set his face resolutely against innovation; in both cases he defied the enemies who came up from two different quarters to assail the English constitution, and to destroy a system under which three generations of Englishmen had been happy and prosperous. He changed his front, but he never changed his ground. "I flatter myself," he said, with justice, "that I love a manly, moral, regulated liberty."1 And again: "The liberty, the only liberty I mean, is a liberty connected with order." The court tried to regulate liberty too severely. It found in him an inflexible opponent. Demagogues tried to remove the regulations of liberty. They encountered in him the bitterest and most unceasing of all remonstrants. The arbitrary majority in the House of Commons forgot for whose benefit they held power, from whom they derived their authority, and in what description of government it was that they had a place. Burke was the most valiant and strenuous champion in the ranks of the independent minority. He withstood to the face the King and the King's friends. He withstood to the face Charles Fox and the friends of the people. He may have been wrong in both, or in either, but let 1 Reflections, Works, i. 384, a. 2 Speech on Arrival at Bristol (1774), Works, i. 177, b. us not be told that he turned back in his course; that he was a revolutionist in 1770 and a reactionist in 1790; that he was in his sane mind when he opposed the supremacy of the Court, but that his reason was tottering before he opposed the supremacy of the rabble.1 1 "As any one of the great members of this constitution happens to be endangered, he that is a friend to all of them chooses and presses` the topics necessary for the support of the part attacked. . . . He ought not to apprehend that his raising fences about popular privileges this day will infer that he ought on the next to concur with those who would pull down the throne; because on the next he defends the throne, it ought not to be supposed that he has abandoned the rights of the people." Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, Works, i. 501, b. CHAPTER II. ISSUES OF THE TIME. TS not the highest object of our search in a study of the career of a conspicuous man, an estimate of his contributions to the cause of the collective progress of mankind? We have to ask first, what general advanee was made by this cause, while he was still a witness of it; and next, what place and part he took as an actor in it. We seek to know how country affected the pro the ideas and policy of his gress of history, and we seek to know in what attitude he stood to this policy, and in what respects he modified these ideas. Apart from all this, we may allow, the merely pictorial study of such a man as Burke is profoundly interesting and attractive. We hear him in conversation at the club, with Johnson and Goldsmith, and Reynolds and Windham, winding into his subject like a serpent, as Goldsmith said of him; bidding some too grave and anxious gentleman to "live pleasant;" fascinating the greathearted Johnson with "his knowledge, his genius, his diffusion and affluence of conversation," and making him cry, "Sir, that fellow calls forth all my powers." We see him in the House of Commons, in his tight brown coat, with his spectacles and a little bob-wig with curls, beginning his oration with folded arms and an air of humility, and gradually rising to thunderous denunciations of the noble lord in the blue ribbon; or later on, of those vain petulant upstarts in a neighbouring country, who were wickedly proscribing the sacred ministers of religion, persecuting their virtuous and innocent sovereign, and covering with humiliation the august daughter of the Cæsars. We may follow him from the heat and violence of the House, where drunken lordlings and squires derided the greatest man of their time, down to the calm shades of Beaconsfield, where he would with his own hands give food to a starving beggar, or medicine to a peasant sick of the ague; where he would talk of the weather, the turnips, and the hay, with the team-men and the farm-bailiff; and where, in the evening stillness, he would pace the walk under the trees, and reflect on the state of Europe and the distractions of his country. While Fox was squandering tens of thousands at the gambling-table, we may watch Burke supporting Barry for several years at Rome; anxiously pressing his last half-guinea upon the friendless Emin; rescuing Crabbe, though a perfect stranger to him, from a debtors' prison, and maintaining him in his own house until a provision was found for him ; and on every occasion ready to extend not only sympathy, but a share of his slender purse, wherever he found penniless genius or worth. And finally, we may look with tragic emotion on the pathos of that crowning scene which left the remnant of the old man's days so desolate and void. A Roman poet has described, in touching words, the woe of the aged Nestor, as he beheld the funeral-pile of his son, too untimely slain. "Oro parumper Attendas quantum de legibus ipse queratur "The Burke's grief finds a yet nobler expression. storm has gone over me; and I lie like one of those old oaks which the late hurricane has scattered about me. I am stripped of all my honours; I am torn up by the roots, and lie prostrate on the earth. . . . . |