a Protestant, and the lady an adherent to what
used to be pleasantly called the ' old religion.'
The severer spirit now dominating Catholic
councils has condemned these marriages, on
the score of their bad theology and their lax
morality; but the practical politician, who is
not usually much of a theologian — though Lord
Melbourne and Mr. Gladstone are distinguished
exceptions — and whose moral conscience is apt
to be robust (and here I believe there are no
exceptions), cannot but regret that so good an
opportunity of lubricating religious differences
with the sweet oil of the domestic affections
should be lost to us in these days of bitterness
EDMUND BURKE. 141
and dissension. Burke was brought up in the
Protestant faith of his father, and was never in
any real danger of deviating from it ; but I
cannot doubt that his regard for his Catholic
fellow-subjects, his fierce repudiation of the
infamies of the Penal Code — the horrors of
which he did something to mitigate — his respect
for antiquity, and his historic sense, were all
quickened by the fact that a tenderly loved
and loving mother belonged through life and
in death to an ancient and an outraged
faith.
The great majority of Burke's brothers and
sisters, like those of Laurence Sterne, were ' not
* made to live ;' and out of the fifteen but three,
beside himself, attained maturity. These were
his eldest brother Garrett, on whose death
Edmund succeeded to the patrimonial Irish
estate, which he sold ; his younger brother,
Richard, a highly speculative gentleman, who
always lost ; and his sister, Juliana, who married
a Mr. French, and was, as became her mother's
daughter, a rigid Roman Catholic — who, so we
read, was accustomed every Christmas Day to
invite to the Hall the maimed, the aged, and
distressed of her vicinity to a plentiful repast,
during which she waited upon them as a servant.
1 42 EDMUND BURKE.
A sister l : ke this never did any man any seriou?
harm.
Edmund Burke was born in 1729, in Dublin,
and was tau2ht his rudiments in the country —
first by a Mr. O'Halloran, and afterwards by a
Mr. FitzGerald, village pedagogues both, who
at all events succeeded in giving their charge a
brogue which death alone could silence. Burke
passed from their hands to an academy at
Ballitore, kept by a Quaker, whence he pro-
ceeded to Trinity College, Dublin. He was
thus not only Irish born, but Irish bred. His
intellectual habit of mind exhibited itself early.
He belonged to the happy family of omnivorous
readers, and, in the language of his latest school-
master, he went to college with a larger mis-
cellaneous stock of reading than was usual with
one of his years ; which, being interpreted out
of pedagogic into plain English, means that
1 our good Edmund ' was an enormous devourer
of poetry and novels, and so he remained to the
end of his days. That he always preferred
Fielding to Richardson is satisfactory, since it
pairs him off nicely with Dr. Johnson, whose
preference was the other way, and so helps to
keep an interesting question wide open. His
passion for the poetry of Virgil is significant.
EDMUND BURKE. 143
His early devotion to Edward Young, the
grandiose author of the Night Thoughts, is net
to be wondered at ; though the inspiration of
the youthful Burke, either as poet or critic, may
be questioned, when we find him rapturously
scribbling in the margin of his copy :
'Jove claimed the verse old Homer sung,
But God Himself inspired Dr. Young.'
But a boy's enthusiasm for a favourite poet is a
thing to rejoice over. The years that bring the
philosophic mind will not bring — they must find
— enthusiasm.
In 1750 Burke (being then twenty-one) came
for the first time to London, to do what so many
of his lively young countrymen are still doing —
though they are beginning to make a grievance
even of that — eat his dinners at the Middle
Temple, and so qualify himself for the Bar.
Certainly that student was in luck who found
himself in the same mess with Burke ; and yet
so stupid are men — so prone to rest with their
full weight on the immaterial and slide over the
essential — that had that good fortune been ours
we should probably have been more taken up
with Burke's brogue than with his brains. Burke
came to London with a cultivated curiosity, and
M4
EDMUND BURKE.
in no spirit of desperate determination to make
his fortune. That the study of the law in-
terested him cannot be doubted, for everything
interested h : m, particularly the stage. Like the
sensible Irishman he was, he lost his heart to
Peg Woffington on the first opportunity. He
was fond of roaming about the country during,
it is to be hoped, vacation-time only, and is to
be found writing the most cheerful letters to his
friends in Ireland (all of whom are persuaded
that he is going some day to be somebody,
though sorely puzzled to surmise what thing or
when, so pleasantly does he take life), from all
sorts of out-of-the-way country places, where he
lodges with quaint old landladies who wonder
maternally why he never gets drunk, and
generally mistake him for an author until he
pays his bill. When in town he frequented
debating societies in Fleet Street and Covent
Garden, and made his first speeches ; for which
purpose he would, unlike some debaters, devote
studious hours to getting up the subjects to be
discussed. There is good reason to believe
that it was in this manner his attention was first
directed to India. He was at all times a great
talker, and, Dr. Johnson's dictum notwithstand-
ing, a good listener. He was endlessly in-
EDMUND BURKE. 145
terestedin everything — in the state of the crops,
in the last play, in the details of all trades, the
rhythm of all poems, the plots of all novels,
and indeed in the course of every manufacture.
And so for six years he went up and down, to
and fro, gathering information, imparting know-
ledge, and preparing himself, though he knew
not for what.
The attorney in Dublin grew anxious, and
searched for precedents of a son behaving like
his, and rising to eminence. Had his son got
the legal mind? — which, according to a keen
observer, chiefly displays itself by illustrating the
obvious, explaining the evident, and expatiating
on the commonplace. Edmund's powers of
illustration, explanation, and expatiation could
not indeed be questioned ; but then the subjects
selected for the exhibition of those powers were
very far indeed from being obvious, evident, or
commonplace, and the attorney's heart grew
heavy within him. The paternal displeasure was
signified in the usual manner — the supplies were
cut off. Edmund Burke, however, was no
ordinary prodigal, and his reply to his father's
expostulations took the unexpected and unpre-
cedented shape of a copy of a second and en-
larged edition of his treatise on the Sublime a?id
146 EDMUND BURKE.
Beautiful, which he had published in 1756 at
the price of three shillings. Burke's father
promptly sent the author a bank-bill for ;£ioo
— conduct on his part which, considering he had
sent his son to London and maintained him
there for six years to study law, was, in my
judgment, both sublime and beautiful. In the
same year Burke published another pamphlet —
a one-and-sixpenny affair — written ironically in
the style of Lord Bolingbroke, and called A
Vi?idication of Natural Society ; or, A View of
the Miseries and Evils arising to Mankind
from Every Species of Civil Society. Irony is
a dangerous weapon for a public man to have
ever employed, and in after-life Burke had fre-
quently to explain that he was not serious. On
these two pamphlets' airy pinions Burke floated
into the harbour of literary fame. No less a
man than the great David Hume referred to
him, in a letter to the hardly less great Adam
Smith, as an Irish gentleman who had written a
'very pretty treatise on the Sublime.' After
these efforts Burke, as became an established
wit, went to Bath to recruit, and there, fitly
enough, fell in love. The lady was Miss Jane
Mary Nugent, the daughter of a celebrated Bath
physician, and it is pleasant to be able to say of
EDMUND BURKE. 147
the marriage that was shortly solemnized be-
tween the young couple, that it was a happy one,
and then to go on our way, leaving them — where
man and wife ought to be left — alone. Oddly
enough, Burke's wife was also the offspring of a
mixed marriage ' — only in her case it was the
father who was the Catholic ; consequently both
Mr. and Mrs. Edmund Burke were of the same
way of thinking, but each had a parent of the
other way. Although getting married is no part
of the curriculum of a law student, Burke's father
seems to have come to the conclusion that after
all it was a greater distinction for an attorney in
Dublin to have a son living amongst the wits
in London, and discoursing familiarly on the
* Sublime and Beautiful,' than one prosecuting
some poor countryman, with a brogue as rich as
his own, for stealing a pair of breeches ; for we
find him generously allowing the young couple
^200 a year, which no doubt went some way
towards maintaining them. Burke, who was
now in his twenty-eighth year, seems to have
given up all notion of the law. In 1758 he
wrote for Dodsley the first volume of the Annual
Register, a melancholy series which continues to
this day. For doing this he got ;£ioo. Burke
was by this time a well-known figure in London
10 — 2
i 4 8 EDMUND BURKE.
literary society, and was busy making for him-
self a huge private reputation. The Christmas
Day of 1758 witnessed a singular scene at the
dinner table of David Garrick. Dr. Johnson,
then in full vigour of his mind, and with the all-
dreaded weapons of his dialectics kept burnished
by daily use, was flatly contradicted by a fellow-
guest some twenty years his junior, and, what is
more, submitted to it without a murmur. One
of the diners, Arthur Murphy, was so struck by
this occurrence, unique in his long experience of
the Doctor, that on returning home he recorded
the fact in his journal, but ventured no explana-
tion of it. It can only be accounted for — so at
least I venture to think — by the combined effect
of four wholly independent circumstances: First,
the day was Christmas Day, a day of peace and
goodwill, and our beloved Doctor was amongst
the sincerest, though most argumentative, of
Christians, and a great observer of days. Second,
the house was David Garrick's, and conse-
quently we may be certain that the dinner had
been a superlatively good one ; and has not
Boswell placed on record Johnson's opinion of
the man who professed to be indifferent about
his dinner? Third, the subject under discus-
sion was India, about which Johnson knew he
EDMUND BURKE. 149
knew next to nothing. Andfourt/i, the offender
was Edmund Burke, whom Johnson loved from
the first day he set eyes upon him to their lasi
sad parting by the waters of death.
In 1761 that shrewd old gossip, Horace
Walpole, met Burke for the first time at dinner,
and remarks of him in a letter to George Mon-
tague :
1 I dined at Hamilton's yesterday; there were
' Garrick, and young Mr. Burke, who wrote a
1 book in the style of Lord Bolingbroke, that
1 was much admired. He is a sensible man, but
'lias not worn off his authorism yet, and thinks
'there is nothing so charming as writers, and
* to be one. He will know better one of these
4 days.'
But great as were Burke's literary powers,
and passionate as was his fondness for letters
and for literary society, he never seems to have
felt that the main burden of his life lay in that
direction. He looked to the public service, and
this though he always believed that the pen
of a great writer was a more powerful and
glorious weapon than any to be found in the
armoury of politics. This faith of his comes
out sometimes queerly enough. For example,
when Dr. Robertson in 1777 sent Burke his
150 EDMUND BURKE.
cheerful History of A?nerica^ in quarto volumes,
Burke, in the most perfect good faith, closes a
long letter of thanks thus : —
'You will bmile when I send you a trifling
' temporary production made for the occasion
' of the day, and to perish with it, in return for
' your immortal work.'
I have no desire, least of all in Edinburgh,
to say anything disrespectful of Principal
Robertson ; but still, when we remember that
the temporary production he got in exchange
for his History of America was Burke's immortal
letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol on the American
War, we must, I think, be forced to admit that,
as so often happens when a Scotchman and an
Irishman do business together, the former got
the better of the bargain.
Burke's first public employment was of a
humble character, and might well have been
passed over in a sentence, had it not terminated
in a most delightful quarrel, in which Burke
conducted himself like an Irishman of genius.
Some time in 1759 he became acquainted with
William Gerard Hamilton, commonly called
1 Single-speech Hamilton,' on account of the
celebrity he gained from his first speech in
Parliament, and the steady way in which his
EDMUND BURKE. 151
oratorical reputation went on waning ever after.
In 1761 this gentleman went over to Ireland as
Chief Secretary, and Burke accompanied him
as the Secretary's secretary, or, in the unlicensed
speech of Dublin, as Hamilton's jackal. This
arrangement was eminently satisfactory to
Hamilton, who found, as generations of men
have found after him, Burke's brains very
useful, and he determined to borrow them for
the period of their joint lives. Animated by
this desire, in itself praiseworthy, he busied
himself in procuring for Burke a pension of
^300 a year on the Irish establishment, and
then the simple ' Single-speech ' thought the
transaction closed. He had bought his poor
man of genius, and paid for him on the nail
with other people's money. Nothing remained
but for Burke to draw his pension and devote
the rest of his lrfe to maintaining Hamilton's
reputation. There is nothing at all unusual in
this, and I have no doubt Burke would have
stuck to his bargain, had not Hamilton con-
ceived the fatal idea that Burke's brains were
exclusively his (Hamilton's). Then the situation
became one of risk and apparent danger.
Burke's imagination began playing round the
subject : he saw himself a slave, blotted out
1 52 EDMUND BURKE.
of existence — mere fuel for Hamilton's flame.
In a week he was in a towering passion. Few
men can afford to be angry. It is a run upon
their intellectual resources they cannot meet.
But Burke's treasury could well afford the
luxury ; and his letters to Hamilton make
delightful reading to those who, like myself,
dearly love a dispute when conducted according
to the rules of the game by men of great intel-
lectual wealth. Hamilton demolished and re-
duced to stony silence, Burke sat down again
and wrote long letters to all his friends, telling
them the whole story from beginning to end.
I must be allowed a quotation from one of
these letters, for this really is not so frivolous a
matter as I am afraid I have made it appear
— a quotation of which this much may be said,
that nothing more delightfully Burkean is to be
found anywhere : —
1 My dear Mason, —
' I am hardly able to tell you how much
* satisfaction I had in your letter. Your appro-
* bation of my conduct makes me believe much
'the better of you and myself; and I assure
1 you that that approbation came to me very
4 seasonably. Such proofs of a warm, sincere,
EDMUND BURKE. 153
1 and disinterested friendship were not wholly
4 unnecessary to my support at a time when I
4 experienced such bitter effects of the perfidy
1 and ingratitude of much longer and much
1 closer connections. The way in which you
1 take up my affairs binds me to you in a manner
4 1 cannot express ; for, to tell you the truth, I
* never can (knowing as I do the principles upon
* which I always endeavour to act) submit to any
* sort of compromise of my character ; and I
4 shall never, therefore, look upon those who,
* after hearing the whole story, do not think me
* perfectly in the right, and do not consider
* Hamilton an infamous scoundrel, to be in the
* smallest degree my friends, or even to be
1 persons for whom I am bound to have the
4 slightest esteem, as fair and just estimators of
' the characters and conduct of men. Situated
* as I am, and feeling as I do, I should be just
4 as well pleased that they totally condemned
4 me as that they should say there were faults
4 on both sides, or that it was a disputable case,
4 as I hear is (I cannot forbear saying) the
4 affected language of some persons. . . . You
4 cannot avoid remarking, my dear Mason,
'and I hope not without some indignation,
'the unparalleled singularity of my situation.
154 EDMUND BURKE.
1 Was ever a man before me expected to enter
' into formal, direct, and undisguised slavery ?
' Did ever man before him confess an attempt
' to decoy a. man into such an alleged contract,
' not to say anything of the impudence of
' regularly pleading it ? If such an attempt be
' wicked and unlawful (and I am sure no one
' ever doubted it), I have only to confess his
1 charge, and to admit myself his dupe, to
1 make him pass, on his own showing, for the
' most consummate villain that ever lived. The
' only difference between us is, not whether he
1 is not a , rogue — for he not only admits but
' pleads the facts that demonstrate him to be
1 so ; but only whether I was such a fool as to
1 sell myself absolutely for a consideration which,
1 so far from being adequate, if any such could
1 be adequate, is not even so much as certain.
' Not to value myself as a gentleman, a free
* man, a man of education, and one pretending
' to literature ; is there any situation in life so
' low, or even so criminal, that can subject a
' man to the possibility of such an engagement ?
' Would you dare attempt to bind your footman
* to such terms ? Will the law suffer a felon sent
'to the plantations to bind himself for his life,
' and to renounce all possibility either of eleva-
EDMUND BURKE. 155
1 tion or quiet ? And am I to defend myself for
( not doing what no man is suffered to do, and
4 what it would be criminal in any man to
4 submit to ? You will excuse me for this
• heat'
I not only excuse Burke for his heat, but love
him for letting me warm my hands at it after a
lapse of a hundred and twenty years.
Burke was more fortunate in his second
master, for in 1765 being then thirty-six years
of age, he became private secretary to the new-
Prime Minister, the Marquis of Rockingham ;
was by the interest of Lord Verney returned
to Parliament for Wendover, in Bucks ; and on
January 27th, 1766, his voice was first heard in
the House of Commons.
The Rockingham Ministry deserves well of
the historian, and on the whole has received
its deserts. Lord Rockingham, the Duke of
Richmond, Lord John Cavendish, Mr. Dowdes-
well, and the rest of them, were good men and
true, judged by an ordinary standard ; and when
contrasted with most of their political competitors,
they almost approach the ranks of saints and
angels. However, after a year and twenty days,
his Majesty King George the Third managed to
156 EDMUND BURKE.
get rid of them, and to keep them at bay for
fifteen years. But their first term of office,
though short, lasted long enough to establish a
friendship of no ordinary powers of endurance
between the chief members of the party and the
Prime Minister's private secretary, who was at
first, so ran the report, supposed to be a wild
Irishman, whose real name was O'Bourke, and
whose brogue seemed to require the allegation
that its owner was a popish emissary. It is satis-
factory to notice how from the very first Burke's
intellectual pre-eminence, character, and aims
were clearly admitted and most cheerfully recog-
nised by his political and social superiors ; and
in the long correspondence in which he engaged
with most of them there is not a trace to be
found, on one side or the other, of anything
approaching to either patronage or servility.
Burke advises them, exhorts them, expostulates
with them, condemns their aristocratic languor,
fans their feeble flames, drafts their motions,
dictates their protests, visits their houses, and
generally supplies them with facts, figures,
poetry, and romance. To all this they submit
with much humility. The Duke of Richmond
once indeed ventured to hint to Burke, with
exceeding delicacy, that he (the Duke) had a
EDMUND BURKE. 157
small private estate to attend to as well as public
affairs ; but the validity of the excuse was not
admitted. The part Burke played for the next
fifteen years with relation to the Rockingham
party reminds me of the functions I have
observed performed in lazy families by a soberly
clad and eminently respectable person who pays
them domiciliary visits, and, having admission
everywhere, goes about mysteriously from room
to room, winding up all the clocks. This is what
Burke did for the Rockingham party — he kept
it going.
But fortunately for us, Burke was not content
with private adjuration, or even public speech.
His literary instincts, his dominating desire to
persuade everybody that he, Edmund Burke,
was absolutely in the right, and every one of his
opponents hopelessly wrong, made him turn to
the pamphlet as a propaganda, and in his hands
• The thing became a trumpet, whence he blew
Soul-animating strains.'
So accustomed are we to regard Burke's
pamphlets as specimens of our noblest litera-
ture, and to see them printed in comfortable
volumes, that we are apt to forget that in their
origin they were but the children of the pave-
#-
irj EDMUND BURKE.
ment, the publications of the hour. If, however,
you ever visit any old public library, and grope
about a little, you are likely enough to find a
shelf holding some twenty-five or thirty musty,
ugly little books, usually lettered * Burke,' and
on opening any of them you will come across
one of Burke's pamphlets as originally issued,
bound up with the replies and counter-pamphlets
it occasioned. I have frequently tried, but
always in vain, to read these replies, which are
pretentious enough — usually the works of deans,
members of Parliament, and other dignitaries of
the class Carlyle used compendiously to describe
as ' shovel-hatted' — and each of whom was as
much entitled to publish pamphlets as Burke
himself. There are some things it is very easy
to do, and to write a pamphlet is one of them ;
but to write such a pamphlet as future genera-
tions will read with delight is perhaps the most
difficult feat in literature. Milton, Swift, Burke,
and Sydney Smith are, I think, our only great
pamphleteers.
I have now rather more than kept my word
so far as Burke's pre-parliamentary life is con-
cerned, and will proceed to mention some of the
tircumstances that may serve to account for the
.act that, when the Rockingham party came into
a
EDMUND BURKE. 159
power for the second time in 1782, Burke, who
was their life and soul, was only rewarded with
a minor office. First, then, it must be recorded
I sorrowfully of Burke that he was always desper-
ately in debt, and in this country no politician
under the rank of'a baronet can ever safely be
in debt. Burke's finances are, and always have
been, marvels and mysteries ; but one thing
must be said of them — that the malignity of his
enemies, both Tory enemies and Radical
enemies, has never succeeded in formulating
any charge of dishonesty against him that has
not been at once completely pulverized, and
shown on the facts to be impossible.* Burke's
purchase of the estate at Beaconsfield in 1768,
only two years after he entered Parliament, con-
sisting as it did of a good house and 1,600 acres
of land, has puzzled a great many good men —
* All the difficulties connected with this subject will be
found collected, and somewhat unkindly considered, in
Mr. Dilke's Papers of a Critic, vol. ii. The equity
draughtsman will be indisposed to attach importance to
statements made in a Bill of Complaint filed in Chancery
by Lord Verney against Burke fourteen years after the
transaction to which it had reference, in a suit which was
abandoned after answer put in. But, in justice to a
deceased plaintiff, it should be remembered that in those
days a defendant could not be cross-examined upon his
sworn answer.
160 EDMUND BURKE.
much more than it ever did Edmund Burke.