I am alone. the gate.

I have none to meet my enemies in 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."1

And if the votary of pictorial history thus finds an interesting and affecting subject in Burke's life, neither will he be disappointed who studies remarkable men from the moralist's point of view. Burke was irritable and violent, it is true, but even here he sinned out of zeal for the State, and enthusiasm for his principles. They were not private grievances, but public follies and public injuries, which moved him to these impatient outbreaks. There had not been halfa-dozen prominent politicians since the Great Rebellion and the Commonwealth with whom personal objects counted for so absolutely little as they did with Edmund Burke. He really did what so large a majority of public men only feign to do. He forgot that he had any interests of his own to be promoted, apart from the interests of the party with which he acted and from those of the whole nation, for which he held himself a trustee. What William Burke said of him in 1766, was true throughout his life

1 Letter to a Noble Lord, Works, ii. 268, a.

"Ned is full of real business, intent upon doing solid good to his country, as much as if he was to receive twenty per cent. from the commerce of the whole empire, which he labours to extend and improve."

Above all things, he achieved honourable and independent political distinction, at a time when it was much harder for a plebeian to achieve distinction on such terms than it is now. When we remember all the untold bitternesses of the struggle in which he was engaged from the time when the old Duke of Newcastle tried to make the Marquis of Rockingham dismiss his new private secretary as an Irish Jesuit in disguise (1765), down to the time when the Duke of Bedford, himself battening "in grants to the house of Russell, so enormous as not only to outrage economy, but even to stagger credibility," reviled the Government for giving Burke a moderate pension, we may almost imagine that if Johnson had imitated the famous Tenth Satire a little later he would have been tempted to apply the poet's cynical criticism of the career heroic to the greater Cicero of his own day. "I was not," Burke said, in a passage of lofty dignity, "like his Grace of Bedford, swaddled and rocked and dandled into a legislator; Nitor in adversum is the 1 Prior's Life of Burke, i. 151.

motto for a man like me. I possessed not one of the qualities nor cultivated one of the arts that recommend men to the favour and protection of the great. I was not made for a minion or a tool. As little did I follow the trade of winning the hearts, by imposing on the understandings of the people. At every step of my progress in life, for in every step was I traversed and opposed, and at every turnpike I met, I was obliged to show my passport, and again and again to prove my sole title to the honour of being useful to my country, by a proof that I was not wholly unacquainted with its laws and the whole system of its interests both abroad and at home; otherwise no rank, no toleration even for me."1

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And let us remember the kind of men with whom he had to compete on these unequal terms. Their unscrupulous and utterly dishonourable selfishness is admirably illustrated in one of Walpole's stories. "The Duke of Grafton," he tells us, "gave a dinner to several of the principal men in the city to settle the loan. Mr. Townshend came in his nightgown, and after dinner, when the terms were settled, and every one present wished to introduce some friend in the list of subscribers, he pretended to cast up the

Letter to a Noble Lord, Works, ii. 263-4.

sums already subscribed, said the loan was full, huddled up his papers, got into a chaise and returned home, reserving to himself by this manœuvre a large share in the loan." These loans of course were raised on terms as unfavourable to the State as possible, and the gains went into the hands of those who were lucky enough to get the scrip. Romilly mentions a loan made by Lord North, on terms so favourable to the subscribers, and so disadvantageous to the public, therefore, as to have borne the next day a premium of ten per cent., and to have remained afterwards at from ten to seven per cent. premium. Dissoluteness was no drawback in one of the favoured order, any more than corruption and dishonesty. When Fox defended the practice of subscription against clerical and lay recalcitrants, he had prepared himself for that holy war, as Gibbon tells us, "by passing twenty-two hours in the pious exercise of hazard, his devotion only costing him five hundred pounds per hour." When Burke,

2

1 Quoted in May's Constitutional Hist. i. 324-5.

2 Romilly's Life, i. 120. William Pitt was the first minister who consulted the public interest by accepting the lowest terms that were tendered, without retaining a farthing in his own hands for distribution among his friends (1784). Cf. Stanhope's Life of Pitt, i. 220, where Pitt's bold integrity is contrasted with the well-meaning feebleness of Lord Rockingham.

3 Gibbon's Miscel. Works, ii. 74.

exhausted with a day's assiduous labour, used to call for Fox at his apartments in St. James's, on his way to the House, he would find him just out of bed, all bright and fresh for the evening's work. Such men as the shrewd and impudent Rigby, on the other hand, atoned for a plebeian origin by the arts of dependence and a judicious servility, and drew more of the public money from the pay office in half-a-dozen quarter-days, than Burke received in all his life. It was not by such arts that Burke rose. His boast was justifiable. He minion or a tool of corrupt or dissolute patricians. He was still less made for a flatterer and cajoler of the populace.1

was not made for a

Whether, therefore, we are of those who see no more in the world's great men than conspicuous figures in a lively and many-coloured scene, or of those others who love great men for the qualities which, in kind, they have in common with all their human brothers, and which spring from the common conditions of human life, in either case Burke attracts us with equal and irresistible force. But history proper is only concerned with these aspects of the character of its prominent actors incidentally and by the way. At the most, they are only accessories to true historic study, which the 1 See Note at the end of the Chapter.