French, should command the attention of neighbouring nations, was inevitable. A king and queen, with many leading nobles, sent to the guillotine-an entire nobility proscribed, and hunted out with complete forfeiture of their estates an ancient religion foresworn and abandoned-its bishops and priests maligned and traduced, that they might become the victims of popular rage, and so be exterminated, or chased into exile-and all this within a few hours' Isail of the British shore-made the heart of the nation palpitate with deep emotion, and filled the minds of the people of all classes with tremulous anxiety.

But who cared for, or thought of, the doings of Warren Hastings in India? When stifled rumours of robbery, and murder, and wholesale ruin of the Indian princes, and wholesale oppression of the Indian people, came across the vast oceans that divide England from that far-off dependency, were they not as the idle winds? All the nation cared to know was that she got great tribute therefrom, and so the taxes at home were lightened, that many of her sons went out emptyhanded, and came back in a few years with great fortunes. And thus the whole gain was for the British people. The voice of wailing came from every district comprised within the vast Hindoo regions, but every ear was deaf to its cry. Young adventurers went there in the service of the Crown, to spend their time in rioting and dissipation, and to return in a short time from the land of exile with ample fortunes wrung from the natives. To attack the Government of India was to array against the claims of justice and humanity all the violence of unscrupulous men, who had become directors of a Company practically irresponsible, and all the venality of the British upper and middle classes, who looked to India merely as a place for their younger sons unscrupulously to acquire rapid wealth to be spent at home in England.

There was one man who resolved to put an end, if possible, to the tyranny, peculation, and crime which marked the Government of India.

Burke devoted himself, without pay or reward, without any personal interest, solely from the purest sense of public justice, to the redress of Indian grievances. The thoroughness with which he went to work has no parallel in our history.

Before he entered on the question of American taxation, he had, by intense study, mastered all the details of its colonial policy.

"Good God!" cried out Lord John Townsend, from the gallery of the House of Commons, as he listened to Burke's

defence of the American colonies-"what a man this is how could he acquire such transcendent powers."1

With still greater earnestness, and inconceivable industry, he set himself to study the laws, the institutions, and habits of the people of India, in order to see things "from their platform." The testimony of so accomplished a witness as Lord Macaulay, who had himself lived as Commissioner in India, is decisive as to Burke's motives and labours.

"The plain truth is, that Hastings had committed some great crimes, and that the thought of these crimes made the blood of Burke boil in his veins. For Burke was a man in whom compassion for suffering, and hatred of injustice and tyranny, were as strong as in Las Casas or Clarkson. And although in him, as in Las Casas and Clarkson, these noble feelings were alloyed with the infirmity which belongs to human nature, he is, like them, entitled to this great praise, that he devoted years of intense labour to the service of the people of India, with whom he had neither blood nor language, neither religion nor manners in common, and from whom no requital, no thanks, no applause could be expected. His knowledge of India was such as few, even of those Europeans who have passed many years in that country, have attained, and such as certainly was never attained by any public man who had not quitted Europe."

Armed with that wonderful amount of accurate knowledge, and spurred on by his innate scorn of oppression, he demanded the impeachment, for high crimes and misdemeanours of Hastings, the Governor-General of India. Amidst what solemn pomp and splendid presence that trial began in Westminster Hall, can be read in the glowing pages of Macaulay. How the trial was adjourned, and taken up year after year, for upwards of seven years, history tells. The public at last got thoroughly tired, and all the excitement created by the wondrous speeches which opened the impeachment, died out. Interest and pride prevailed over truth and justice. Hastings was finally acquitted. Yet Burke made it impossible to repeat the crimes which disgraced the rule of Hastings. Mr. Pitt proposed and carried, on the 20th of June, 1794, a motion, that the thanks of the House of Commons be given to the managers of Hastings' trial. Burke acknowledged, on the part of the managers, the compliment so paid.

In a letter of Burke to his friend, Dr. Laurence, he writes as follows, in reference to the iniquitous acquittal :

"Bath, July 28, 1796. "As it is possible that my stay on this side of the grave

1 He was then only in the second session of his being an M.P.

may yet be shorter than I computed, let me now beg to call to your recollection the solemn charge and trust I gave you on my departure from the public stage. Let not this cruel, daring, unexampled act of public corruption, guilt, and meanness, go down to a posterity as careless as the present race, without its due animadversion, which will be best found in its own acts and monuments. Let my endeavours to save the nation from that shame and guilt be my monument, the only one I ever will have. Let everything I have done, said, or written, be forgotten but this. I have struggled with the great and the little on this point during the greater part of my active life; and I wish, after death, to have recorded my defiance of the judgments of those who consider the dominion of the glorious empire, given by an incomprehensible dispensation of the Divine Providence into our hands, as nothing more than an opportunity of gratifying, for the lowest of their purposes, the basest of their passions, and that for such poor rewards, and, for the most part, indirect and silly bribes, as indicate even more the folly than the corruption of these infamous and contemptible wretches. Above all, make out the cruelty of this pretended acquittal, but in reality this barbarous and inhuman condemnation of whole tribes and nations, and of all the classes they contain. If ever Europe recovers its civilization, that work will be useful. 'Remember-Remember-Remember.'"

Many of you have, I suppose, seen Foley's statue of Edmund Burke in front of Trinity College, Dublin. The artist has embodied in that figure those impressive words of Burke. The attitude of that defiant form proclaims Burke's denunciation of Hastings' villany, and thus we have in permanent shape the only monument our glorious countryman desired-a monument which is a double tribute to Irish genius, to the departed genius whom it commemorates, and the living genius by whom it has been designed and executed.

Under his portrait, Sir Joshua Reynolds wrote those lines of Milton, as singularly applicable to Burke:

"Unmoved,

Unshaken, unseduced, unterrified,

His loyalty he kept, his love, his zeal;

Nor number, nor example with him wrought

To swerve from truth, or change his constant mind,
Though single."

Burke's Death-The "Illustrated Life" of Burke, by Peter Burke, Esq., Barrister-at-Law, is a charming biography. From

1 Burke resigned his seat as M.P. in 1794. Heart-broken, by the death of his son Richard, he retired from public life.-See Mustrated Life, pp. 273, 4

its pages is here transferred, somewhat abbreviated, the graphic description of the last illness and death of Burke :

"Burke's bodily health giving way, he, early in 1797, went to Bath to try the benefit of the waters. Burke remained at Bath four months, but without any material improvement. At length, despairing of a change for the better, he resolved on a removal to Beaconsfield, there, as he said, 'to await his end with unfeigned humiliation, and to prepare to submit to the will of God with trembling hope.' He thus expressed himself in a letter to Mrs. Leadbeater:-'I have been at Bath these four months to no purpose, and am, therefore, to be removed to my own house at Beaconsfield to-morrow, to be nearer to a habitation more permanent, humbly and fearfully trusting that my better part may find a better mansion.'

"On Friday, July the 7th, he spent the morning in a recapitulation of the most important acts of his life. Dwelling particularly on the French Revolution, and on the separation from admired friends which it had occasioned, he spoke with pleasure of the conscious rectitude of his intentions, and entreated 'that if any unguarded asperity of his had hurt them, to believe that no offence was meant.' He earnestly declared his forgiveness of all who had either on that subject, or any other cause, endeavoured to injure him."

"His end was suited," wrote his friend Dr. Laurence, " to the simple greatness of mind which he displayed through life-every way unaffected, without levity, without ostentation, full of natural grace and dignity. He appeared neither to wish nor to dread, but patiently and placidly to await the appointed hour of his dissolution. On the 8th July, he had conversed for some time with his usual force of thought and expression on the state of his country, for the welfare of which his heart was interested till it ceased to beat. His young friend and relative, Mr. Nagle, coming to his bed-side, he expressed a desire to be carried to another apartment. Mr. Nagle, with the assistance of servants, was complying with his request, when Burke faintly uttering, 'God bless you," fell back, and expired on the night of the 8th, or, rather, the morning of the 9th July, 1797, in the sixty-eighth year of his age."

1 Fox was the head of the great Whig party to which Burke was long allied, and from which he separated, owing to its leading members-Fox, Sheridan, and others--receiving the news of the French Revolution of 1789 with enthusiastic welcome, and lauding it with no stinted praises, in the House of Commons. It is much to be regretted that any political differences of opinion should have broken up such friendship. However, Fox's esteem for Burke's high character, and the purity of his motives, remained unchanged. When he learned that Burke's illness was of a fatal character, he at once wrote to Mrs. Burke a letter of tenderest condolence, and requested her to convey to her husband the expression of his grief and sympathy.

The private character of Burke I must dismiss with brief notice.

Great men have often been bad-—very bad men—very vicious, corrupt, and profligate men. If Burke were not a good man as well as a great man, I should not venture to occupy your attention with his career.

Lord Byron, a great poet, and a very great profligate both in his life and writings, says of the letters of Robert Burns :-"They are full of oaths and obscene songs. What an antithetical mind! tenderness and roughness-delicacy, coarseness, sentiment, sensuality-soaring and grovelling-dirt and deity- all mixed up in that one compound of inspired clay." These words may most fitly be applied to Byron as well as to Burns.

Very different were the writings and the life of our countryman Burke. By him no principle of high honour was disregarded; no immorality proclaimed nor tolerated by him irreligion and atheism were scornfully denounced as debasing to mankind. Of his writings we can say, with far more truth than Sir Walter Scott said of his own productions:

"I am drawing near to the close of my career. I have been, perhaps, the most voluminous author of the day; and it is a comfort to me that I have tried to unsettle no man's faith-to corrupt no man's principle."

Burke's domestic and social worth may be summarised in a few very comprehensive sentences :—

I. He was the best of husbands, and was blessed, as he well deserved, with a most devoted wife. He lived in stormy

When Burke died. Fox was the first to propose that Burke should be interred with public honours in Westminster Abbey. Burke's will prevented this result. as he directed his remains to be laid in the little country church, near to his residence at Beaconsfield. Long before his death, he had, when a young man, written these simple and pathetic lines:

"I would rather sleep in the southern corner of a little country churchyard than in the tomb of the Capulets. I should like, however, that my dust should mingle with kindred dust. The good old expression, family burying-ground, has something pleasing in it, at least to me." His wishes were realized, for he was interred beside his brother and his son.

Burke's last will is an extremely interesting document. It reveals the unclouded happiness of his married life-"the sunshine spoken" of true and lasting devotion to all his wishes and comforts on the part of that lady, whom he styles "his entirely beloved. faithful and incomparable wife," and whom he makes the sole inheritor of all his real and personal estates.' It shows his abiding warm-hearted friendship for his friends and relations, and companions through life, and especially the friends and companions of my son, who were the dearest of mine."

Its last clause is very affecting and Christian like. It relates to friendships sundered by political conflicts. "If the intimacy which I have had with others has been broken off by political difference on great questions concerning the state of things existing and impending, I hope they will forgive whatever of general human infirmity, or of my own particular infirmity, has entered into that contention. heartily entreat their forgiveness."

I