always extremely reserved about his private affairs. All that we know of Burke exhibits him as inspired by a resolute See also:pride, a certain stateliness and imperious See also:elevation of mind. Such a character, while See also:free from any weak shame about the shabby necessities of See also:early struggles, yet is naturally unwilling to make them prominent in after life. There is nothing dishonourable in such an inclination. " I was not swaddled and rocked and dandled into a legislator," wrote Burke when very near the end of his days: Nitor in adversum is the See also:motto for a man like me. At every step of my progress in life (for in every step I was traversed and opposed), and at every See also:turnpike I met, I was obliged to show my See also:passport. Otherwise no See also:rank, no See also:toleration even, for me." All sorts of whispers have been circulated by idle or maliciousgossip about Burke's first manhood. He is said to have been one of the numerous lovers of his fascinating countrywoman, See also:Margaret See also:Woffington. It is hinted that he made a mysterious visit to the See also:American colonies. He was for years accused of having gone over to the See also:Church of See also:Rome, and afterwards recanting. There is not a tittle of See also:positive See also:evidence for these or any of the other statements to Burke's discredit.

The See also:

common See also:story that he was a See also:candidate for See also:Adam See also:Smith's See also:chair of moral philosophy at See also:Glasgow, when See also:Hume was rejected in favour of an obscure nobody (1751), can be shown to be wholly false. Like a great many other youths with an eminent destiny before them, Burke conceived a strong distaste for the profession of the See also:law. His father, who was an attorney of substance, had a distaste still stronger for so vagrant a profession as letters were in that day. He withdrew the See also:annual See also:allowance, and Burke set to See also:work to win for himself by indefatigable industry and capability in the public interest that position of See also:power or pre-See also:eminence which his detractors acquired either by accident of birth and connexions or else by the vile arts of political intrigue. He began at the bottom of the See also:ladder, mixing with the Bohemian society that haunted the Temple, practising See also:oratory in the free and easy debating See also:societies of Covent See also:Garden and the Strand, and See also:writing for the booksellers. In 1756 he made his first See also:mark by a See also:satire upon See also:Bolingbroke entitled A Vindication of Natural Society. It purported to be a See also:posthumous work from the See also:pen of Bolingbroke, and to See also:present a view of the miseries and evils arising to mankind from every See also:species of artificial society. The See also:imitation of the fine style of that magnificent writer but See also:bad patriot is admirable. As a satire the piece is a failure, for the simple See also:reason that the substance of it. might well pass for a perfectly true, no less than a very eloquent statement of social blunders and calamities. Such acute critics as See also:Chesterfield and See also:Warburton thought the performance serious. See also:Rousseau, whose famous discourse on the evils of See also:civilization had appeared six years before, would have read Burke's ironical vindication of natural society without a suspicion of its See also:irony. There have indeed been found persons who insist that the Vindication was a really serious expression of the writer's own opinions.

This is absolutely incredible, for various reasons. Burke See also:

felt now, as he did See also:thirty years later, that See also:civil institutions cannot wisely or safely be measured by the tests of pure reason. His sagacity discerned that the See also:rationalism by which Boling-See also:broke and the deistic school believed themselves to have over-thrown revealed See also:religion, was equally calculated to undermine the structure of political See also:government. This was precisely the actual course on which See also:speculation was entering in See also:France at that moment. His Vindication is meant to be a reduction See also:town absurdity. The rising revolutionary school in France, if they had read it, would have taken it for a demonstration of the theorem to be proved. The only interest of the piece for us lies in the See also:proof which it furnishes, that at the opening of his life Burke had the same scornful antipathy to political rationalism which flamed out in such overwhelming See also:passion at its close. In the same year (1756) appeared the Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas on the See also:Sublime and Beautiful, a crude and narrow performance in many respects, yet marked by an See also:independent use of the writer's mind, and not without fertile See also:suggestion. It attracted the See also:attention of the rising aesthetic school in See also:Germany. Leasing set about the See also:translation and annotation of it, and See also:Moses Mendelssohn borrowed from Burke's speculation at least one of the most fruitful and important ideas of his own influential theories on the sentiments. In See also:England the Inquiry had considerable See also:vogue, but it has left no permanent trace in the development of aesthetic thought. Burke's See also:literary industry in town was relieved by frequent excursions to the western parts of England, in See also:company with See also:William Burke.

There was a lasting intimacy between the two namesakes, and they seem to have been involved together in some important passages of their lives; but we have Edmund Burke's authority for believing that they were probably not kinsmen. The seclusion of these rural sojourns, originally dictated by delicate See also:

health, was as wholesome to the mind as to the See also:body. Few men, if any, have ever acquired a settled See also:mental See also:habit of See also:surveying human affairs broadly, of watching the See also:play of passion, interest, circumstance, in all its comprehensiveness, and of applying the See also:instruments of general conceptions and wide principles to its See also:interpretation with respectable constancy, unless they have at some early See also:period of their manhood resolved the greater problems of society in See also:independence and See also:isolation. By 1756 the cast of Burke's opinions was decisively fixed, and they underwent no See also:radical See also:change. He began a See also:series of Hints on the See also:Drama. He wrote a portion of an Abridgment of the History of England, and brought it down as far as the reign of See also:John. It included, as was natural enough in a warm admirer of See also:Montesquieu, a fragment on law, of which he justly said that it ought to be the leading See also:science in every well-ordered See also:commonwealth. Burke's early interest in See also:America was shown by an See also:Account of the See also:European Settlements on that See also:continent. Such See also:works were evidently a sign that his mind was turning away from abstract speculation to the great political and economic See also:fields, and to the more visible conditions of social stability and the growth of nations. This interest in the See also:concrete phenomena of society inspired him with the See also:idea of the Annual See also:Register (1759), which he designed to present a broad grouping of the See also:chief movements of each year. The See also:execution was as excellent as the conception, and if we reflect that it was begun in the midst of that momentous See also:war which raised England to her See also:climax of territorial greatness in See also:East and See also:West, we may easily realize how the task of describing these portentous and far-reaching events would be likely to strengthen Burke's habits of wide and laborious observation, as well as to give him firmness and confidence in the exercise of his own See also:judgment. See also:Dodsley gave him £loo for each annual See also:volume, and the sum was welcome enough, for towards the end of 1756 Burke had married.

His wife was the daughter of a Dr See also:

Nugent, a physician at See also:Bath. She is always spoken of by his friends as a mild, reasonable and obliging See also:person, whose amiability and gentle sense did much to soothe the too See also:nervous and excitable temperament of her See also:husband. She had been brought up, there is good reason to believe, as a Catholic, and she was probably a member of that communion at the time of her See also:marriage. Dr Nugent eventually took up his See also:residence with his son-in-law in London, and became a popular member of that famous See also:group of men of letters and artists whom See also:Boswell has made so familiar and so dear to all later generations. Burke, however, had no intention of being dependent. His consciousness of his own See also:powers animated him with a most justifiable ambition, if ever there was one, to play a See also:part in the conduct of See also:national affairs. Friends shared this ambition on his behalf; one of these was See also:Lord See also:Charlemont. He introduced Burke to William See also:Gerard See also:Hamilton (1759), now only remembered by the See also:nickname " single-speech," derived from the circumstance of his having made a single brilliant speech in the House of See also:Commons, which was followed by years of almost unbroken silence. Hamilton was by no means devoid of sense and acuteness, but in character he was one of the most despicable men then alive. There is not a word too many nor too strong in the description of him by one of Burke's friends, as " a sullen, vain, proud, selfish, cankered-hearted, envious reptile." The reptile's connexion, however, was for a time of considerable use to Burke. When he was made Irish secretary, Burke accompanied him to Dublin, and there learnt Oxenstiern's eternal See also:lesson, that awaits all who penetrate behind the scenes of government, quam parva sapientia mundus regitur. The penal See also:laws against the Catholics, the iniquitous restrictions on Irish See also:trade and industry, the selfish factiousness of the See also:parliament, the jobbery and corruption of See also:administration, the See also:absenteeism of the landlords, and all the other too familiar elements of that mischievous and fatal See also:system, were then in full force.

As was shown afterwards, they made an impression upon Burke that was never effaced. So much iniquity and so much disorder may well have struck deep on one whose two chief political sentiments were a passion for See also:

order and a passion for See also:justice. He may have anticipated with something of remorse the reflection of a See also:modern historian, that the absenteeism ofher landlords has been less of a, curse to See also:Ireland than the absenteeism of her men of genius. At least he was never an absentee in See also:heart. He always took the interest of an ardent patriot in his unfortunate See also:country; and, as we shall see, made more than one weighty See also:sacrifice on behalf of the principles which he deemed to be See also:bound up with her welfare. When Hamilton retired from his See also:post, Burke accompanied him back to London, with a See also:pension of £30o a year on the Irish See also:Establishment. This modest allowance he hardly enjoyed for more than a single year. His See also:patron having discovered the value of so laborious and powerful a subaltern, wished to bind Burke permanently to his service. Burke declined to sell himself into final bondage of this See also:kind. When Hamilton continued to See also:press his odious pretensions they quarrelled (1765), and Burke threw up his pension. He soon received a more important piece of preferment than any which he could ever have procured through Hamilton. The See also:accession of See also:George III. to the See also:throne in 176o had been followed by the disgrace of See also:Pitt, the dismissal of See also:Newcastle, and the rise of See also:Bute.

These events marked the See also:

resolution of the See also:court to change the political system which had been created by the Revolution of 1688. That system placed the government of the country in the hands of a territorial See also:oligarchy, composed of a few families of large possessions, fairly enlightened principles, and shrewd political sense. It had been preserved by the existence of a Pretender. The two first See also:kings of the house of See also:Hanover could only keep the See also:crown on their own heads by conciliating the Revolution families and accepting Revolution principles. By 1760 all peril to the See also:dynasty was at an end. George III., or those about him, insisted on substituting for the aristocratic See also:division of political power a substantial concentration of it in the hands of the See also:sovereign. The ministers were no longer to be the members of a great party, acting together in pursuance of a common policy accepted by them all as a See also:united body; they were to become nominees of the court, each holding himself answerable not to his colleagues but to the See also:king, separately, individually and by See also:department. George III. had before his eyes the government of his See also:cousin the great See also:Frederick; but not every one can See also:bend the See also:bow of Ulysses, and, apart from difference of See also:personal capacity and historic tradition, he forgot that a territorial and commercial See also:aristocracy cannot be dealt with in the spirit of the barrack and the See also:drill-ground. But he made the See also:attempt, and resistance to that attempt supplies the keynote to the first twenty-five years of Burke's political life. Along with the change in system went high-handed and absolutist tendencies in policy. The first See also:stage of the new experiment was very See also:short. Bute, in a panic at the See also:storm of unpopularity that menaced him, resigned in 1763.

George See also:

Grenville and the less enlightened See also:section of the Whigs took his place. They proceeded to tax the American colonists, to inter-pose vexatiously against their trade, to threaten the See also:liberty of the subject at See also:home by general warrants, and to stifle the liberty of public discussion by prosecutions of the press. Their arbitrary methods disgusted the nation, and the personal arrogance of the ministers at last disgusted the king. The system received a temporary check. Grenville See also:fell, and the king was forced to deliver himself into the hands of the orthodox section of the Whigs. The See also:marquess of See also:Rockingham (See also:July to, 1765) became See also:prime See also:minister, and he was induced to make Burke his private secretary. Before Burke had begun his duties, an incident occurred which illustrates the character of the two men. The old See also:duke of Newcastle, probably desiring a post for some nominee of his own, conveyed to the See also:ear of the new minister various absurd rumours prejudicial to Burke,—that he was an Irish papist, that his real name was O'See also:Bourke, that he had been a Jesuit, that he was an emissary from St Omer's. Lord Rocking-See also:ham repeated these tales to Burke, who of course denied them with indignation. His chief declared himself satisfied, but Burke, from a feeling that the indispensable confidence between them was impaired, at once expressed a strong See also:desire to resign his post. Lord Rockingham prevailed upon him to reconsider his resolve, and from that day until Lord Rockingham's See also:death in 1782, their relations were those of the closest friendship and confidence. The first Rockingham administration only lasted a year and a few days, ending in July 1766.

The uprightness and good sense of its leaders did not compensate for the weakness of their political connexions. They were unable to stand against the coldness of the king, against the hostility of the powerful and selfish See also:

faction of See also:Bedford Whigs, and, above all, against the towering predominance of William Pitt. That Pitt did not join them is one of the many fatal miscarriages of history, as it is one of the many serious reproaches to be made against that extraordinary man's chequered and uneven course. An See also:alliance between Pitt and the Rockingham party was the surest See also:guarantee of a See also:wise and liberal policy towards the colonies. He went further than they did, in holding, like Lord See also:Camden, the See also:doctrine that See also:taxation went with See also:representation, and that therefore parliament had no right to tax the unrepresented colonists. The See also:ministry asserted, what no competent jurist would now think of denying, that parliament is sovereign; but they went heartily with Pitt in pronouncing the exercise of the right of taxation in the case of the American colonists to be thoroughly impolitic and inexpedient. No practical difference, therefore, existed upon the important question of the See also:hour. But Pitt's prodigious See also:egoism, stimulated by the mischievous counsels of men of the See also:stamp of Lord Shelburne, prevented the See also:fusion of the only two sections of the Whig party that were at once able, enlightened and disinterested enough to carry on the government efficiently, to check the arbitrary See also:temper of the king, and to command the confidence of the nation. Such an opportunity did not return. The ministerial policy towards the colonies was defended by Burke with splendid and unanswerable eloquence. He had been returned to the House of Commons for the See also:pocket See also:borough of See also:Wendover, and his first speech (January 27, 1766) was felt to be the rising of a new See also:light. For the space of a See also:quarter of a See also:century, from this time down to 1790, Burke was one of the chief guides and inspirers of a revived Whig party.

The " See also:

age of small factions" was now succeeded by an age of great principles, and selfish ties of mere families and persons were trans-formed into a union resting on common conviction and patriotic aims. It was Burke who did more than any one else to give to the Opposition, under the first See also:half of the reign of George III., this stamp of elevation and grandeur. Before leaving See also:office the Rockingham government repealed the Stamp See also:Act; See also:con-firmed the personal liberty of the subject by forcing on the House of Commons one resolution against general warrants, and another against the seizure of papers; and relieved private houses from the intrusion of See also:officers of See also:excise, by repealing the See also:cider tax. Nothing so good was done in an English parliament for nearly twenty years to come. George Grenville, whom the Rockinghams had displaced, and who was bitterly incensed at their formal reversal of his policy, printed a pamphlet to demonstrate his own See also:wisdom and statesmanship. Burke replied in his Observations on a See also:late Publication on the Present See also:State of the Nation (1769), in which he showed for the first time that he had not only as much knowledge of See also:commerce and See also:finance, and as See also:firm a hand, in dealing with figures as Grenville himself, but also a broad, general and luminous way of conceiving and treating politics, in which neither then nor since has he had any See also:rival among English publicists. It is one of the perplexing points in Burke's private history to know how he lived during these long years of See also:parliamentary opposition. It is certainly not altogether mere impertinence to ask of a public man how he gets what he lives upon, for independence of spirit, which is so hard to the man who See also:lays his See also:head on the debtor's See also:pillow, is the prime virtue in such men. Probity in See also:money is assuredly one of the keys to character, though we must be very careful in ascertaining and proportioning all the circumstances. Now, in 1769, Burke bought an See also:estate at Beaconsfield, in the county of See also:Buckingham. It was about boo acres in extent, was See also:worth some £goo a year, and cost £22,000.. See also:People have been asking ever since how the penniless man ofletters was able to raise so large a sum in the first instance, and how he was able to keep up a respectable establishment after-wards.

The suspicions of those who are never sorry to disparage the great have been of various kinds. Burke was a gambler, they hint, in See also:

Indian stock, like his kinsmen Richard and William, and like Lord See also:Verney, his political patron at Wendover. Perhaps again, his activity on behalf of Indian princes, like the See also:raja of See also:Tanjore, was not disinterested and did not go unrewarded. The See also:answer to all these calumnious innuendoes is to be found in documents and See also:title-deeds of decisive authority, and is simple enough. It is, in short, this. Burke inherited a small See also:property from his See also:elder See also:brother, which he realized. Lord Rockingham advanced him a certain sum (£6000). The See also:remainder, amounting to no less than two-thirds of the See also:purchase-money, was raised on See also:mortgage, and was never paid off during Burke's life. The See also:rest of the story is equally simple, but more painful. Burke made some sort of income out of his 600 acres; he was for a short time agerit for New See also:York, with a See also:salary of £700; he continued to work at the Annual Register down to 1788. But, when all is told, he never made as much as he spent; and in spite of' considerable assistance from Lord Rockingham, amounting it is sometimes said to as much as £30,000, Burke, like the younger Pitt, got every year deeper into See also:debt. Pitt's debts were the result of a wasteful indifference to his private affairs.

Burke, on the contrary, was assiduous and orderly, and had none of the vices of profusion. But he had that quality which Aristotle places high among the virtues—the See also:

noble mean of Magnificence, See also:standing midway between the two extremes of vulgar ostentation and narrow pettiness. He was indifferent to luxury, and sought to make life, not commodious nor soft, but high and dignified in a refined way. He loved art, filled his house with statues and pictures, and extended a generous patronage to the painters. He was a See also:collector of books, and, as See also:Crabbe and less conspicuous men discovered, a helpful friend to their writers. Guests were ever welcome at his board; the opulence of his mind and the fervid copiousness of his talk naturally made the guests of such a man very numerous. Non invideo equidem, miror magis, was See also:Johnson's good-natured remark, when he was taken over his friend's fine house and pleasant gardens. Johnson was of a very different type. There was something in this See also:external dignity which went with Burke's imperious spirit, his spacious See also:imagination, his turn for all things stately and imposing. We may say, if we please, that Johnson had the far truer and loftier dignity of the two; but we have to take such men as Burke with the defects that belong to their qualities. And there was iro corruption in Burke's outlay. When the Pitt administration was formed in 1766, he might have had office, and Lord Rockingham wished him to accept it, but he honourably took his See also:fate with the party.

He may have spent £3000 a year, where he would have been more prudent to spend only £2000. But nobody was wronged; his creditors were all paid in time, and his hands were at least clean of See also:

traffic in reversions, clerkships, tellerships and all the rest of the See also:rich sinecures which it was thought no shame in those days for the aristocracy of the See also:land and the robe to wrangle for, and See also:gorge themselves upon, with the fierce voracity of famishing wolves. The most we can say is that Burke, like Pitt, was too deeply absorbed in beneficent service in the affairs of his country, to have for his own affairs the solicitude that would have been prudent. In the midst of intense political preoccupations, Burke always found time to keep up his intimacy with the brilliant group of his earlier friends. He was one of the commanding figures at the See also:club at the Turk's Head, with See also:Reynolds and See also:Garrick, Goldsmith and Johnson. The old See also:sage who held that the first Whig was the See also:Devil, was yet compelled to forgive Burke's politics for the See also:sake of his magnificent gifts. " I would not talk to him of the Rockingham party," he used to say, " but I love his knowledge, his genius, his See also:diffusion and affluence of conversation." And everybody knows Johnson's vivid account of him: " Burke, See also:Sir, is such a man that if you met him for the first time in the See also:street, where you were stopped by a drove of oxen, and you and he stepped aside to take shelter but for five minutes, he'd talk to you in such a manner that when you parted you would say, ` This is an extraordinary man.' " They all grieved that public business should draw to party what was meant for mankind. They deplored that the See also:nice and difficult test of answering See also:Berkeley had not been undertaken, as was once intended, by Burke, and sighed to think what an admirable display of subtlety and brilliance such a contention would have afforded them, had not politics " turned him from active philosophy aside." There was no See also:jealousy in this. They did not grudge Burke being the first man in the House of Commons, for they admitted that he would have been the first man anywhere. With all his hatred for the See also:book-man in politics, Burke owed much of his own distinction to that generous richness and breadth of judgment which had been ripened in him by literature and his practice in it. 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 work, such as over-abounded in the civil and ecclesiastical publicists of the 17th century.

Nor can we truly say that there is much, though there is certainly some, of that tact which literature is alleged to confer on those who approach it in a just spirit and with the true See also:

gift. The See also:influence of literature on Burke See also:lay partly in the direction of emancipation from the See also:mechanical formulae of practical politics; partly in the association which it engendered, in a powerful understanding like his, between politics and the moral forces of the See also:world, and between political See also:maxims and the old and great sentences of morals; partly in See also:drawing him, even when resting his case on prudence and expediency, to See also:appeal to the widest and highest sympathies; partly, and more than all, in opening his thoughts to the many conditions, possibilities and " varieties of untried being," in human character and situation, and so giving an incomparable flexibility to his methods of political approach. This flexibility is not to be found in his manner of composition. That derives its immense power from other See also:sources; from passion, intensity, imagination, See also:size, truth, cogency of logical reason. Those who insist on See also:charm, on winningness in style, on subtle harmonies and fine exquisiteness of 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 ungainly, his wit See also:blunt, as Johnson said, and often unseasonable. As is usual with a man who has not true See also: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 unredeemed vulgarities; some images that make us shudder. But only a literary fop can be 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 See also:

Ali's descent upon the Carnatic should be from the same pen as the grave, simple, unadorned Address to the King (1777), where each See also:sentence falls on the ear with the See also:accent of some See also:golden-tongued See also:oracle of the wise gods. His stride is the stride of a See also:giant, from the sentimental beauty of the picture of See also:Marie Antoinette at See also:Versailles, or the red horror of the See also:tale of Debi Sing in Rungpore, to the learning; positiveness and cool judicial mastery of the See also:Report on the Lords' See also:Journals (1794), which See also:Philip See also:Francis, no mean judge, declared on the whole to be the " most eminent and extraordinary " of all his productions. But even in the coolest and driest of his pieces there is the mark of greatness, of grasp, of comprehension. In all its varieties Burke's style is noble, See also:earnest, deep-Bowing, because his sentiment was lofty and fervid, and went with sincerity and ardent disciplined travail of judgment. He had the style of his subjects; the See also:amplitude, the weightiness, the laboriousness, the sense, the high See also:flight, the grandeur, proper to a man dealing with imperial themes, with the fortunes of great societies, with the sacredness of law, the freedom of nations, the justice of rulers. Burke will always be read with delight and edification, because in the midst of discussions on the See also:local and the accidental, he scatters apophthegms that take us intothe regions of lasting 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 human society. We do not hear the See also:organ tones of Milton, for faith and freedom had other notes in the 1Sth century. There is none of the complacent and wise-browed sagacity of See also:Bacon, for Burke's were days of personal strife and See also:fire and civil division. We are not exhilarated by the cheerfulness, the See also:polish, the fine See also:manners of Bolingbroke, for Burke had an anxious See also:conscience, and was earnest and See also:intent that the good should See also:triumph. And yet Burke is among the greatest of those who have wrought marvels in the See also:prose of our English See also:tongue. Not all the transactions in which Burke was a combatant could furnish an imperial theme.

We need not tell over again the story of Wilkes and the See also:

Middlesex See also:election. The Rocking-ham ministry had been succeeded by a composite government, of which it was intended that Pitt, now made Lord See also:Chatham and privy See also:seal, should be the real chief. Chatham's health and mind fell into disorder almost immediately after the ministry had been formed. The duke of See also:Grafton was its nominal head, but party ties had been broken, the political connexions of the ministers were dissolved, and, in truth, the king was now at last a king indeed, who not only reigned but governed. The revival of high doctrines of See also:prerogative in the crown was accompanied by a revival of high doctrines of See also:privilege in the House of Commons, and the ministry was so smitten with weakness and confusion as to be unable to resist the current of arbitrary policy, and not many of them were even willing to resist it. The unconstitutional See also:prosecution of Wilkes was followed by the fatal recourse to new plans for raising taxes in the American colonies. These two points made the rallying ground of the new Whig opposition. Burke helped to smooth matters for a practical union between the Rockingham party and the powerful triumvirate, composed of Chatham, whose understanding had recovered from its late disorder, and of his brothers-in-law, Lord Temple and. George Grenville. He was active in urging petitions from the freeholders of the counties, protesting against the unconstitutional invasion of the right of election. And he added a durable masterpiece to political literature in a pamphlet which he called Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770). The immediate See also:object of this excellent piece was to hold up the court See also:scheme of weak, divided and dependent administrations in the light of its real purpose and See also:design; to describe the distempers which had been engendered in parliament by the growth of royal influence and the faction of the king's friends; to show that the newly formed Whig party had combined for truly public ends, and was no mere family See also:knot like the Grenvilles and the Bedfords; and, finally, to press for the hearty concurrence both of public men and of the nation at large in combining against " a faction ruling by the private instructions of a court against the general sense of the people." The pamphlet was disliked by Chatham on the one hand, on no reasonable grounds that we can discover; it was denounced by the extreme popular party of the See also:Bill of Rights, on the other hand, for its moderation and conservatism.

In truth, there is as strong a vein of conservative feeling in the pamphlet of 1770 as in the more resplendent pamphlet of 1790. " Our constitution," he said, " stands on a nice equipoise, with steep precipices and deep See also:

waters upon all sides of it. In removing it from a dangerous leaning towards one See also:side, there may be a See also:risk of oversetting it on the other. Every project of a material change in a government so complicated as ours is a See also:matter full of difficulties; in which a considerate man will not be too ready to decide, a prudent man too ready to undertake, or an honest man too ready to promise." Neither now nor ever had Burke any other real conception of a polity for England than government by the territorial aristocracy in the interests of the nation at large, and especially in the interests of commerce, to the vital importance of which in our See also:economy he was always keenly and wisely alive. The policy of George III.; and the support which it found among men who were weary of Whig factions,. disturbed this scheme, and therefore Burke denounced both the court policy and the court party with all his heart and all his strength. Eloquence and good sense, however, were impotent in the See also:face of such forces as were at this time arrayed against a government at once strong and liberal. The court was confident that a union between Chatham and the Rockinghams was impossible. The union was in fact hindered by the waywardness and the absurd pretences of Chatham, and the want of force in Lord Rockingham. In the nation at large, the late violent ferment had been followed by as remarkable a deadness and vapidity, and Burke himself had to admit a year or two later that any remarkable See also:robbery at See also:Hounslow See also:Heath would make more conversation than all the disturbances of America. The duke of Grafton went out, and Lord See also:North became the head of a government, which lasted twelve years (1770-1782), and brought about more than all the disasters that Burke had foretold as the inevitable issue of the royal policy. For the first six years of this lamentable period Burke was actively employed in stimulating, informing and guiding the patrician chiefs of his party. " Indeed, Burke," said the duke of See also:Richmond, " you have more merit than any man in keeping us tdgether." They were well-meaning and patriotic men,but it was not always easy to get them to prefer politics to See also:fox-See also:hunting.

When he reached his lodgings at night after a day in the See also:

city or a skirmish in the House of Commons, Burke used to find a See also:note from the duke of Richmond or the marquess of Rockingham, praying him to draw a protest to be entered on the Journals of the Lords, and in fact he See also:drew all the See also:principal protests of his party between 1767 See also:anti 1782. The accession of See also:Charles See also:James Fox to the Whig party, which took place at this time, and was so important an event in its history, was mainly due to the teaching and influence of Burke. In the House of Commons his industry was almost excessive. He was taxed with speaking too often, and with being too forward. And he was mortified by a more serious See also:charge than murmurs about superfluity of zeal. Men said and said again that he was See also:Junius. His very proper unwillingness to stoop to deny an See also:accusation, that would have been so disgraceful if it had been true, made See also:ill-natured and See also:silly people the more convinced that it was not wholly false. But whatever the London world may have thought of him, Burke's See also:energy and devotion of character impressed the better minds in the country. In 1774 he received the great distinction of being chosen as one of its representatives by See also:Bristol, then the second town in the See also:kingdom. In the events which ended in the emancipation of the American colonies from the See also:monarchy, Burke's political genius shone with an effulgence that was worthy of the great affairs over which it See also:shed so magnificent an See also:illumination. His speeches are almost the one See also:monument of the struggle on which a See also:lover of English greatness can look back with pride and a sense of worthiness, such as a churchman feels when he reads See also:Bossuet, or an See also:Anglican when he turns over the pages of See also:Taylor or of See also:Hooker. Burke's attitude in these high transactions is really more impressive than Chatham's, because he was far less theatrical than Chatham; and while he was no less nobly passionate for freedom and justice, in his passion was fused the most strenuous political argumentation and See also:sterling reason of state.

On the other hand he was wholly free from that quality which he ascribed to Lord George See also:

Sackville, a man " See also:apt to take a sort of undecided, equivocal, marrow ground, that evades the substantial merits of the question, and puts the whole upon some temporary, local, accidental or personal See also:consideration." He See also:rose to the full height of that great See also:argument. Burke here and everywhere else displayed the rare art of filling his subject with generalities, and yet never intruding commonplaces. No publicist who deals as largely in general propositions has ever been as free from truisms; no one has ever treated great themes with so much elevation, and yet been so wholly secured against the pitfalls of emptiness and the vague. And it is instructive to compare the See also:foundation of all his pleas for the colonists with that on which they erected their own theoretic See also:declaration of independence. The American leaders wereimpregnated with the metaphysical ideas of rights which had come to them from the rising revolutionary school in France. Burke no more adopted the doctrines of See also:Jefferson in 1776 than he adopted the doctrines of See also:Robespierre in 1793. He says nothing about men being born free and equal, and on the other hand he never denies the position of the court and the country at large, that the home legislature, being sovereign, had the right to tax the colonies. What he does say is that the exercise of such a right was not practicable; that if it were practicable, it was inexpedient; al}d that, even if this had not been in. expedient, yet, after the colonies had taken to arms, to crush their resistance by military force would not be more disastrous to them than it would be unfortunate for the ancient liberties of Great See also:Britain. Into abstract discussion he would not enter. " Show the thing you contend for to be reason; show it to be common sense; show it to he the means of attaining some useful end." " The question with me is not whether you have a right to render your people miserable, but whether it is not your interest to make them happy." There is no difference in social spirit and doctrine between his protests against the maxims of the English common people as to the colonists, and his protests against the maxims of the French common people as to the court and the nobles; and it is impossible to find a single principle either asserted or implied in the speeches on the American revolution which was afterwards repudiated in the writings on the revolution in France. It is one of the signs of Burke's singular and varied eminence that hardly any two people agree precisely which of his works to mark as the masterpiece. Every speech or See also:tract that he composed on a great subject becomes, as we read it, the rival of every other.

But the Speech on Conciliation (1775) has, perhaps, been more universally admired than any of his other productions, partly because its maxims are of a simpler and less disputable kind than those which adorn the pieces on France; and partly because it is most strongly characterized by that deep ethical quality which is the prime secret of Burke's great style and literary mastery. In this speech, moreover, and in the only less powerful one of the preceding year upon American taxation, as well as in the See also:

Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol in 1777, we see the all-important truth conspicuously illustrated that half of his eloquence always comes of the thoroughness with which he gets up his case. No eminent man has ever done more than Burke to justify the See also:definition of genius as the consummation of the See also:faculty of taking pains. Labour incessant and intense, if it was not the source, was at least an inseparable See also:condition of his power. And magnificent rhetorician though he was, his labour was given less to his diction than to the facts; his heart was less in the See also:form than the matter. It is true that his See also:manuscripts were blotted and smeared, and that he made so many alterations in the proofs that the printer found it worth while to have the whole set up in type afresh. But there is no polish in his style, as in that of Junius for example, though there is something a thousand times better than polish. " Why will you not allow yourself to be persuaded," said Francis after See also:reading the Reflections, " that polish is material to preservation ?" Burke always accepted the rebuke, and flung himself into vindication of the sense, substance and veracity of what he had written. His writing is magnificent, because he knew so much, thought so comprehensively, and felt so strongly. The See also:succession of failures in America, culminating in See also:Cornwallis's.surrender at See also:Yorktown in See also:October 178r, wearied the nation, and at length the persistent and powerful attacks of the opposition began to tell. " At this time," wrote Burke, in words of manly self-assertion, thirteen years afterwards," having a momentary See also:lead (1780-1782), so aided and so encouraged, and as a feeble See also: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 at that time that did not acknowledge it.

It was but one See also:

voice, that no man in the kingdom better deserved an See also:honourable See also:provision should be made for him." In the See also:spring of 1782 Lord North resigned. It seemed as if the court system which Burke had been denouncing for a dozen years was now finally broken, and as if the party which he had been the chief instrument in instructing, directing and keeping together must now inevitably possess power for many years to come. Yet in a few months the whole fabric had fallen, and the Whigs were thrown into opposition for the rest of the century. The story cannot be omitted in the most See also:summary account of Burke's life. Lord Rockingham came into office on the fall of North. Burke was rewarded for services beyond See also:price by being made paymaster of the forces, with the rank of a privy councillor. He had lost his seat for B Istol two years before, in consequence of his courageous advocacy of a measure of tolerance for the Catholics, and his still more courageous exposure of the enormities of the commercial policy of England towards Ireland. He sat during the rest of his parliamentary life (to 1794) for See also:Malton, a pocket borough first of Lord Rockingham's, then of Lord See also:Fitzwilliam's. Burke's first See also:tenure of office was very brief. He had brought forward in 178o a comprehensive scheme of economical reform, with the design of limiting the resources of jobbery and corruption which the crown was able to use to strengthen its own sinister influence in parliament. Administrative reform was, next to See also:peace with the colonies, the part of the scheme of the new ministry to which the king most warmly objected. It was carried out with greater moderation than had been foreshadowed in opposition.

But at any See also:

rate Burke's own office was not spared. While Charles Fox's father was at the pay-office (1765–17 78) he realized as the interest of the See also:cash balances which he was allowed to retain in his hands, nearly a quarter of a million of money. When Burke came to this post the salary was settled at £4000 a year. He did not enjoy the income long. In July 1782 Lord Rockingham died; Lord Shelburne took his place; Fox, who inherited from his father a belief in Lord Shelburne's duplicity, which his own experience of him as a colleague during the last three months had made stronger, declined to serve under him. Burke, though he had not encouraged Fox to take this step, still with his usual See also:loyalty followed him out of office. This may have been a proper thing to do if their distrust of Shelburne was incurable, but the next step, See also:coalition with Lord North against him, was not only a political blunder, but a See also:shock to party morality, which brought speedy retribution. Either they had been wrong, and violently wrong, for a dozen years, or else Lord North was the guiltiest political instrument since See also:Strafford. Burke attempted to defend the alliance on the ground of the substantial agreement between Fox and North in public aims. The See also:defence is wholly untenable. The Rockingham Whigs were as substantially in agreement on public affairs with the Shelburne Whigs as they were with Lord North. The See also:movement was one of the worst in the history of English party.

It served its immediate purpose, however, for Lord Shelburne found himself (See also:

February 24, 1783) too weak to carry on the government, and was succeeded by • the members of the coalition, with the duke of See also:Portland for prime minister (See also:April 2, 1783). Burke went back to his old post at the pay-office and was soon engaged in framing and drawing the famous See also:India Bill. This was long supposed to be the work of Fox, who was politically responsible for it. We may be sure that neither he nor Burke would have devised any government for India which they did not honestly believe to be for the See also:advantage both of that country and of England. But it cannot be disguised that Burke had thoroughly persuaded himself that it was indispensable in the interests of English freedom to strengthen the party hostile to the court. As we have already said, dread of the peril to the constitution from the new aims of George III. was the See also:main See also:inspiration of Burke's political See also:action in home affairs for the best part of his political life. The India Bill strengthened the anti-court party by transferring the government of India to seven persons named in the bill, and neither appointed nor removable by the crown. In other words, the bill gave the government to a board chosen directly by the House of Commons; and it had the incidental advantage of conferring on the ministerial party patronage valued at £300,000 a year, which would remain for a fixed See also:term of years out of reach of the king. In a word, judging the India Bill from a party point of view, we see that Burke wasnow completing the aim of his project of economic reform. That measure had weakened the influence of the crown by limiting its patronage. The measure for India weakened the influence of the crown by giving a See also:mass of patronage to the party which the king hated. But this was not to be.

The India Bill was thrown out by means of a royal intrigue in the Lords, and the ministers were instantly dismissed (See also:

December 18, 1783). See also:Young William Pitt, then only in his twenty-fifth year, had been See also:chancellor of the See also:exchequer in Lord Shelburne's short ministry, and had refused to enter the coalition government from an honourable repugnance to join Lord North. He was now made prime minister. The country in the election of the next year ratified the king's judgment against the Portland See also:combination; and the hopes which Burke had cherished for a political lifetime were irretrievably ruined. The six years that followed the great rout of the orthodox Whigs were years of repose for the country, but it was now that Burke engaged in the most laborious and formidable enterprise of his life, the See also:impeachment of See also:Warren See also:Hastings for high crimes and misdemeanours in his government of India. His interest in that country was of old date. It arose partly from the fact of William Burke's residence there, partly from his friendship with Philip Francis, but most of all, we suspect, from the effect which he observed Indian influence to have in demoralizing the House pf Commons. " Take my See also:advice for once in your life," Francis wrote to See also:Shee; " lay aside 40,000 rupees for a seat in parliament: in this country that alone makes all the difference between somebody and nobody." The relations, moreover, between the East India 'Company and the government were of the most important kind, and occupied Burke's closest attention from the beginning of the American war down to his own India Bill and that of Pitt and Dundas. In February 1785 he delivered one of the most famous of all his speeches, that on the See also:nabob of See also:Arcot's debts. The real point of this superb declamation was Burke's conviction that ministers supported the claims of the fraudulent creditors in order to secure the corrupt advantages of a sinister parliamentary interest. His proceedings against Hastings had a deeper spring. The story of Hastings's crimes, as See also:Macaulay says, made the See also:blood of Burke See also:boil in his See also:veins.

He had a native abhorrence of See also:

cruelty, of injustice, of disorder, of oppression, of tyranny, and all these things in all their degrees marked Hastings's course in India. They were, moreover, concentrated in individual cases, which exercised Burke's passionate imagination to its profoundest depths, and raised it to such a glow of fiery intensity as has never been rivalled in our history. For it endured for fourteen years, and was just as burning and as terrible when Hastings was acquitted in 1795, as in the select See also:committee of 1781 when Hastings's enormities were first revealed. " If I were to See also:call for a See also:reward," wrote Burke, " it would be for the services in which for fourteen years, without intermission, I showed the most industry and had the least success, I mean in 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 judgment; most for constancy and perseverance in the pursuit." See also:Sheridan's speech in the House of Commons upon the charge relative to the begums of Oude probably excelled anything that Burke achieved, as a dazzling performance abounding in the most surprising literary and rhetorical effects. But neither Sheridan nor Fox was capable of that sustained and overflowing indignation at outraged justice and oppressed humanity, that consuming moral fire, which burst forth again and again from the chief manager of the impeachment, with such scorching might as drove even the cool and intrepid Hastings beyond all self-See also:control, and made him cry out with protests and exclamations like a criminal writhing under the See also:scourge. Burke, no doubt, in the course of that unparalleled trial showed some See also:prejudice; made some minor overstatements of his case; used many intemperances; and suffered himself to be provoked into expressions of See also:heat and impatience by the cabals of the See also:defendant and his party, and the intolerable incompetence of the tribunal. It is one of the inscrutable perplexities of human affairs, that in the See also:logic of practical life, in order to reach conclusions that See also:cover enough for truth, we are constantly driven to premises that cover too much, and that in order to secure their right See also:weight to justice and reason good men are forced to fling the two-edged See also:sword of passion into the same See also:scale. But these excuses were mere trifles, and well deserve to be forgiven, when we think that though the offender was in form acquitted, yet Burke succeeded in these fourteen years of laborious effort in laying the See also:foundations once for all of a moral, just, philanthropic and responsible public opinion in England with reference to India, and in doing so performed perhaps the most magnificent service that any statesman has ever had it in his power to render to humanity. Burke's first decisive step against Hastings was a See also:motion for papers in the spring of 1786; the thanks of the House of Commons to the managers of the impeachment were voted in the summer of 1794. But in those eight years some of the most astonishing events in history had changed the political face of Europe. Burke was more than sixty years old when the states-general met at Versailles in the spring of 1789. He had taken a prominent part on the side of freedom in the revolution which stripped England of her See also:empire in the West.

He had taken a prominent part on the side of justice, humanity and order in dealing with the revolution which had brought to England new empire in the East. The same vehement passion for freedom, justice, humanity and order was roused in him at a very early stage of .the third great revolution in his history—the revolution which overthrew the old monarchy in France. From the first Burke looked on the events of 1789 with doubt and misgiving. He had been in France in 1773, where he had not only the famous See also:

vision of Marie Antoinette at Versailles, " glittering like the See also:morning See also:star, full of life, and splendour and joy," but had also supped and discussed with some of the destroyers, the encyclopaedists, " the sophisters, economists and calculators." His first speech on his return to England was a warning (See also:March 17, 1773) that the props of good government were beginning to fail under the systematic attacks of unbelievers, and that principles were being propagated that would not leave to civil society any stability. The See also:apprehension never died out in his mind; and when he knew that the principles and abstractions, the un-English See also:dialect and destructive See also:dialectic, of his *former acquaintances were predominant in the National See also:Assembly, his suspicion that the movement would end in disastrous See also:miscarriage waxed into certainty. The See also:scene See also:grew still more sinister in his eyes after the march of the See also:mob from See also:Paris to Versailles in October, and the violent transport of the king and See also:queen from Versailles to Paris. The same hatred of lawlessness and violence which fired him with a divine rage against the Indian malefactors was aroused by the violence and lawlessness of the Parisian insurgents. The same disgust for abstractions and naked doctrines of right that had stirred him against the pretensions of the British parliament in 1774 and 1776, was revived in as lively a degree by political conceptions which he judged to be identical in the French assembly of 1789. And this anger and disgust were exasperated by the dread with which certain proceedings in England had inspired him, that the aims, principles, methods and See also:language which he so misdoubted or abhorred in France were likely to infect the people of Great Britain. In See also:November 1790 the town, which had long been eagerly expecting a manifesto from Burke's pen, was electrified by the Reflections on the Revolution in France, and on the proceedings in certain societies in London relative to that event. The generous See also:Windham made an entry in his See also:diary of his reception of the new book. "What shall be said," he added, " of the state of things, when it is remembered that the writer is 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 madman?" But the writer now ceased to be decried, persecuted and proscribed, and his book was seized as the expression of that new current of opinion in Europe which the more See also:recent events of the Revolution had slowly setflowing.

Its vogue was instant and enormous. Eleven See also:

editions were exhausted in little more than a year, and there is probably not much exaggeration in the estimate that 30,000 copies were sold before Burke's death seven years afterwards. George III. was extravagantly delighted; See also:Stanislaus of See also:Poland sent Burke words of thanks and high glorification and a See also:gold See also:medal. See also:Catherine of See also:Russia, the friend of See also:Voltaire and the benefactress of See also:Diderot, sent her congratulations to the man who denounced French philosophers as miscreants and wretches. " One wonders," See also:Romilly said, by and by, " that Burke is not ashamed at such success." See also:Mackintosh replied to him temperately in the Vindiciae Galliicae, and See also:Thomas See also:Paine replied to him less temperately but far more trenchantly and more shrewdly in the Rights of Man. See also:Arthur Young, with whom he had corresponded years before on the mysteries of deep ploughing and fattening hogs, added a cogent polemical See also:chapter to that ever admirable work, in which he showed that he knew as much more than Burke about the old system of France as he knew more than Burke about soils and roots. Philip Francis, to whom he had shown the proof-sheets, had tried to dissuade Burke from See also:publishing his performance. The passage about Marie Antoinette, which has since become a stock piece in books of recitation, seemed to Francis a mere piece of foppery; for was she not a Messalina and a See also:jade? " I know nothing of your story of Messalina," answered Burke; " am I obliged to prove judicially the virtues of all those I shall see suffering every kind of wrong and contumely and risk of life, before I endeavour to interest others in their sufferings? . Are not high rank, great splendour of descent, great personal elegance and outward accomplishments ingredients of moment in forming the interest we take in the misfortunes of men? . . . I tell you again that the recollection of the manner in which I saw the queen of France in 1774, and the contrast between that brilliancy, splendour and beauty, with the prostrate See also:homage of a nation to her, and the abominable scene of 1789 which I was describing, did draw tears from me and wetted my See also:paper.

These tears came again into my eyes almost as often as I looked at the description,—they may again. You do not believe this fact, nor that these are my real feelings; but that the whole is affected, or as you See also:

express it, downright foppery. My friend, I tell you it is truth; and that it is true and will be truth when you and I are no more; and will exist as long as men with their natural feelings shall exist " (Corr. iii. 139). Burke's conservatism was, as such a passage as this may illustrate, the result partly of strong imaginative associations clustering See also:round the more imposing symbols of social continuity, partly of a sort of corresponding conviction in his reason that there are certain permanent elements of human nature out of which the European order had risen and which that order satisfied, and of whose immense merits, as of its mighty strength, the revolutionary party in France were most fatally ignorant. When Romilly saw Diderot in 1783, the great encyclopaedic chief assured him that submission to kings and belief in See also:God would be at an end all over the world in a very few years. When See also:Condorcet described the Tenth See also:Epoch in the long development of human progress, he was sure not only that fulness of light and perfection of happiness would come to the sons of men, but that they were coming with all See also:speed. Only those who know the incredible rashness of the revolutionary doctrine in the mouths of its most powerful professors at that time; only those who know their absorption in ends and their inconsiderateness about means, can feel how profoundly right Burke was in all this part of his contention. See also:Napoleon, who had begun life as a See also:disciple of Rousseau, confirmed the wisdom of the philosophy of Burke when he came to make the See also:Concordat. That measure was in one sense the outcome of a mere sinister expediency, but that such a measure was expedient at all sufficed to prove that Burke's view of the present possibilities of social change was right, and the view of the Rousseauites and too sanguine Perfectibilitarians wrong. As we have seen, Burke's very first niece, the satire on Bolingbroke, sprang from his conviction that merely rationalistic or destructive See also:criticism, applied to the vast complexities of man in the social union, is either mischievous or futile, and mischievous exactly in proportion as it is not futile. To discuss Burke's writings on the Revolution would be to write first a volume upon the abstract theory of society, and then a second volume on the history of France.

But we may make one or two further remarks. One of the most common charges against Burke was that he allowed his imagination and pity to be touched only by the sorrows of kings and queens, and forgot the thousands of oppressed and See also:

famine-stricken toilers of the land. No tears are shed for nations," cried Francis, whose sympathy for the Revolution was as passionate as Burke's execration of it. " When the provinces are scourged to the See also:bone by a See also:mercenary and merciless military power, and every drop of its blood and substance extorted from it by the edicts of a royal See also:council, the case seems very tolerable to those who are not involved in it. When thousands after thousands are dragooned out of their country for the sake of their religion, or sent to See also:row in the galleys for selling See also:salt against law,—when the liberty of every individual is at the See also:mercy of every prostitute, pimp or See also:parasite that has See also:access to power or any of its basest substitutes,—my mind, I own, is not at once prepared to be satisfied with gentle palliatives for such disorders " (Francis to Burke, November 3, 1790). This is a very terse way of putting a See also:crucial objection to Burke's whole view of French affairs in 1789. His answer was tolerably simple. The Revolution, though it had made an end of the See also:Bastille, did not bring the only real practical liberty, that is to say, the liberty which comes withsettled courts of justice, administering settled laws, undisturbed by popular fury, independent of everything but law, and with a clear law for their direction. The people, he contended, were no worse off under the old monarchy than they will be in the long run under assemblies that are bound by the See also:necessity of feeding one part of the community at the grievous charge of other parts, as necessitous as those who are so fed; that are obliged to flatter those who have their lives at their disposal by tolerating acts of doubtful influence on commerce and See also:agriculture, and for the sake of See also:precarious See also:relief to sow the seeds of lasting want; that will be driven to be the instruments of the violence of others from a sense of their own weakness, and, by want of authority to assess equal and proportioned charges upon all, will be compelled to lay a strong hand upon the possessions of a part. As against the moderate section of the Constituent Assembly this was just. One secret of Burke's views of the Revolution was the contempt which he had conceived for the popular leaders in the earlier stages of the movement. In spite of much excellence of intention, much heroism, much energy, it is hardly to be denied that the leaders whom that movement brought to the See also:surface were almost without exception men of the poorest political capacity.

See also:

Danton, no doubt, was abler than most of the others, yet the timidity or temerity with which he allowed himself to be vanquished by Robespierre showed that even he was not a man of commanding quality. The spectacle of men so rash, and so incapable of controlling the forces which they seemed to have presumptuously summoned, excited in Burke both indignation and contempt. And the leaders of the Constituent who came first on the stage, and hoped to make a revolution with rose-See also:water, and hardly realized any more than Burke did how rotten was the structure which they had undertaken to build up, almost deserved his contempt, even if, as is certainly true, they did not deserve his indignation. It was only by revolutionary methods, which are in their essence and for a time as arbitrary as despotic methods, that the knot could be cut. Burke's vital See also:error was his inability to see that a See also:root and See also:branch revolution was, under the conditions, inevitable. His See also:cardinal position, from which he deduced so many important conclusions, namely, that, the parts and See also:organs of the old constitution of France were See also:sound, and only needed moderate invigoration, is absolutely mistaken and untenable. There was not a single chamber in the old fabric that was not crumbling and tottering. The court was frivolous, vacillating, See also:stone See also:deaf and stone See also:blind; the gentry were amiable, but distinctly See also:bent to the very last on holding to their privileges,and they were wholly devoid both of the political experience that only comes of practical responsibility for public affairs, and of the political sagacity that only comes of political experience. The parliaments or tribunals were nests of faction and of the deepest social incompetence. The very sword of the state broke short in the king's hand. If the king or queen could either have had the political genius of Frederick the Great, or could have had the good See also:fortune to find a minister with that genius, and the good sense and good faith to See also:trust and stand by him against mobs of aristocrats and mobs of democrats; if the See also:army had been sound and the states-general had been convoked at See also:Bourges or See also:Tours instead of at Paris, then the type of French monarchy and French society might have been modernized without convulsion. But none of these conditions existed.

When he dealt with the affairs of India Burke passed over the circumstances of our acquisition of power in that continent. " There is a sacred See also:

veil to be See also:drawn over the beginnings of all government," he said. " The first step to empire is revolution, by which power is conferred; the next is good laws, good order, good institutions, to give that power stability." Exactly on this broad principle of political force, revolution was the first step to the See also:assumption by the people of France of their own government. Granted that the Revolution was inevitable and indispensable, how was the nation to make the best of it ? And how were surrounding nations to make the best of it ? This was the true point of view. But Burke never placed himself at such a point. He never conceded the postulate, because, though he knew France better than anybody in England except Arthur Young, he did not know her condition well enough. "Alas!" he said, " they little know how many a weary step is to be taken before they can form themselves into a mass which has a true political personality." Burke's view of French affairs, however consistent with all his former political conceptions, put an end to more than one of his old political friendships. He had never been popular in the House of Commons, and the vehemence, sometimes amounting to fury, which he had shown in the debates on the India Bill, on the regency, on the impeachment of Hastings, had made him unpopular even among men on his own side. In May 1789-that memorable See also:month of May in which the states-general marched in impressive See also:array to hear a See also:sermon at the church of Notre See also:Dame at Versailles—a See also:vote of censure had actually been passed on him in the House of Commons for a too severe expression used against Hastings. Fox, who led the party, and Sheridan, who led Fox, were the intimates of the See also:prince of See also:Wales; and Burke would have been as much out of place in' that circle of gamblers and profligates as Milton would have been out of place in the court of the Restoration.

The prince, as somebody said, was like his father in having closets within cabinets and cupboards within closets. When the debates on the regency were at their height we have Burke's word that he was not admitted to the private counsels of the party. Though Fox and he were on friendly terms in society, yet Burke admits that for a considerable period before r 790 there had been between them " distance, coolness and want of confidence, if not See also:

total See also:alienation on his part." The younger Whigs had begun to press for shorter parliaments, for the See also:ballot, for redistribution of political power. Burke had never looked with any favour on these projects. His experience of the sentiment of the populace in the two greatest concerns of his life,—American affairs and Indian affairs,—had not been likely to prepossess him in favour of the popular voice as the voice of See also:superior political wisdom. He did not absolutely object to some remedy in the state of representation (Corr. ii. 387), still he vigorously resisted such proposals as the duke of Richmond's in 1780 for manhood See also:suffrage. The general ground was this:—" The See also:machine itself is well enough to answer any good purpose, provided the materials were sound. But what signifies the arrangement of rottenness ?" Bad as the parliaments of George III. were, they contained their full See also:share of eminent and capable men; and, what is more, their very defects were the exact counterparts of what we now look back upon as the prevailing stupidity in the country. What Burke valued was good government. His Report on the Causes of the Duration of Mr Hastings's Trial shows how wide and sound were his views of law reform. His Thoughts on Scarcity attest his enlightenment on the central necessities of trade and manufacture, and even furnished arguments to See also:Cobden fifty years afterwards.

Pitt's parliaments were competent to discuss, and willing to pass, all See also:

measures for which the See also:average political intelligence of the country was ripe. Burke did not believe that altered machinery was at that time needed to improve the quality of legislation. If wiser legislation followed the great reform of 1832, Burke would have said this was because the political intelligence of the country had improved. Though averse at all times to taking up parliamentary reform, he thought all such projects downright crimes in the agitation of 1791-1792. This was the view taken by Burke, but it was not the view of Fox, nor of Sheridan, nor of Francis, nor of many others of his party, and difference of opinion here was naturally followed by difference of opinion upon affairs in France. Fox, See also:Grey, Windham, Sheridan, Francis, Lord Fitzwilliam, and most of the other Whig leaders, welcomed the Revolution in France. And so did Pitt, too, for some time. " How much the greatest event it is that ever happened in the world," cried Fox, with the exaggeration of a man ready to 'See also:dance the See also:carmagnole, " and how much the best! The dissension between a man who felt so passionately as Burke, and a man who spoke so impulsively as Charles Fox, lay in the very nature of things. Between Sheridan and Burke there was an open See also:breach in the House of Commons upon the Revolution so early as February 1790, and Sheridan's influence with Fox was strong. This divergence of opinion destroyed all the elation that Burke might well have felt at his compliments from kings, his gold medals, his twelve editions. But he was too fiercely in earnest in his horror of Jacobinism to allow mere party associations to See also:guide him.

In May 1791 the thundercloud burst, and a public rupture between Burke and Fox took place in the House of Commons. The scene is famous in English parliamentary See also:

annals. The minister had introduced a measure for the division of the See also:province of See also:Canada and for the establishment of a local legislature in each division. Fox in the course of debate went out of his way to See also:laud the Revolution, and to sneer at some of the most effective passages in the Reflections. Burke was not present, but he announced his determination to reply. On the day when the See also:Quebec Bill was to come on again, Fox called upon Burke, and the pair walked together from Burke's house in Duke Street down to See also:Westminster. The Quebec Bill was recommitted, and Burke at once rose and soon began to talk his usual language against the Revolution, the rights of man, and Jacobinism whether English or French. There was a call to order. Fox, who was as See also:sharp and intolerant in the House as he was amiable out of it, interposed with some words of contemptuous irony. Pitt, Grey, Lord See also:Sheffield, all plunged into confused and angry debate as to whether the French Revolution was a good thing, and whether the French Revolution, good or bad, had anything to do with the Quebec Bill. At length Fox, in seconding a motion for confining the debate to its proper subject, burst into the fatal question beyond the subject, taxing Burke with inconsistency, and taunting him with having forgotten that ever-admirable saying of his own about the insurgent colonists, that he did not know how to draw an See also:indictment against a whole nation. Burke replied in tones of firm self-repression; complained of the attack that had been made upon him; reviewed Fox's charges of inconsistency; enumerated the points on which they had disagreed, and remarked that such disagreements had never broken their friendship.

But whatever the risk of enmity, and however See also:

bitter the loss of friendship, he would never cease from the warning to flee from the French constitution. " But there is no loss of friends," said Fox in an eager undertone. " Yes," said Burke, " there is a. loss of friends. I know the See also:penalty of my conduct. I have done my See also:duty at the price of my friend—our friendship is at an end." Fox rose, but was so overcome that for some moments he could not speak. At length, his eyes streaming with tears, and in a broken voice, he deplored the IV. 27breach of a twenty years' friendship on a political question. Burke was inexorable. To him the political question was so vivid, so real, so intense, as to make all personal sentiment no more than dust in the See also:balance. Burke confronted Jacobinism with the relentlessness of a Jacobin. The rupture was never healed, and Fox and he had no relations with one another hence-forth beyond such formal interviews as took place in the manager's See also:box in Westminster See also:Hall in connexion with the impeachment. A few months afterwards Burke published the Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, a grave, See also:calm and most cogent vindication of the perfect consistency of his criticisms upon the English Revolution of 1688 and upon the French Revolution of 1789, with the doctrines of the great Whigs who conducted and after-wards defended in See also:Anne's reign the See also:transfer of the crown from James to William and See also:Mary.

The Appeal was justly accepted as a satisfactory performance for the purpose with which it was written. Events, however, were doing more than words could do, to confirm the public opinion of Burke's sagacity and foresight. He had always divined by the See also:

instinct of hatred that the French moderates must gradually be swept away by the See also:Jacobins, and now it was all coming true. The humiliation of the king and queen after their See also:capture at Varennes; the compulsory See also:acceptance of the constitution; the See also:plain incompetence of the new Legislative Assembly; the growing violence of the Parisian mob, and the ascendency of the Jacobins at the Common Hall; the fierce day of the 2oth of See also:June (1792), when the mob flooded the Tuileries, and the bloodier day of the loth of See also:August, when the Swiss guard was massacred and the royal family flung into See also:prison; the murders in the prisons in See also:September; the trial and execution of the king in January (1793); the proscription of the Girondins in June, the execution of the queen in October if we realize the impression likely to be made upon the sober and homely English imagination by such a heightening of horror by horror, we may easily understand how people came to listen to Burke's voice as the voice of inspiration, and to look on his burning anger as the See also:holy fervour of a See also:prophet of the Lord. Fox still held to his old opinions as stoutly as he could, and condemned and opposed the war which England had declared against the French See also:republic. Burke, who was profoundly in-capable of the meanness of letting personal estrangement blind his eyes to what was best for the commonwealth, kept hoping against See also:hope that each new trait of excess in France would at length bring the great Whig See also:leader to a better mind. He used to declaim by the hour in the conclaves at See also:Burlington House upon the necessity of securing Fox; upon the strength which his genius would lend to the administration in its task of grappling with the sanguinary giant; upon the impossibility, at least, of doing either with him or without him. Fox's most important political friends who had long wavered, at length, to Burke's great See also:satisfaction, went over to the side of the government. In July 1794 the duke of Portland, Lord Fitzwilliam, Windham and Grenville took office under Pitt. Fox was left with a minority which was satirically said not to have been more than enough to fill a See also:hackney See also:coach. " That is a calumny," said one of the party, " we should have filled two." The war was prosecuted with the aid of both the great parliamentary parties of the country, and with the approval of the great bulk of the nation. Perhaps the one man in England who in his heart approved of it less than any other was William Pitt.

The difference between Pitt and Burke was nearly as great as that between Burke and Fox. Burke would be content with nothing short of a crusade against France, and war to the death with her rulers. " I cannot persuade myself," he said, " that this war bears any the least resemblance to any that has ever existed in the world. I cannot persuade myself that any examples or any reasonings drawn from other See also:

wars and other politics are at all applicable to it " (Corr. iv. 219). Pitt, on the other hand. as Lord See also:Russell truly says, treated Robespierre and Carnet as he would have treated any other French rulers, whose ambition was to be resisted, and whose interference in the affairs of other nations was to be checked. And he entered upon the matter II in the spirit of a man of business, by sending See also:ships to seize some islands belonging to France in the West Indies, so as to make certain of repayment of the expenses of the war. In the summer of 1794 Burke was struck to the ground by a See also:blow to his deepest See also:affection in life, and he never recovered from it. His whole soul was wrapped up in his only son, of whose abilities he had the most extravagant estimate and hope. All the evidence goes to show that Richard Burke was one of the most presumptuous and empty-headed of human beings. " He is the most impudent and opiniative See also:fellow I ever knew," said See also:Wolfe See also:Tone. See also:Gilbert Elliot, a very different man, gives the same account.

" Burke," he says, describing a See also:

dinner party at Lord Fitzwilliam's in 1793, " has now got such a See also:train after him as would 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 oppressive with See also:animal See also:spirits and See also:brogue; and his cousin, William Burke, who is just returned unexpectedly from India, as much ruined as when he went years ago, and who is a fresh charge on any prospects of power Burke may ever have. Mrs Burke has in her train See also:Miss French [Burke's niece], the most perfect She Paddy that ever was caught. Notwithstanding these disadvantages Burke is in himself a sort of power in the state. It is not too much to say that he is a sort of power in Europe, though totally without any of those means or the smallest share in them which give or maintain power in other men." Burke accepted the position of a power in Europe seriously. Though no man was ever more free from anything like the egoism of the intellectual coxcomb, yet he abounded in that active self-confidence and self-assertion which is natural in men who are conscious of great powers, and strenuous in promoting great causes. In the summer of 1791 he despatched his son to See also:Coblenz to give advice to the royalist exiles, then under the direction of See also:Calonne, and to report to him at Beaconsfield their disposition and prospects. Richard Burke was received with many compliments, but of course nothing came of his See also:mission, and the only impression that remains with the reader of his prolix story is his tale of the two royal brothers, who afterwards became See also:Louis XVIII. and Charles X., See also:meeting after some parting, and embracing one another with many tears on board a See also:boat in the See also:middle of the See also:Rhine, while some of the courtiers raised a cry of " Long live the king "—the king who had a few See also:weeks before been carried back in triumph to his See also:capital with See also:Mayor Petion in his coach. When we think of the pass to which things had come in Paris by this time, and of the unappeasable ferment that boiled round the court, there is a certain See also:touch of the ludicrous in the notion of poor Richard Burke writing to Louis XVI. a letter of wise advice how to comport himself. At the end of the same year, with the approval of his father he started for Ireland as the adviser of the Catholic Association. He made a wretched emissary, and there was no limit to his arrogance, noisiness and indiscretion. The Irish See also:agitators were glad to give him two thousand guineas and to send him home. The mission is associated with a more important thing, his father's Letters to Sir See also:Hercules Langrishe, advocating the See also:admission of the Irish Catholics to the See also:franchise.

This short piece abounds richly in maxims of moral and political prudence. And Burke exhibited considerable courage in writing it; for many of its maxims seem to involve a See also:

contradiction, first, to the principles on which he withstood the movement in France, and second, to his attitude upon the subject of parliamentary reform. The contradiction is in fact only superficial. Burke was not the man to fall unawares into a See also:trap of this kind. His defence of Catholic relief—and it had been the conviction of a lifetime—was very properly founded on propositions which were true of Ireland, and were true neither of France nor of the quality of parliamentary representation in England. Yet Burke threw such breadth and generality over all he wrote that even these propositions, relative as they were, form a short See also:manual of statesmanship. At the close of the session of 1794 the impeachment of Hastings had come to an end, and Burke bade farewell to parliament. Richard Burke was elected in his father's place at Malton. The king was bent on making the See also:champion of the old order of Europe a peer. His title was to be Lord Beaconsfield, and it was designed to annex to the title an income for three lives. The patent was being made ready, when all was arrested by the sudden death of the son who was to Burke more than life. The old man's grief was agonizing and inconsolable.

" The storm has gone over me," he wrote in words which are well known, but which can hardly be repeated too often for any who have an ear for the cadences of noble and pathetic speech,—" The storm has gone over me, and I See also:

lie like one of those old oaks which the late See also:hurricane has scattered about me. I am stripped of all my honours; I am torn up by the roots and lie prostrate on the See also:earth. . . . I am alone. I have none to meet my enemies in the See also: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." A pension of £2500 was all that Burke could now be persuaded to accept. The duke of Bedford and Lord See also:Lauderdale made some remarks in parliament upon this paltry reward to a man who, in conducting a great trial on the public behalf, had worked harder for nearly ten years than any minister in any See also:cabinet of the reign. But it was not yet safe to kick up heels in face of the dying See also:lion. The vileness of such criticism was punished, as it deserved to be, in the Letter to a Noble Lord (1796), in which Burke showed the usual art of all his compositions in shaking aside the insignificances of a subject.

He turned mere personal defence and See also:

retaliation into an occasion for a lofty enforcement of constitutional principles, and this, too, with a relevancy and pertinence of consummate skilfulness. There was to be one more great effort before the end. In the spring of 1796 Pitt's constant anxiety for peace had become more earnest than ever. He had found out the instability of the coalition and the power of France. Like the thrifty steward he was, he saw with growing concern the See also:waste of the national resources and the See also:strain upon commerce, with a public debt swollen to what then seemed the desperate sum of £400,000,000. Burke at the notion of negotiation flamed out in the Letters on a See also:Regicide Peace, in some respects the most splendid of all his compositions. They glow with passion, and yet with all their rapidity is such steadfastness, the fervour of imagination is so skilfully tempered by close and plausible reasoning, and the whole is wrought with such strength and fire, that we hardly know where else to look either in Burke's own writings or elsewhere for such an See also:exhibition of the rhetorical resources of our language. We cannot wonder that the whole nation was stirred to the very depths, or that they strengthened the aversion of the king, of Windham and other important personages in the government against the plans of Pitt. The prudence of their See also:drift must be settled by external considerations. Those who think that the French were likely to show a moderation and practical reasonableness in success, such as they had never shown in the hour of imminent ruin, will find Burke's judgment full of error and See also:mischief. Those, on the contrary, who think that the nation which was on the very See also:eve of surrendering itself to the See also:Napoleonic See also:absolutism was not in a hopeful humour for peace and the European order, will believe that Burke's protests were as perspicacious as they were powerful, and that anything which chilled the energy of the war was as fatal as he declared it to be. When the third and most impressive of these astonishing productions came into the hands of the public, the writer was no more.

Burke died on the 8th of July 1797. Fox, who with all his faults was never wanting in a fine and generous sensibility, proposed that there should be a public funeral, and that the body should lie among the illustrious dead in Westminster See also:

Abbey. Burke, however, had left strict injunctions that his See also:burial should be private; and he was laid in the little church at Beaconsfield. It was the year of Campo Formio. So a See also:black whirl and torment of rapine, violence and See also:fraud was encircling the Western world, as a life went out which, notwithstanding some eccentricities and some aberrations, had made great tides in human destiny very luminous. (J. Mo.) Among the numerous editions published later may be mentioned that in See also:Bohn's British See also:Classics, published in 1853. This contains the fifth edition of Sir James See also:Prior's life; also an edition in twelve volumes, See also:octavo, published by J. C. Nimmo, 1898. There is an edition of the Select Works of Burke with introduction and notes by E. J.

See also:

Payne in the See also:Clarendon Press series, new edition, 3 vols., 1897. The See also:Correspondence of Edmund Burke, edited by See also:Earl Fitzwilliam and Sir R. Bourke, with appendix, detached papers and notes for speeches, was published in 4 vols., 1844. The Speeches of Edmund Burke, in the House of Commons and Westminster Hall, were published in 4 vols., 1816. Other editions of the speeches are those On Irish Affairs, collected and arranged by See also:Matthew See also:Arnold, with a See also:preface (1881), On American Taxation, On Conciliation with America, together with the Letter to the See also:Sheriff of Bristol, edited with introduction and notes by F. G. See also:Selby (1895). The See also:standard life of Burke is that by Sir James Prior, Memoir of the Life and Character of Edmund Burke with Specimens of his See also:Poetry and Letters (1824). The lives by C. MacCormick (1798) by R. Bisset (1798, 1800) are of little value. Other lives are those by the Rev.

George See also:

Croly (2 vols., 1847), and by T. MacKnight (3 vols., 1898). Of critical estimates of Burke's life the Edmund Burke of John See also:Morley, " English Men of Letters " series (1879), is an elaboration of the above See also:article; see also his Burke, a See also:Historical Study (1867) ; " Three Essays on Burke," by Sir James Fitzjames See also:Stephen in Horae Sabbaticae, series iii. (1892); and Peptographia Dublinensis, Memorial Discourses preached in the See also:Chapel of Trinity College, Dublin, 1895-1902; Edmund Burke, by G. See also:Chadwick, See also:bishop of Derry (1902).

End of Article: BURKE

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