6

But he regarded those whom he called the bad great men of the old stamp, Cromwell, Richelieu, the Guises, the Condés, with a certain tolerance, because, though the virtues of such men were not to be taken as a balance to their crimes, yet they had long views, and sanctified their ambition by aiming at the orderly rule, and not the destruction, of their country.' What he valued was the deep-seated order of systems that worked by the accepted uses, opinions, beliefs, prejudices of a community."

Leslie Stephen-English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, vol. ii., p. 232:

"In Burke's first writings he appears to be the great prophet of Whig principles. He set forth the philosophy which was, or which ought to have been, introduced in their policy. He was, indeed, alive to the many defects which made the actual very different from the ideal aristocracy. His earliest writings, indeed, protested against the meanness of the great nobles; and in one of his latest, the Letter to a Noble Lord, the vice of the system which could make a duke of Bedford a great power because he was descended from a corrupt courtier, and yet render invidious the scraps of reward thrown to a simple man of genius, is depicted with unrivalled vigor. But Burke always seems to have considered such blemishes as the separable accidents of the constitution, not as belonging to its essence. To his eyes the constitution was no makeshift scaffolding, destined to speedy decay, but a venerable edifice of superb architecture, resembling the proud keep of Windsor, rising in the majesty of proportion, and girt with the double belt of its kindred and coeval towers.' It was built around, indeed, with filthy hovels, and too often converted into a mart for degrading intrigue; but the buyers and the sellers might be driven forth, and its true majesty would be apparent. His glowing imagination heightened all that was really impressive in the old order its reverent antiquity, the chivalrous honor of its best leaders, and the liberty of speech and action that had grown up under its shelter. He would willingly have passed with averted eyes by its many defects had it not been necessary to attack with his whole force some of the short-sighted and selfish men who were using its shelter for their own contemptible purposes.

“The ideal aristocracy of his imagination was a body whose privileges rested on the sacred right of prescription'; not in the sense that its existence justified itself, but that it was the spontaneous

result of the free play of social forces through many generations. The rulers of the country would be the men who enjoyed the greatest social influence, and whose high cultivation and delicate sense of honor would enable them to wield it in the highest interests of the nation. It would be responsible to public opinion, not in the sense that its power would be dependent on every breath of popular favor, but as being acutely sensitive to every imputation of unfairness or corruption, and too proud to stifle the criticisms of its inferiors. It would be divided into parties; but their bonds of union would be a community of political principle, not a common desire for place and profit. To this ideal, he thought, the English constitution approximated in its best moments, though it was constantly tending to degenerate under various uncongenial influences. . . . The aristocracy might become a close corporation on a large scale, and either develop into an oligarchy or sell itself to the crown. On the other side was the danger, less perceptible during the early part of Burke's activity, of a democratic revolution. To this tendency, it is sufficient to say here, Burke was opposed as decidedly, though not as vehemently, in early years as during the French Revolution."

John Morley:

"Why should Burke not be approved of for chancellor of the exchequer? What were the many difficulties described as seeming to be in the way of arranging for Burke in a manner equal to Burke's merits and the Duke of Portland's wishes? His personal relations with the chiefs of his party were at this time extremely cordial and intimate. He was constantly a guest at the Duke of Portland's most private dinner-parties. Fox had gone down to Beaconsfield to recruit himself from the fatigues of his rapid journey from Bologna, and to spend some days in quiet with Windham and the master of the house. Elliot and Windham, who were talked about for a post for which one of them says that Burke would not have been approved, vied with one another in adoring Burke. Finally, Elliot and the Duke think themselves happy in a day's work which ended in consigning the man who not only was, but was admitted to be, the most powerful genius of their party, to a third-rate post, and that most equivocal distinction, a pension on the Irish establishment. The common explanation that it illustrates Whig exclusiveness cannot be seriously received as adequate. It is probable, for one thing, that the feelings of the Prince of Wales had more to do with it than the feelings of

men like the Duke of Portland or Fox. We can easily imagine how little that most worthless of human creatures would appreciate the qualities of such a man as Burke. The painful fact which we are unable to conceal from ourselves is that the common opinion of better men than the Prince of Wales leaned in the same direction. His violence in the course of the regency debates had produced strong disapproval in the public and downright consternation in his own party. On one occasion he is described by a respectable observer as having 'been wilder than ever, and laid himself and his party more open than ever speaker did. He is folly personified, but shaking his cap and bells under the laurel of genius. He finished his wild speech in a manner next to madness.' Moore believes that Burke's indiscretions in these trying and prolonged transactions sowed the seeds of the alienation between him and Fox two years afterward.

"On the whole, it seems to be tolerably clear that the difficulties in the way of Burke's promotion to high office were his notoriously straitened circumstances; his ungoverned excesses of party zeal and political passion; finally, what Sir Gilbert Elliot calls the unjust prejudice and clamor against him and his family, and what Burke himself once called the hunt of obloquy that pursued him all his life. The first two of these causes can scarcely have operated in the arrangements that were made in the Rockingham and Coalition ministries. But the third, we may be sure, was incessantly at work. It would have needed social courage alike in 1782, 1783, and 1788 to give cabinet rank to a man round whose name there floated so many disparaging associations. Social courage is exactly the virtue in which the constructors of a government will always think themselves least able to indulge. Burke, we have to remember, did not stand alone before the world. Elliot describes a dinner-party at Lord Fitzwilliam's, at which four of these half-discredited Irishmen were present. 'Burke has now got such a 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 offensive with animal spirits and with brogue; and his cousin, Will Burke, who is just returned unexpectedly from India, as much ruined as when he went many years ago, and who is a fresh charge on any prospects of power that Burke may ever have.' It was this train and the ideas of adventurership that clung to them, the inextinguishable stories about papistry and Saint Omer's, the tenacious calumny about the letters of Junius, the notorious circumstances of embarrassment and neediness-it was all these things which combined with Burke's

own defects of temper and discretion to give the Whig grandees as decent a reason as they could have desired for keeping all the great posts of state in their own hands."

Taine:

"He brought to politics a horror of crime, a vivacity and sincerity of conscience, a humanity, a sensibility, which seem only suitable to a young man. He based human society on maxims of morality, insisted upon a high and pure tone of feeling in the conduct of public business, and seemed to have undertaken to raise and authorize the generosity of the human heart. He fought nobly for noble causes; against the crimes of power in England, the crimes of the people in France, the crimes of monopolists in India. . . . He made himself every where the champion of principle and the persecutor of vice; and men saw him bring to the attack all the forces of his wonderful knowledge, his lofty reason, his splendid style, with the unwearying and untempered ardor of a moralist and a knight."

GOVERNMENT BY OPPOSITION.

The meaning of this stock-phrase description of English political methods may be gained from the following spirited picture of the situation as it presented itself to an imaginary young Irishman in much Burke's position, but belonging to a later date. These extracts are from Anthony Trollope's Phineas Finn, one of the so-called parliamentary novels of that very close observer of life and human nature:

"Lord De Terrier, the conservative Prime Minister, who had now been in office for the almost unprecedentedly long period of fifteen months, had found that he could not face continued majorities against him in the House of Commons, and had dissolved the House. Rumor declared that he would have much preferred to resign, and betake himself once again to the easy glories of opposition; but his party had naturally been obdurate with him, and he had resolved to appeal to the country. When Phineas received his father's letter, it had just been suggested to him at the Reform Club that he should stand for the Irish borough of Loughshane.

"This proposition had taken Phineas Finn so much by surprise, that when first made to him by Barrington Erle it took his breath away. What! he stand for Parliament, twenty-four years old, with no vestige of property belonging to him, without a penny in his purse, as completely dependent on his father as he was when he first went to school at eleven years of age! And for Loughshane, a little borough in the County Galway, for which a brother of that fine old Irish peer, the Earl of Tulla, had been sitting for the last twenty years—a fine, high-minded representative of the thoroughgoing, Orange Protestant feeling of Ireland! And the Earl of Tulla, to whom almost all Loughshane belonged-or at any rate the land about Loughshanewas one of his father's staunchest friends. Loughshane is in County Galway, but the Earl of Tulla usually lived at his seat in County Clare, not more than ten miles from Killaloe, and always confided his gouty feet, and the weak nerves of the old countess, and the stomachs of all his domestics, to the care of Dr. Finn. How was it possible that Phineas should stand for Loughshane? From whence was the money to come for such a contest? It was a beautiful dream, a grand idea, to lift Phineas almost off the earth by its glory. When the proposition was first made to him in the smoking-room at the Reform Club, by his friend Erle, he was aware that he blushed like a girl, and that he was unable at the moment to express himself plainly, so great was his astonishment and so great his gratification. But before ten minutes had passed by, while Barrington Erle was still sitting over his shoulder on the club sofa, and before the blushes had altogether vanished, he had seen the improbability of the scheme, and had explained to his friend that the thing could not be done. But to his increased astonishment his friend made nothing of the difficulties. Loughshane, according to Barrington Erle, was so small a place that the expense would be very little. There were altogether no more than three hundred and seven registered electors. The inhabitants were so far removed from the world, and were so ignorant of the world's good things, that they knew nothing about bribery. The Hon. George Morris, who had sat for the last twenty years, was very unpopular. He had not been near the borough since the last election; he had hardly done more than show himself in Parliament, and had neither given a shilling in the town nor got a place under government for a single son of Loughshane. And he has quarrelled with his brother,' said Barrington Erle. The devil he has!' said

·

Phineas. I thought they always swore by each other.' It's at each other they swear now,' said Barrington.

6

George has asked the