In 1361, on the death of Duke Philip de Rouvres, son of Jeanne of Auvergne

and Boulogne, who had married the second time John II. of France, surnamed

the Good, the duchy of Burgundy returned to the crown of France. In 1363

John gave it, with hereditary rights, to his son Philip, surnamed the Bold,

thus founding that second Capet house of Burgundy which filled such an

important place in the history of France during the 14th and 15th

centuries, acquiring as it did a territorial power which proved redoubtable

to the kingship itself. By his marriage with Margaret of Flanders Philip

added to his duchy, on the death of his father-in-law, Louis of Male, in

1384, the countships of Burgundy and Flanders; and in the same year he

purchased the countship of Charolais from John, count of Armagnac. On the

death of Charles V. in 1380 Philip and his brothers, the dukes of Anjou and

Berry, had possessed themselves of the regency, and it was he who led

Charles VI. against the rebellious Flemings, over whom the young king

gained the victory of Roosebeke in 1382. Momentarily deprived of power

during the period of the "Marmousets'" government, he devoted himself to

the administration of his own dominions, establishing in 1386 an

audit-office (_chambre des comptes_) at Dijon and another at Lille. In 1396

he refused to take part personally in the expedition against the Turks

which ended in the disaster of Nicopolis, and would only send his son John,

then count of Nevers. In 1392 the king's madness caused Philip's recall to

power along with the other princes of the blood, and from this time dates

that hostility between the party of Burgundy and the party of Orleans which

was to become so intense when in May 1404 Duke Philip had been succeeded by

his son, John the Fearless.

In 1407 the latter caused the assassination of his political rival, Louis

of Orleans, the king's brother. Forced to quit Paris for a time, he soon

returned, supported in particular by the gild of the butchers and by the

university. The monk Jean Petit pronounced an apology for the murder

(1408).

The victory of Hasbain which John achieved on the 23rd of September 1408

over the Liégeois, who had attacked his brother-in-law, John of Bavaria,

bishop of Liége, still further strengthened his power and reputation, and

during the following years the struggle between the Burgundians and the

partisans of the duke of Orleans--or Armagnacs, as they were called--went

on with varying results. In 1413 a reaction took place in Paris; John the

Fearless was once more expelled from the capital, and only returned there

in 1418, thanks to the treason of Perrinet Leclerc, who yielded up the town

to him. In 1419, just when he was thinking of making advances towards the

party of the dauphin (Charles VII.), he was assassinated by members of that

party, during an interview between himself and the dauphin at the bridge of

Montereau.

This event inclined the new duke of Burgundy, Philip the Good, towards an

alliance with England. In 1420 he signed the treaty of Troyes, which

recognized Henry V. as the legitimate successor of Charles VI.; in 1423 he

gave his sister Anne in marriage to John, duke of Bedford; and during the

following years the Burgundian troops supported the English pretender. But

a dispute between him and the English concerning the succession in Hainaut,

their refusal to permit the town of Orleans to place itself under his rule,

and the defeats sustained by them, all combined to embroil him with his

allies, and in 1435 he concluded the treaty of Arras with Charles VII. The

king relieved the duke of all homage for his estates during his lifetime,

[v.04 p.0822] and gave up to him the countships of Mâcon, Auxerre,

Bar-sur-Seine and Ponthieu; and, reserving the right of redemption, the

towns of the Somme (Roye, Montdidier, Péronne, &c.). Besides this Philip

had acquired Brabant and Holland in 1433 as the inheritance of his mother.

He gave an asylum to the dauphin Louis when exiled from Charles VII.'s

court, but refused to assist him against his father, and henceforth rarely

intervened in French affairs. He busied himself particularly with the

administration of his state, founding the university of Dôle, having

records made of Burgundian customs, and seeking to develop the commerce and

industries of Flanders. A friend to letters and the arts, he was the

protector of writers like Olivier de la Marche, and of sculptors of the

school of Dijon. He also desired to revive ancient chivalry as he conceived

it, and in 1429 founded the order of the Golden Fleece; while during the

last years of his life he devoted himself to the preparation of a crusade

against the Turks. Neither these plans, however, nor his liberality,

prevented his leaving a well-filled treasury and enlarged dominions when he

died in 1467.

Philip's successor was his son by his third wife, Isabel of Portugal,

Charles, surnamed the Bold, count of Charolois, born in 1433. To him his

father had practically abandoned his authority during his last years.

Charles had taken an active part in the so-called wars "for the public

weal," and in the coalitions of nobles against the king which were so

frequent during the first years of Louis XI.'s reign. His struggle against

the king is especially marked by the interview at Péronne in 1468, when the

king had to confirm the duke in his possession of the towns of the Somme,

and by a fruitless attempt which Charles the Bold made on Beauvais in 1472.

Charles sought above all to realize a scheme already planned by his father.

This was to annex territory which would reunite Burgundy with the northern

group of her possessions (Flanders, Brabant, &c.), and to obtain the

emperor's recognition of the kingdom of "Belgian Gaul." In 1469 he bought

the landgraviate of Alsace and the countship of Ferrette from the archduke

Sigismund of Austria, and in 1473 the aged duke Arnold ceded the duchy of

Gelderland to him. In the same year he had an interview at Trier with the

emperor Frederick III., when he offered to give his daughter and heiress,

Mary of Burgundy, in marriage to the emperor's son Maximilian in exchange

for the concession of the royal title. But the emperor, uneasy at the

ambition of the "grand-duke of the West," did not pursue the negotiations.

Meanwhile the tyranny of the duke's lieutenant Peter von Hagenbach, who was

established at Ferrette as governor (_grand bailli_ or _Landvogt_) of Upper

Alsace, had brought about an insurrection. The Swiss supported the cause of

their allies, the inhabitants of the free towns of Alsace, and Duke René

II. of Lorraine also declared war against Charles. In 1474 the Swiss

invaded Franche-Comté and achieved the victory of Hericourt. In 1475

Charles succeeded in conquering Lorraine, but an expedition against the

Swiss ended in the defeat of Grandson (February 1476). In the same year the

duke was again beaten at Morat, and the Burgundian nobles had to abandon to

the victors a considerable amount of booty. Finally the duke of Lorraine

returned to his dominions; Charles advanced against him, but on the 6th of

January 1477 he was defeated and killed before Nancy.

By his wife, Isabella of Bourbon, he only left a daughter, Mary, and Louis

XI. claimed possession of her inheritance as guardian to the young

princess. He succeeded in getting himself acknowledged in the duchy and

countship of Burgundy, which were occupied by French garrisons. But Mary,

alarmed by this annexation, and by the insurrection at Ghent (secretly

fomented by Louis), decided to marry the archduke Maximilian of Austria, to

whom she had already been promised (August 1477), and hostilities soon

broke out between the two princes. Mary died through a fall from her horse

in March 1482, and in the same year the treaty of Arras confirmed Louis XI.

in possession of the duchy. Franche-Comté and Artois were to form the dowry

of the little Margaret of Burgundy, daughter of Mary and Maximilian, who

was promised in marriage to the dauphin. As to the lands proceeding from

the succession of Charles the Bold, which had returned to the Empire

(Brabant, Hainaut, Limburg, Namur, Gelderland, &c.), they constituted the

"Circle of Burgundy" from 1512 onward.

We know that the title of duke of Burgundy was revived in 1682 for a short

time by Louis XIV. in favour of his grandson Louis, the pupil of Fénelon.

But from the 16th to the 18th century Burgundy constituted a military

government bounded on the north by Champagne, on the south by Lyonnais, on

the east by Franche-Comté, on the west by Bourbonnais and Nivernais. It

comprised Dijonnais, Autunois, Auxois, and the _pays de la montagne_ or

Country of the Mountain (Châtillon-sur-Seine), with the "counties" of

Chalonnais, Mâconnais, Auxerrois and Bar-sur-Seine, and, so far as

administration went, the annexes of Bresse, Bugey, Valromey and the country

of Gex. Burgundy was a _pays d'états_. The estates, whose privileges the

dukes at first, and later Louis XI., had to swear to maintain, had their

assembly at Dijon, usually under the presidency of the governor of the

province, the bishop of Autun as representing the clergy, and the mayor of

Dijon representing the third estate. In the judiciary point of view the

greater part of Burgundy depended on the parlement of Dijon; but Auxerrois

and Mâconnais were amenable to the parlement of Paris.

See also U. Plancher, _Histoire générale et particulière de Bourgogne_

(Dijon, 1739--1781, 4 vols. 8vo); Courtépée, _Description générale et

particulière du duché de Bourgogne_ (Dijon, 1774-1785, 7 vols. 8vo); O.

Jahn. _Geschichte der Burgundionen_ (Halle, 1874, 2 vols. 8vo); E. Petit de

Vausse, _Histoire des dues de Bourgogne de la race capétienne_ (Paris,

1885-1905, 9 vols. 8vo); B. de Barante, _Histoire des ducs de Bourgogne de

la maison de Valois_ (Paris, 1833--1836, 13 vols. 8vo); the marquis Léon

E.S.J. de Laborde, _Les Ducs de Bourgogne: Études sur les lettres, les arts

et l'industrie pendant le XV siècle_ (Paris, 1849-1851, 3 vols. 8vo).

(R. PO.)

BURHANPUR, a town of British India in the Nimar district of the Central

Provinces, situated on the north bank of the river Tapti, 310 m. N.E. of

Bombay, and 2 m. from the Great Indian Peninsula railway station of

Lalbagh. It was founded in A.D. 1400 by a Mahommedan prince of the Farukhi

dynasty of Khandesh, whose successors held it for 200 years, when the

Farukhi kingdom was annexed to the empire of Akbar. It formed the chief

seat of the government of the Deccan provinces of the Mogul empire till

Shah Jahan removed the capital to Aurangabad in 1635. Burhanpur was

plundered in 1685 by the Mahrattas, and repeated battles were fought in its

neighbourhood in the struggle between that race and the Mussulmans for the

supremacy of India. In 1739 the Mahommedans finally yielded to the demand

of the Mahrattas for a fourth of the revenue, and in 1760 the Nizam of the

Deccan ceded Burhanpur to the peshwa, who in 1778 transferred it to

Sindhia. In the Mahratta War the army under General Wellesley, afterwards

the duke of Wellington, took Burhanpur (1803), but the treaty of the same

year restored it to Sindhia. It remained a portion of Sindhia's dominions

till 1860-1861, when, in consequence of certain territorial arrangements,

the town and surrounding estates were ceded to the British government.

Under the Moguls the city covered an area of about 5 sq. m., and was about

10½ m. in circumference. In the _Ain-í-Akbari_ it is described as a "large

city, with many gardens, inhabited by all nations, and abounding with

handicraftsmen." Sir Thomas Roe, who visited it in 1614, found that the

houses in the town were "only mud cottages, except the prince's house, the

chan's and some few others." In 1865-1866 the city contained 8000 houses,

with a population of 34,137, which had decreased to 33,343 in 1901.

Burhanpur is celebrated for its muslins, flowered silks, and brocades,

which, according to Tavernier, who visited it in 1668, were exported in

great quantities to Persia, Egypt, Turkey, Russia and Poland. The gold and

silver wires used in the manufacture of these fabrics are drawn with

considerable care and skill; and in order to secure the purity of the

metals employed for their composition, the wire-drawing under the native

rule was done under government inspection. The town of Burhanpur and its

manufactures were long on the decline, but during recent times have made a

slight recovery. The buildings of interest [v.04 p.0823] in the town are a

palace, built by Akbar, called the Lal Kila or the Red Fort, and the Jama

Masjid or Great Mosque, built by Ali Khan, one of the Farukhi dynasty, in

1588. A considerable number of Boras, a class of commercial Mahommedans,

reside here.

BURI, or BURE, in Norse mythology, the grandfather of Odin. In the creation

of the world he was born from the rocks, licked by the cow Andhumla

(darkness). He was the father of Bor, and the latter, wedded to Bestla, the

daughter of the giant Bolthorn (evil), became the father of Odin, the

Scandinavian Jove.

BURIAL and BURIAL ACTS (in O. Eng. _byrgels_, whence _byriels_, wrongly

taken as a plural, and so Mid. Eng. _buryel_, from O. Eng. _byrgan_,

properly to protect, cover, to bury). The main lines of the law of burial

in England may be stated very shortly. Every person has the right to be

buried in the churchyard or burial ground of the parish where he dies, with

the exception of executed felons, who are buried in the precincts of the

prison or in a place appointed by the home office. At common law the person

under whose roof a death takes place has a duty to provide for the body

being carried to the grave decently covered; and the executors or legal

representatives of the deceased are bound to bury or dispose of the body in

a manner becoming the estate of the deceased, according to their

discretion, and they are not bound to fulfil the wishes he may have

expressed in this respect. The disposal must be such as will not expose the

body to violation, or offend the feelings or endanger the health of the

living; and cremation under proper restrictions is allowable. In the case

of paupers dying in a parish house, or shipwrecked persons whose bodies are

cast ashore, the overseers or guardians are responsible for their burial;

and in the case of suicides the coroner has a similar duty. The expenses of

burial are payable out of the deceased's estate in priority to all other

debts. A husband liable for the maintenance of his wife is liable for her

funeral expenses; the parents for those of their children, if they have the

means of paying. Legislation has principally affected (1) places of burial,

(2) mode of burial, (3) fees for burial, and (4) disinterment.

1. The overcrowded state of churchyards and burial grounds gradually led to

the passing of a group of statutes known as the Burial Acts, extending from

1852 up to 1900. By these acts a general system was set up, the aim of

which was to remedy the existing deficiencies of accommodation by providing

new burial grounds and closing old ones which should be dangerous to

health, and to establish a central authority, the home office (now for most

purposes the Local Government Board) to superintend all burial grounds with

a view to the protection of the public health and the maintenance of public

decency in burials. The Local Government Board thus has the power to obtain

by order in council the closing of any burial ground it thinks fit, while

its consent is necessary to the opening of any new burial ground; and it

also has power to direct inspection of any burial ground or cemetery, and

to regulate burials in common graves in statutory cemeteries and to compel

persons in charge of vaults or places of burial to take steps necessary for

preventing their becoming dangerous or injurious to health. The vestry of

any parish, whether a common-law or ecclesiastical one, was thus authorized

to provide itself with a new burial ground, if its existing one was no

longer available; such ground might be wholly or partly consecrated, and

chapels might be provided for the performance of burial service. The ground

was put under the management of a burial board, consisting of ratepayers

elected by the vestry, and the consecrated portion of it took the place of

the churchyard in all respects. Disused churchyards and burial grounds in

the metropolis may be used as open spaces for recreation, and only

buildings for religious purposes can be built on them (1881, 1884, 1887).

The Local Government Act 1894 introduced a change into the government of

burial grounds (consequent on the general change made in parochial

government) by transferring, or allowing to be transferred, the powers,

duties, property and liabilities of the burial boards in urban districts to

the district councils, and in rural parishes to the parish councils and

parish meetings; and by allowing rural parishes to adopt the Burials Acts,

and provide and manage new burial grounds by the parish council, or a

burial board elected by the parish meeting.

2. The mode of burial is a matter of ecclesiastical cognizance; in the case

of churchyards and elsewhere it is in the discretion of the owners of the

burial ground. The Local Government Board now makes regulations for burials

in burial grounds provided under the Burial Acts; for cemeteries provided

under the Public Health Act 1879. Private cemeteries and burial grounds

make their own regulations. Burial may now take place either with or

without a religious service in consecrated ground. Before 1880 no body

could be buried in consecrated ground except with the service of the

Church, which the incumbent of the parish or a person authorized by him was

bound to perform; but the canons and prayer-book refused the use of the

office for excommunicated persons, _majori excommunicatione_, for some

grievous and notorious crime, and no person able to testify of his

repentance, unbaptized persons, and persons against whom a verdict of _felo

de se_ had been found. But by the Burial Laws Amendment Act 1880, the

bodies of persons entitled to be buried in parochial burial grounds,

whether churchyards or graveyards, may be buried there, on proper notice

being given to the minister, without the performance of the service of the

Church of England, and either without any religious service or with a

Christian and orderly religious service at the grave, which may be

conducted by any person invited to do so by the person in charge of the

funeral. Clergymen of the Church of England are also by the act allowed,

but are not obliged, to use the burial service in any unconsecrated burial

ground or cemetery, or building therein, in any case in which it could be

used in consecrated ground. In cases where it may not be so used, and where

such is the wish of those in charge of the service, the clergy may use a

form of service approved by the bishop without being liable to any

ecclesiastical or temporal penalty. Except as altered by this act, it is

still the law that "the Church knows no such indecency as putting a body

into consecrated ground without the service being at the same time

performed"; and nothing in the act authorizes the use of the service on the

burial of a _felo de se_, which, however, may take place in any way allowed

by the act of 1880. The proper performance of the burial office is provided

for by the Public Worship Regulation Act 1874. Statutory provision is made

by the criminal law in this act for the preservation of order in burial

grounds and protection of funeral services.

3. Fees are now payable by custom or under statutory powers on all burials.

In a churchyard the parson must perform the office of burial for

parishioners, even if the customary fee is denied, and it is doubtful who

is liable to pay it. The custom must be immemorial and invariable. If not

disputed, its payment can be enforced in the ecclesiastical court; if

disputed, its validity must be tried by a temporal court. A special

contract for the payment of an annual fee in the case of a non-parishioner

can be enforced in the latter court. In the case of paupers and shipwrecked

persons the fees are payable by the parish. In other parochial burial

grounds and cemeteries the duties and rights to fees of the incumbents,

clerks and sextons of the parishes for which the ground has been provided

are the same as in burials in the churchyard. Burial authorities may fix

the fees payable in such grounds, subject to the approval of the home

secretary; but the fees for services rendered by ministers of religion and

sextons must be the same in the consecrated as in the unconsecrated part of

the burial ground, and no incumbent of a parish or a clerk may receive any

fee upon burials except for services rendered by them (act of 1900). On

burials under the act of 1880 the same fees are payable as if the burial

had taken place with the service of the Church.

4. A corpse is not the subject of property, nor capable of holding

property. If interred in consecrated ground, it is under the protection of

the ecclesiastical court; if in unconsecrated, it is under that of the

temporal court. In the former case it is an ecclesiastical offence, and in

either case it is a misdemeanour, to disinter or remove it without proper

authority, [v.04 p.0824] whatever the motive for such an act may be. Such

proper authority is (1) a faculty from the ordinary, where it is to be

removed from one consecrated place of burial to another, and this is often

done on sanitary grounds or to meet the wishes of relatives, and has been

done for secular purposes, _e.g._ widening a thoroughfare, by allowing part

of the burial ground (disused) to be thrown into it; but it has been

refused where the object was to cremate the remains, or to transfer them

from a churchyard to a Roman Catholic burial ground; (2) a licence from the

home secretary, where it is desired to transfer remains from one

unconsecrated place of burial to another; (3) by order of the coroner, in

cases of suspected crime. There has been considerable discussion as to the

boundary line of jurisdiction between (1) and (2), and whether the

disinterment of a body from consecrated ground for purposes of

identification falls within, (1) only or within both (1) and (2); and an

attempt by the ecclesiastical court to enforce a penalty for that purpose

without a licence has been prohibited by the temporal court.

See also CHURCHYARD; and, for methods of disposal of the dead, CEMETERY;

CREMATION, and FUNERAL RITES.

AUTHORITIES.--Baker, _Law of Burials_ (6th ed. by Thomas, London, 1898);

Phillimore, _Ecclestastical Law_ (2nd ed., London, 1895); Cripps, _Law of

Church and Clergy_ (6th ed., London, 1886).

(G. G. P.*)

BURIAL SOCIETIES, a form of friendly societies, existing mainly in England,

and constituted for the purpose of providing by voluntary subscriptions,

for insuring money to be paid on the death of a member, or for the funeral

expenses of the husband, wife or child of a member, or of the widow of a

deceased member. (See FRIENDLY SOCIETIES.)

BURIATS, a Mongolian race, who dwell in the vicinity of the Baikal Lake,

for the most part in the government of Irkutsk and the Trans-Baikal

Territory. They are divided into various tribes or clans, which generally

take their names from the locality they frequent. These tribes are

subdivided according to kinship. The Buriats are a broad-shouldered race

inclined to stoutness, with small slanting eyes, thick lips, high

cheekbones, broad and flat noses and scanty beards. The men shave their

heads and wear a pigtail like the Chinese. In summer they dress in silk and

cotton gowns, in winter in furs and sheepskins. Their principal occupation

is the rearing of cattle and horses. The Buriat horse is famous for its

power of endurance, and the attachment between master and animal is very

great. At death the horse should, according to their religion, be

sacrificed at its owner's grave; but the frugal Buriat heir usually

substitutes an old hack, or if he has to tie up the valuable steed to the

grave to starve he does so only with the thinnest of cords so that the

animal soon breaks his tether and gallops off to join the other horses. In

some districts the Buriats have learned agriculture from the Russians, and

in Irkutsk are really better farmers than the latter. They are

extraordinarily industrious at manuring and irrigation. They are also

clever at trapping and fishing. In religion the Buriats are mainly

Buddhists; and their head lama (Khambo Lama) lives at the Goose Lake

(Guisinoe Ozero). Others are Shamanists, and their most sacred spot is the

Shamanic stone at the mouth of the river Angar. Some thousands of them

around Lake Baikal are Christians. A knowledge of reading and writing is

common, especially among the Trans-Baikal Buriats, who possess books of

their own, chiefly translated from the Tibetan. Their own language is

Mongolian, and of three distinct dialects. It was in the 16th century that

the Russians first came in touch with the Buriats, who were long known by

the name of Bratskiye, "Brotherly," given them by the Siberian colonists.

In the town of Bratskiyostrog, which grew up around the block-house built

in 1631 at the confluence of the Angara and Oka to bring them into

subjection, this title is perpetuated. The Buriats made a vigorous

resistance to Russian aggression, but were finally subdued towards the end

of the 17th century, and are now among the most peaceful of Russian

peoples.

See J.G. Gruelin, _Siberia_; Pierre Simon Pallas, _Sammlungen historischer

Nachrichten über die mongolischen Volkerschaften_ (St Petersburg,

1776-1802); M.A. Castrén, _Versuch einer buriatischen Sprachlehre_ (1857);

Sir H.H. Howorth, _History of the Mongols_ (1876-1888).

BURIDAN, JEAN [JOANNES BURIDANUS] (c. 1297-c. 1358), French philosopher,

was born at Béthune in Artois. He studied in Paris under William of Occam.

He was professor of philosophy in the university of Paris, was rector in

1327, and in 1345 was deputed to defend its interests before Philip of

Valois and at Rome. He was more than sixty years old in 1358, but the year

of his death is not recorded. The tradition that he was forced to flee from

France along with other nominalists, and founded the university of Vienna

in 1356, is unsupported and in contradiction to the fact that the

university was founded by Frederick II. in 1237. An ordinance of Louis XI.,

in 1473, directed against the nominalists, prohibited the reading of his

works. In philosophy Buridan was a rationalist, and followed Occam in

denying all objective reality to universals, which he regarded as mere

words. The aim of his logic is represented as having been the devising of

rules for the discovery of syllogistic middle terms; this system for aiding

slow-witted persons became known as the _pons asinorum_. The parts of logic

which he treated with most minuteness are modal propositions and modal

syllogisms. In commenting on Aristotle's _Ethics_ he dealt in a very

independent manner with the question of free will, his conclusions being

remarkably similar to those of John Locke. The only liberty which he admits

is a certain power of suspending the deliberative process and determining

the direction of the intellect. Otherwise the will is entirely dependent on

the view of the mind, the last result of examination. The comparison of the

will unable to act between two equally balanced motives to an ass dying of

hunger between two equal and equidistant bundles of hay is not found in his

works, and may have been invented by his opponents to ridicule his

determinism. That he was not the originator of the theory known as "liberty

of indifference" (_liberum arbitrium indifferentiae_) is shown in G.

Fonsegrive's _Essai sur le libre arbitre_, pp. 119, 199 (1887).

His works are:--_Summula de dialectica_ (Paris, 1487); _Compendium logicae_

(Venice, 1489); _Quaestiones in viii. libros physicorum_ (Paris, 1516); _In

Aristotelis Metaphysica_ (1518); _Quaestiones in x. libros ethicorum

Aristotelis_ (Paris, 1489; Oxford, 1637); _Quaestiones in viii. libros

politicorum Aristotelis_ (1500). See K. Prantl's _Geschichte der Logik_,

bk. iv. 14-38; Stöckl's _Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters_, ii.

1023-1028; Herzog-Hauck, _Realencyklopadie_, s.v. (1897).

BURKE, EDMUND (1729-1797), British statesman and political writer. His is

one of the greatest names in the history of political literature. There

have been many more important statesmen, for he was never tried in a

position of supreme responsibility. There have been many more effective

orators, for lack of imaginative suppleness prevented him from penetrating

to the inner mind of his hearers; defects in delivery weakened the

intrinsic persuasiveness of his reasoning; and he had not that commanding

authority of character and personality which has so often been the secret

of triumphant eloquence. There have been many subtler, more original and

more systematic thinkers about the conditions of the social union. But no

one that ever lived used the general ideas of the thinker more successfully

to judge the particular problems of the statesman. No one has ever come so

close to the details of practical politics, and at the same time remembered

that these can only be understood and only dealt with by the aid of the

broad conceptions of political philosophy. And what is more than all for

perpetuity of fame, he was one of the great masters of the high and

difficult art of elaborate composition.

A certain doubtfulness hangs over the circumstances of Burke's life

previous to the opening of his public career. The very date of his birth is

variously stated. The most probable opinion is that he was born at Dublin

on the 12th of January 1729, new style. Of his family we know little more

than his father was a Protestant attorney, practising in Dublin, and that

his mother was a Catholic, a member of the family of Nagle. He had at least

one sister, from whom descended the only existing representatives of

Burke's family; and he had at least two brothers, Garret Burke and Richard

Burke, the one older and the other younger than Edmund. The sister,

afterwards Mrs French, was brought up and remained throughout life in the

religious faith of her [v.04 p.0825] mother; Edmund and his brothers

followed that of their father. In 1741 the three brothers were sent to

school at Ballitore in the county of Kildare, kept by Abraham Shackleton,

an Englishman, and a member of the Society of Friends. He appears to have

been an excellent teacher and a good and pious man. Burke always looked

back on his own connexion with the school at Ballitore as among the most

fortunate circumstances of his life. Between himself and a son of his

instructor there sprang up a close and affectionate friendship, and, unlike

so many of the exquisite attachments of youth, this was not choked by the

dust of life, nor parted by divergence of pursuit. Richard Shackleton was

endowed with a grave, pure and tranquil nature, constant and austere, yet

not without those gentle elements that often redeem the drier qualities of

his religious persuasion. When Burke had become one of the most famous men

in Europe, no visitor to his house was more welcome than the friend with

whom long years before he had tried poetic flights, and exchanged all the

sanguine confidences of boyhood. And we are touched to think of the

simple-minded guest secretly praying, in the solitude of his room in the

fine house at Beaconsfield, that the way of his anxious and overburdened

host might be guided by a divine hand.

In 1743 Burke became a student at Trinity College, Dublin, where Oliver

Goldsmith was also a student at the same time. But the serious pupil of

Abraham Shackleton would not be likely to see much of the wild and squalid

sizar. Henry Flood, who was two years younger than Burke, had gone to

complete his education at Oxford. Burke, like Goldsmith, achieved no

academic distinction. His character was never at any time of the academic

cast. The minor accuracies, the limitation of range, the treading and

re-treading of the same small patch of ground, the concentration of

interest in success before a board of examiners, were all uncongenial to a

nature of exuberant intellectual curiosity and of strenuous and

self-reliant originality. His knowledge of Greek and Latin was never

thorough, nor had he any turn for critical niceties. He could quote Homer

and Pindar, and he had read Aristotle. Like others who have gone through

the conventional course of instruction, he kept a place in his memory for

the various charms of Virgil and Horace, of Tacitus and Ovid; but the

master whose page by night and by day he turned with devout hand, was the

copious, energetic, flexible, diversified and brilliant genius of the

declamations for Archias the poet and for Milo, against Catiline and

against Antony, the author of the disputations at Tusculum and the orations

against Verres. Cicero was ever to him the mightiest of the ancient names.

In English literature Milton seems to have been more familiar to him than

Shakespeare, and Spenser was perhaps more of a favourite with him than

either.

It is too often the case to be a mere accident that men who become eminent

for wide compass of understanding and penetrating comprehension, are in

their adolescence unsettled and desultory. Of this Burke is a signal

illustration. He left Trinity in 1748, with no great stock of well-ordered

knowledge. He neither derived the benefits nor suffered the drawbacks of

systematic intellectual discipline.

After taking his degree at Dublin he went in the year 1750 to London to

keep terms at the Temple. The ten years that followed were passed in

obscure industry. Burke was always extremely reserved about his private

affairs. All that we know of Burke exhibits him as inspired by a resolute

pride, a certain stateliness and imperious elevation of mind. Such a

character, while free from any weak shame about the shabby necessities of

early struggles, yet is naturally unwilling to make them prominent in after

life. There is nothing dishonourable in such an inclination. "I was not

swaddled and rocked and dandled into a legislator," wrote Burke when very

near the end of his days: "_Nitor in adversum_ is the motto for a man like

me. At every step of my progress in life (for in every step I was traversed

and opposed), and at every turnpike I met, I was obliged to show my

passport. Otherwise no rank, no toleration even, for me."

All sorts of whispers have been circulated by idle or malicious gossip

about Burke's first manhood. He is said to have been one of the numerous

lovers of his fascinating countrywoman, Margaret Woffington. It is hinted

that he made a mysterious visit to the American colonies. He was for years

accused of having gone over to the Church of Rome, and afterwards

recanting. There is not a tittle of positive evidence for these or any of

the other statements to Burke's discredit. The common story that he was a

candidate for Adam Smith's chair of moral philosophy at Glasgow, when Hume

was rejected in favour of an obscure nobody (1751), can be shown to be

wholly false. Like a great many other youths with an eminent destiny before

them, Burke conceived a strong distaste for the profession of the law. His

father, who was an attorney of substance, had a distaste still stronger for

so vagrant a profession as letters were in that day. He withdrew the annual

allowance, and Burke set to work to win for himself by indefatigable

industry and capability in the public interest that position of power or

pre-eminence which his detractors acquired either by accident of birth and

connexions or else by the vile arts of political intrigue. He began at the

bottom of the ladder, mixing with the Bohemian society that haunted the

Temple, practising oratory in the free and easy debating societies of

Covent Garden and the Strand, and writing for the booksellers.

In 1756 he made his first mark by a satire upon Bolingbroke entitled _A

Vindication of Natural Society_. It purported to be a posthumous work from

the pen of Bolingbroke, and to present a view of the miseries and evils

arising to mankind from every species of artificial society. The imitation

of the fine style of that magnificent writer but bad patriot is admirable.

As a satire the piece is a failure, for the simple reason that the

substance of it might well pass for a perfectly true, no less than a very

eloquent statement of social blunders and calamities. Such acute critics as

Chesterfield and Warburton thought the performance serious. Rousseau, whose

famous discourse on the evils of civilization had appeared six years

before, would have read Burke's ironical vindication of natural society

without a suspicion of its irony. There have indeed been found persons who

insist that the _Vindication_ was a really serious expression of the

writer's own opinions. This is absolutely incredible, for various reasons.

Burke felt now, as he did thirty years later, that civil institutions

cannot wisely or safely be measured by the tests of pure reason. His

sagacity discerned that the rationalism by which Bolingbroke and the

deistic school believed themselves to have overthrown revealed religion,

was equally calculated to undermine the structure of political government.

This was precisely the actual course on which speculation was entering in

France at that moment. His _Vindication_ is meant to be a reduction to an

absurdity. The rising revolutionary school in France, if they had read it,

would have taken it for a demonstration of the theorem to be proved. The

only interest of the piece for us lies in the proof which it furnishes,

that at the opening of his life Burke had the same scornful antipathy to

political rationalism which flamed out in such overwhelming passion at its

close.

In the same year (1756) appeared the _Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin

of our Ideas on the Sublime and Beautiful_, a crude and narrow performance

in many respects, yet marked by an independent use of the writer's mind,

and not without fertile suggestion. It attracted the attention of the

rising aesthetic school in Germany. Lessing set about the translation and

annotation of it, and Moses Mendelssohn borrowed from Burke's speculation

at least one of the most fruitful and important ideas of his own

influential theories on the sentiments. In England the _Inquiry_ had

considerable vogue, but it has left no permanent trace in the development

of aesthetic thought.

Burke's literary industry in town was relieved by frequent excursions to

the western parts of England, in company with William Burke. There was a

lasting intimacy between the two namesakes, and they seem to have been

involved together in some important passages of their lives; but we have

Edmund Burke's authority for believing that they were probably not kinsmen.

The seclusion of these rural sojourns, originally dictated by delicate

health, was as wholesome to the mind as to [v.04 p.0826] the body. Few men,

if any, have ever acquired a settled mental habit of surveying human

affairs broadly, of watching the play of passion, interest, circumstance,

in all its comprehensiveness, and of applying the instruments of general

conceptions and wide principles to its interpretation with respectable

constancy, unless they have at some early period of their manhood resolved

the greater problems of society in independence and isolation. By 1756 the

cast of Burke's opinions was decisively fixed, and they underwent no

radical change.

He began a series of _Hints on the Drama_. He wrote a portion of an

_Abridgment of the History of England_, and brought it down as far as the

reign of John. It included, as was natural enough in a warm admirer of

Montesquieu, a fragment on law, of which he justly said that it ought to be

the leading science in every well-ordered commonwealth. Burke's early

interest in America was shown by an _Account of the European Settlements_

on that continent. Such works were evidently a sign that his mind was

turning away from abstract speculation to the great political and economic

fields, and to the more visible conditions of social stability and the

growth of nations. This interest in the concrete phenomena of society

inspired him with the idea of the _Annual Register_ (1759), which he

designed to present a broad grouping of the chief movements of each year.

The execution was as excellent as the conception, and if we reflect that it

was begun in the midst of that momentous war which raised England to her

climax of territorial greatness in East and West, we may easily realize how

the task of describing these portentous and far-reaching events would be

likely to strengthen Burke's habits of wide and laborious observation, as

well as to give him firmness and confidence in the exercise of his own

judgment. Dodsley gave him £100 for each annual volume, and the sum was

welcome enough, for towards the end of 1756 Burke had married. His wife was

the daughter of a Dr Nugent, a physician at Bath. She is always spoken of

by his friends as a mild, reasonable and obliging person, whose amiability

and gentle sense did much to soothe the too nervous and excitable

temperament of her husband. She had been brought up, there is good reason

to believe, as a Catholic, and she was probably a member of that communion

at the time of her marriage. Dr Nugent eventually took up his residence

with his son-in-law in London, and became a popular member of that famous

group of men of letters and artists whom Boswell has made so familiar and

so dear to all later generations. Burke, however, had no intention of being

dependent. His consciousness of his own powers animated him with a most

justifiable ambition, if ever there was one, to play a part in the conduct

of national affairs. Friends shared this ambition on his behalf; one of

these was Lord Charlemont. He introduced Burke to William Gerard Hamilton

(1759), now only remembered by the nickname "single-speech," derived from

the circumstance of his having made a single brilliant speech in the House

of Commons, which was followed by years of almost unbroken silence.

Hamilton was by no means devoid of sense and acuteness, but in character he

was one of the most despicable men then alive. There is not a word too many

nor too strong in the description of him by one of Burke's friends, as "a

sullen, vain, proud, selfish, cankered-hearted, envious reptile." The

reptile's connexion, however, was for a time of considerable use to Burke.

When he was made Irish secretary, Burke accompanied him to Dublin, and

there learnt Oxenstiern's eternal lesson, that awaits all who penetrate

behind the scenes of government, _quam parva sapientia mundus regitur_.

The penal laws against the Catholics, the iniquitous restrictions on Irish

trade and industry, the selfish factiousness of the parliament, the jobbery

and corruption of administration, the absenteeism of the landlords, and all

the other too familiar elements of that mischievous and fatal system, were

then in full force. As was shown afterwards, they made an impression upon

Burke that was never effaced. So much iniquity and so much disorder may

well have struck deep on one whose two chief political sentiments were a

passion for order and a passion for justice. He may have anticipated with

something of remorse the reflection of a modern historian, that the

absenteeism of her landlords has been less of a curse to Ireland than the

absenteeism of her men of genius. At least he was never an absentee in

heart. He always took the interest of an ardent patriot in his unfortunate

country; and, as we shall see, made more than one weighty sacrifice on

behalf of the principles which he deemed to be bound up with her welfare.

When Hamilton retired from his post, Burke accompanied him back to London,

with a pension of £300 a year on the Irish Establishment. This modest

allowance he hardly enjoyed for more than a single year. His patron having

discovered the value of so laborious and powerful a subaltern, wished to

bind Burke permanently to his service. Burke declined to sell himself into

final bondage of this kind. When Hamilton continued to press his odious

pretensions they quarrelled (1765), and Burke threw up his pension. He soon

received a more important piece of preferment than any which he could ever

have procured through Hamilton.

The accession of George III. to the throne in 1760 had been followed by the

disgrace of Pitt, the dismissal of Newcastle, and the rise of Bute. These

events marked the resolution of the court to change the political system

which had been created by the Revolution of 1688. That system placed the

government of the country in the hands of a territorial oligarchy, composed

of a few families of large possessions, fairly enlightened principles, and

shrewd political sense. It had been preserved by the existence of a

Pretender. The two first kings of the house of Hanover could only keep the

crown on their own heads by conciliating the Revolution families and

accepting Revolution principles. By 1760 all peril to the dynasty was at an

end. George III., or those about him, insisted on substituting for the

aristocratic division of political power a substantial concentration of it

in the hands of the sovereign. The ministers were no longer to be the

members of a great party, acting together in pursuance of a common policy

accepted by them all as a united body; they were to become nominees of the

court, each holding himself answerable not to his colleagues but to the

king, separately, individually and by department. George III. had before

his eyes the government of his cousin the great Frederick; but not every

one can bend the bow of Ulysses, and, apart from difference of personal

capacity and historic tradition, he forgot that a territorial and

commercial aristocracy cannot be dealt with in the spirit of the barrack

and the drill-ground. But he made the attempt, and resistance to that

attempt supplies the keynote to the first twenty-five years of Burke's

political life.

Along with the change in system went high-handed and absolutist tendencies

in policy. The first stage of the new experiment was very short. Bute, in a

panic at the storm of unpopularity that menaced him, resigned in 1763.

George Grenville and the less enlightened section of the Whigs took his

place. They proceeded to tax the American colonists, to interpose

vexatiously against their trade, to threaten the liberty of the subject at

home by general warrants, and to stifle the liberty of public discussion by

prosecutions of the press. Their arbitrary methods disgusted the nation,

and the personal arrogance of the ministers at last disgusted the king. The

system received a temporary check. Grenville fell, and the king was forced

to deliver himself into the hands of the orthodox section of the Whigs. The

marquess of Rockingham (July 10, 1765) became prime minister, and he was

induced to make Burke his private secretary. Before Burke had begun his

duties, an incident occurred which illustrates the character of the two

men. The old duke of Newcastle, probably desiring a post for some nominee

of his own, conveyed to the ear of the new minister various absurd rumours

prejudicial to Burke,--that he was an Irish papist, that his real name was

O'Bourke, that he had been a Jesuit, that he was an emissary from St

Omer's. Lord Rockingham repeated these tales to Burke, who of course denied

them with indignation. His chief declared himself satisfied, but Burke,

from a feeling that the indispensable confidence between them was impaired,

at once expressed a strong desire to resign his post. Lord Rockingham

prevailed upon him to reconsider his resolve, and from that day until Lord

Rockingham's death in [v.04 p.0827] 1782, their relations were those of the

closest friendship and confidence.

The first Rockingham administration only lasted a year and a few days,

ending in July 1766. The uprightness and good sense of its leaders did not

compensate for the weakness of their political connexions. They were unable

to stand against the coldness of the king, against the hostility of the

powerful and selfish faction of Bedford Whigs, and, above all, against the

towering predominance of William Pitt. That Pitt did not join them is one

of the many fatal miscarriages of history, as it is one of the many serious

reproaches to be made against that extraordinary man's chequered and uneven

course. An alliance between Pitt and the Rockingham party was the surest

guarantee of a wise and liberal policy towards the colonies. He went

further than they did, in holding, like Lord Camden, the doctrine that

taxation went with representation, and that therefore parliament had no

right to tax the unrepresented colonists. The ministry asserted, what no

competent jurist would now think of denying, that parliament is sovereign;

but they went heartily with Pitt in pronouncing the exercise of the right

of taxation in the case of the American colonists to be thoroughly

impolitic and inexpedient. No practical difference, therefore, existed upon

the important question of the hour. But Pitt's prodigious egoism,

stimulated by the mischievous counsels of men of the stamp of Lord

Shelburne, prevented the fusion of the only two sections of the Whig party

that were at once able, enlightened and disinterested enough to carry on

the government efficiently, to check the arbitrary temper of the king, and

to command the confidence of the nation. Such an opportunity did not

return.

The ministerial policy towards the colonies was defended by Burke with

splendid and unanswerable eloquence. He had been returned to the House of

Commons for the pocket borough of Wendover, and his first speech (January

27, 1766) was felt to be the rising of a new light. For the space of a

quarter of a century, from this time down to 1790, Burke was one of the

chief guides and inspirers of a revived Whig party. The "age of small

factions" was now succeeded by an age of great principles, and selfish ties

of mere families and persons were transformed into a union resting on

common conviction and patriotic aims. It was Burke who did more than any

one else to give to the Opposition, under the first half of the reign of

George III., this stamp of elevation and grandeur. Before leaving office

the Rockingham government repealed the Stamp Act; confirmed the personal

liberty of the subject by forcing on the House of Commons one resolution

against general warrants, and another against the seizure of papers; and

relieved private houses from the intrusion of officers of excise, by

repealing the cider tax. Nothing so good was done in an English parliament

for nearly twenty years to come. George Grenville, whom the Rockinghams had

displaced, and who was bitterly incensed at their formal reversal of his

policy, printed a pamphlet to demonstrate his own wisdom and statesmanship.

Burke replied in his _Observations on a late Publication on the Present

State of the Nation_ (1769), in which he showed for the first time that he

had not only as much knowledge of commerce and finance, and as firm a hand,

in dealing with figures as Grenville himself, but also a broad, general and

luminous way of conceiving and treating politics, in which neither then nor

since has he had any rival among English publicists.

It is one of the perplexing points in Burke's private history to know how

he lived during these long years of parliamentary opposition. It is

certainly not altogether mere impertinence to ask of a public man how he

gets what he lives upon, for independence of spirit, which is so hard to

the man who lays his head on the debtor's pillow, is the prime virtue in

such men. Probity in money is assuredly one of the keys to character,

though we must be very careful in ascertaining and proportioning all the

circumstances. Now, in 1769, Burke bought an estate at Beaconsfield, in the

county of Buckingham. It was about 600 acres in extent, was worth some £500

a year, and cost £22,000. People have been asking ever since how the

penniless man of letters was able to raise so large a sum in the first

instance, and how he was able to keep up a respectable establishment

afterwards. The suspicions of those who are never sorry to disparage the

great have been of various kinds. Burke was a gambler, they hint, in Indian

stock, like his kinsmen Richard and William, and like Lord Verney, his

political patron at Wendover. Perhaps again, his activity on behalf of

Indian princes, like the raja of Tanjore, was not disinterested and did not

go unrewarded. The answer to all these calumnious innuendoes is to be found

in documents and title-deeds of decisive authority, and is simple enough.

It is, in short, this. Burke inherited a small property from his elder

brother, which he realized. Lord Rockingham advanced him a certain sum

(£6000). The remainder, amounting to no less than two-thirds of the

purchase-money, was raised on mortgage, and was never paid off during

Burke's life. The rest of the story is equally simple, but more painful.

Burke made some sort of income out of his 600 acres; he was for a short

time agent for New York, with a salary of £700; he continued to work at the

_Annual Register_ down to 1788. But, when all is told, he never made as

much as he spent; and in spite of considerable assistance from Lord

Rockingham, amounting it is sometimes said to as much as £30,000, Burke,

like the younger Pitt, got every year deeper into debt. Pitt's debts were

the result of a wasteful indifference to his private affairs. Burke, on the

contrary, was assiduous and orderly, and had none of the vices of

profusion. But he had that quality which Aristotle places high among the

virtues--the noble mean of Magnificence, standing midway between the two

extremes of vulgar ostentation and narrow pettiness. He was indifferent to

luxury, and sought to make life, not commodious nor soft, but high and

dignified in a refined way. He loved art, filled his house with statues and

pictures, and extended a generous patronage to the painters. He was a

collector of books, and, as Crabbe and less conspicuous men discovered, a

helpful friend to their writers. Guests were ever welcome at his board; the

opulence of his mind and the fervid copiousness of his talk naturally made

the guests of such a man very numerous. _Non invideo equidem, miror magis_,

was Johnson's good-natured remark, when he was taken over his friend's fine

house and pleasant gardens. Johnson was of a very different type. There was

something in this external dignity which went with Burke's imperious

spirit, his spacious imagination, his turn for all things stately and

imposing. We may say, if we please, that Johnson had the far truer and

loftier dignity of the two; but we have to take such men as Burke with the

defects that belong to their qualities. And there was no corruption in

Burke's outlay. When the Pitt administration was formed in 1766, he might

have had office, and Lord Rockingham wished him to accept it, but he

honourably took his fate with the party. He may have spent £3000 a year,

where he would have been more prudent to spend only £2000. But nobody was

wronged; his creditors were all paid in time, and his hands were at least

clean of traffic in reversions, clerkships, tellerships and all the rest of

the rich sinecures which it was thought no shame in those days for the

aristocracy of the land and the robe to wrangle for, and gorge themselves

upon, with the fierce voracity of famishing wolves. The most we can say is

that Burke, like Pitt, was too deeply absorbed in beneficent service in the

affairs of his country, to have for his own affairs the solicitude that

would have been prudent.

In the midst of intense political preoccupations, Burke always found time

to keep up his intimacy with the brilliant group of his earlier friends. He

was one of the commanding figures at the club at the Turk's Head, with

Reynolds and Garrick, Goldsmith and Johnson. The old sage who held that the

first Whig was the Devil, was yet compelled to forgive Burke's politics for

the sake of his magnificent gifts. "I would not talk to him of the

Rockingham party," he used to say, "but I love his knowledge, his genius,

his diffusion and affluence of conversation." And everybody knows Johnson's

vivid account of him: "Burke, Sir, is such a man that if you met him for

the first time in the street, where you were stopped by a drove of oxen,

and you and he stepped aside to take shelter but for five minutes, he'd

talk [v.04 p.0828] to you in such a manner that when you parted you would

say, 'This is an extraordinary man.'" They all grieved that public business

should draw to party what was meant for mankind. They deplored that the

nice and difficult test of answering Berkeley had not been undertaken, as

was once intended, by Burke, and sighed to think what an admirable display

of subtlety and brilliance such a contention would have afforded them, had

not politics "turned him from active philosophy aside." There was no

jealousy in this. They did not grudge Burke being the first man in the

House of Commons, for they admitted that he would have been the first man

anywhere.

With all his hatred for the book-man in politics, Burke owed much of his

own distinction to that generous richness and breadth of judgment which had

been ripened in him by literature and his practice in it. He showed that

books are a better preparation for statesmanship than early training in the

subordinate posts and among the permanent officials of a public department.

There is no copiousness of literary reference in his work, such as

over-abounded in the civil and ecclesiastical publicists of the 17th

century. Nor can we truly say that there is much, though there is certainly

some, of that tact which literature is alleged to confer on those who

approach it in a just spirit and with the true gift. The influence of

literature on Burke lay partly in the direction of emancipation from the

mechanical formulae of practical politics; partly in the association which

it engendered, in a powerful understanding like his, between politics and

the moral forces of the world, and between political maxims and the old and

great sentences of morals; partly in drawing him, even when resting his

case on prudence and expediency, to appeal to the widest and highest

sympathies; partly, and more than all, in opening his thoughts to the many

conditions, possibilities and "varieties of untried being," in human

character and situation, and so giving an incomparable flexibility to his

methods of political approach.

This flexibility is not to be found in his manner of composition. That

derives its immense power from other sources; from passion, intensity,

imagination, size, truth, cogency of logical reason. Those who insist on

charm, on winningness in style, on subtle harmonies and fine exquisiteness

of suggestion, are disappointed in Burke: they even find him stiff and

over-coloured. And there are blemishes of this kind. His banter is nearly

always ungainly, his wit blunt, as Johnson said, and often unseasonable. As

is usual with a man who has not true humour, Burke is also without true

pathos. The thought of wrong or misery moved him less to pity for the

victim than to anger against the cause. Again, there are some gratuitous

and unredeemed vulgarities; some images that make us shudder. But only a

literary fop can be detained by specks like these.

The varieties of Burke's literary or rhetorical method are very striking.

It is almost incredible that the superb imaginative amplification of the

description of Hyder Ali's descent upon the Carnatic should be from the

same pen as the grave, simple, unadorned _Address to the King_ (1777),

where each sentence falls on the ear with the accent of some golden-tongued

oracle of the wise gods. His stride is the stride of a giant, from the

sentimental beauty of the picture of Marie Antoinette at Versailles, or the

red horror of the tale of Debi Sing in Rungpore, to the learning,

positiveness and cool judicial mastery of the _Report on the Lords'

Journals_ (1794), which Philip Francis, no mean judge, declared on the

whole to be the "most eminent and extraordinary" of all his productions.

But even in the coolest and driest of his pieces there is the mark of

greatness, of grasp, of comprehension. In all its varieties Burke's style

is noble, earnest, deep-flowing, because his sentiment was lofty and

fervid, and went with sincerity and ardent disciplined travail of judgment.

He had the style of his subjects; the amplitude, the weightiness, the

laboriousness, the sense, the high flight, the grandeur, proper to a man

dealing with imperial themes, with the fortunes of great societies, with

the sacredness of law, the freedom of nations, the justice of rulers. Burke

will always be read with delight and edification, because in the midst of

discussions on the local and the accidental, he scatters apophthegms that

take us into the regions of lasting wisdom. In the midst of the torrent of

his most strenuous and passionate deliverances, he suddenly rises aloof

from his immediate subject, and in all tranquillity reminds us of some

permanent relation of things, some enduring truth of human life or human

society. We do not hear the organ tones of Milton, for faith and freedom

had other notes in the 18th century. There is none of the complacent and

wise-browed sagacity of Bacon, for Burke's were days of personal strife and

fire and civil division. We are not exhilarated by the cheerfulness, the

polish, the fine manners of Bolingbroke, for Burke had an anxious

conscience, and was earnest and intent that the good should triumph. And

yet Burke is among the greatest of those who have wrought marvels in the

prose of our English tongue.

Not all the transactions in which Burke was a combatant could furnish an

imperial theme. We need not tell over again the story of Wilkes and the

Middlesex election. The Rockingham ministry had been succeeded by a

composite government, of which it was intended that Pitt, now made Lord

Chatham and privy seal, should be the real chief. Chatham's health and mind

fell into disorder almost immediately after the ministry had been formed.

The duke of Grafton was its nominal head, but party ties had been broken,

the political connexions of the ministers were dissolved, and, in truth,

the king was now at last a king indeed, who not only reigned but governed.

The revival of high doctrines of prerogative in the crown was accompanied

by a revival of high doctrines of privilege in the House of Commons, and

the ministry was so smitten with weakness and confusion as to be unable to

resist the current of arbitrary policy, and not many of them were even

willing to resist it. The unconstitutional prosecution of Wilkes was

followed by the fatal recourse to new plans for raising taxes in the

American colonies. These two points made the rallying ground of the new

Whig opposition. Burke helped to smooth matters for a practical union

between the Rockingham party and the powerful triumvirate, composed of

Chatham, whose understanding had recovered from its late disorder, and of

his brothers-in-law, Lord Temple and George Grenville. He was active in

urging petitions from the freeholders of the counties, protesting against

the unconstitutional invasion of the right of election. And he added a

durable masterpiece to political literature in a pamphlet which he called

_Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents_ (1770). The immediate

object of this excellent piece was to hold up the court scheme of weak,

divided and dependent administrations in the light of its real purpose and

design; to describe the distempers which had been engendered in parliament

by the growth of royal influence and the faction of the king's friends; to

show that the newly formed Whig party had combined for truly public ends,

and was no mere family knot like the Grenvilles and the Bedfords; and,

finally, to press for the hearty concurrence both of public men and of the

nation at large in combining against "a faction ruling by the private

instructions of a court against the general sense of the people." The

pamphlet was disliked by Chatham on the one hand, on no reasonable grounds

that we can discover; it was denounced by the extreme popular party of the

Bill of Rights, on the other hand, for its moderation and conservatism. In

truth, there is as strong a vein of conservative feeling in the pamphlet of

1770 as in the more resplendent pamphlet of 1790. "Our constitution," he

said, "stands on a nice equipoise, with steep precipices and deep waters

upon all sides of it. In removing it from a dangerous leaning towards one

side, there may be a risk of oversetting it on the other. Every project of

a material change in a government so complicated as ours is a matter full

of difficulties; in which a considerate man will not be too ready to

decide, a prudent man too ready to undertake, or an honest man too ready to

promise." Neither now nor ever had Burke any other real conception of a

polity for England than government by the territorial aristocracy in the

interests of the nation at large, and especially in the interests of

commerce, to the vital importance of which in our economy he was always

keenly and wisely alive. The policy of George III., and the support which

it found among [v.04 p.0829] men who were weary of Whig factions, disturbed

this scheme, and therefore Burke denounced both the court policy and the

court party with all his heart and all his strength.

Eloquence and good sense, however, were impotent in the face of such forces

as were at this time arrayed against a government at once strong and

liberal. The court was confident that a union between Chatham and the

Rockinghams was impossible. The union was in fact hindered by the

waywardness and the absurd pretences of Chatham, and the want of force in

Lord Rockingham. In the nation at large, the late violent ferment had been

followed by as remarkable a deadness and vapidity, and Burke himself had to

admit a year or two later that any remarkable robbery at Hounslow Heath

would make more conversation than all the disturbances of America. The duke

of Grafton went out, and Lord North became the head of a government, which

lasted twelve years (1770-1782), and brought about more than all the

disasters that Burke had foretold as the inevitable issue of the royal

policy. For the first six years of this lamentable period Burke was

actively employed in stimulating, informing and guiding the patrician

chiefs of his party. "Indeed, Burke," said the duke of Richmond, "you have

more merit than any man in keeping us together." They were well-meaning and

patriotic men, but it was not always easy to get them to prefer politics to

fox-hunting. When he reached his lodgings at night after a day in the city

or a skirmish in the House of Commons, Burke used to find a note from the

duke of Richmond or the marquess of Rockingham, praying him to draw a

protest to be entered on the Journals of the Lords, and in fact he drew all

the principal protests of his party between 1767 and 1782. The accession of

Charles James Fox to the Whig party, which took place at this time, and was

so important an event in its history, was mainly due to the teaching and

influence of Burke. In the House of Commons his industry was almost

excessive. He was taxed with speaking too often, and with being too

forward. And he was mortified by a more serious charge than murmurs about

superfluity of zeal. Men said and said again that he was Junius. His very

proper unwillingness to stoop to deny an accusation, that would have been

so disgraceful if it had been true, made ill-natured and silly people the

more convinced that it was not wholly false. But whatever the London world

may have thought of him, Burke's energy and devotion of character impressed

the better minds in the country. In 1774 he received the great distinction

of being chosen as one of its representatives by Bristol, then the second

town in the kingdom.

In the events which ended in the emancipation of the American colonies from

the monarchy, Burke's political genius shone with an effulgence that was

worthy of the great affairs over which it shed so magnificent an

illumination. His speeches are almost the one monument of the struggle on

which a lover of English greatness can look back with pride and a sense of

worthiness, such as a churchman feels when he reads Bossuet, or an Anglican

when he turns over the pages of Taylor or of Hooker. Burke's attitude in

these high transactions is really more impressive than Chatham's, because

he was far less theatrical than Chatham; and while he was no less nobly

passionate for freedom and justice, in his passion was fused the most

strenuous political argumentation and sterling reason of state. On the

other hand he was wholly free from that quality which he ascribed to Lord

George Sackville, a man "apt to take a sort of undecided, equivocal, narrow

ground, that evades the substantial merits of the question, and puts the

whole upon some temporary, local, accidental or personal consideration." He

rose to the full height of that great argument. Burke here and everywhere

else displayed the rare art of filling his subject with generalities, and

yet never intruding commonplaces. No publicist who deals as largely in

general propositions has ever been as free from truisms; no one has ever

treated great themes with so much elevation, and yet been so wholly secured

against the pitfalls of emptiness and the vague. And it is instructive to

compare the foundation of all his pleas for the colonists with that on

which they erected their own theoretic declaration of independence. The

American leaders were impregnated with the metaphysical ideas of rights

which had come to them from the rising revolutionary school in France.

Burke no more adopted the doctrines of Jefferson in 1776 than he adopted

the doctrines of Robespierre in 1793. He says nothing about men being born

free and equal, and on the other hand he never denies the position of the

court and the country at large, that the home legislature, being sovereign,

had the right to tax the colonies. What he does say is that the exercise of

such a right was not practicable; that if it were practicable, it was

inexpedient; and that, even if this had not been inexpedient, yet, after

the colonies had taken to arms, to crush their resistance by military force

would not be more disastrous to them than it would be unfortunate for the

ancient liberties of Great Britain. Into abstract discussion he would not

enter. "Show the thing you contend for to be reason; show it to be common

sense; show it to be the means of attaining some useful end." "The question

with me is not whether you have a right to render your people miserable,

but whether it is not your interest to make them happy." There is no

difference in social spirit and doctrine between his protests against the

maxims of the English common people as to the colonists, and his protests

against the maxims of the French common people as to the court and the

nobles; and it is impossible to find a single principle either asserted or

implied in the speeches on the American revolution which was afterwards

repudiated in the writings on the revolution in France.

It is one of the signs of Burke's singular and varied eminence that hardly

any two people agree precisely which of his works to mark as the

masterpiece. Every speech or tract that he composed on a great subject

becomes, as we read it, the rival of every other. But the _Speech on

Conciliation_ (1775) has, perhaps, been more universally admired than any

of his other productions, partly because its maxims are of a simpler and

less disputable kind than those which adorn the pieces on France, and

partly because it is most strongly characterized by that deep ethical

quality which is the prime secret of Burke's great style and literary

mastery. In this speech, moreover, and in the only less powerful one of the

preceding year upon American taxation, as well as in the _Letter to the

Sheriffs of Bristol_ in 1777, we see the all-important truth conspicuously

illustrated that half of his eloquence always comes of the thoroughness

with which he gets up his case. No eminent man has ever done more than

Burke to justify the definition of genius as the consummation of the

faculty of taking pains. Labour incessant and intense, if it was not the

source, was at least an inseparable condition of his power. And magnificent

rhetorician though he was, his labour was given less to his diction than to

the facts; his heart was less in the form than the matter. It is true that

his manuscripts were blotted and smeared, and that he made so many

alterations in the proofs that the printer found it worth while to have the

whole set up in type afresh. But there is no polish in his style, as in

that of Junius for example, though there is something a thousand times

better than polish. "Why will you not allow yourself to be persuaded," said

Francis after reading the _Reflections_, "that polish is material to

preservation?" Burke always accepted the rebuke, and flung himself into

vindication of the sense, substance and veracity of what he had written.

His writing is magnificent, because he knew so much, thought so

comprehensively, and felt so strongly.

The succession of failures in America, culminating in Cornwallis's

surrender at Yorktown in October 1781, wearied the nation, and at length

the persistent and powerful attacks of the opposition began to tell. "At

this time," wrote Burke, in words of manly self-assertion, thirteen years

afterwards, "having a momentary lead (1780-1782), so aided and so

encouraged, and as a feeble instrument in a mighty hand--I do not say I

saved my country--I am sure I did my country important service. There were

few indeed at that time that did not acknowledge it. It was but one voice,

that no man in the kingdom better deserved an honourable provision should

be made for him." In the spring of 1782 Lord North resigned. It seemed as

if the court system which Burke had been denouncing [v.04 p.0830] for a

dozen years was now finally broken, and as if the party which he had been

the chief instrument in instructing, directing and keeping together must

now inevitably possess power for many years to come. Yet in a few months

the whole fabric had fallen, and the Whigs were thrown into opposition for

the rest of the century. The story cannot be omitted in the most summary

account of Burke's life. Lord Rockingham came into office on the fall of

North. Burke was rewarded for services beyond price by being made paymaster

of the forces, with the rank of a privy councillor. He had lost his seat

for Bristol two years before, in consequence of his courageous advocacy of

a measure of tolerance for the Catholics, and his still more courageous

exposure of the enormities of the commercial policy of England towards

Ireland. He sat during the rest of his parliamentary life (to 1794) for

Malton, a pocket borough first of Lord Rockingham's, then of Lord

Fitzwilliam's. Burke's first tenure of office was very brief. He had

brought forward in 1780 a comprehensive scheme of economical reform, with

the design of limiting the resources of jobbery and corruption which the

crown was able to use to strengthen its own sinister influence in

parliament. Administrative reform was, next to peace with the colonies, the

part of the scheme of the new ministry to which the king most warmly

objected. It was carried out with greater moderation than had been

foreshadowed in opposition. But at any rate Burke's own office was not

spared. While Charles Fox's father was at the pay-office (1765-1778) he

realized as the interest of the cash balances which he was allowed to

retain in his hands, nearly a quarter of a million of money. When Burke

came to this post the salary was settled at £4000 a year. He did not enjoy

the income long. In July 1782 Lord Rockingham died; Lord Shelburne took his

place; Fox, who inherited from his father a belief in Lord Shelburne's

duplicity, which his own experience of him as a colleague during the last

three months had made stronger, declined to serve under him. Burke, though

he had not encouraged Fox to take this step, still with his usual loyalty

followed him out of office. This may have been a proper thing to do if

their distrust of Shelburne was incurable, but the next step, coalition

with Lord North against him, was not only a political blunder, but a shock

to party morality, which brought speedy retribution. Either they had been

wrong, and violently wrong, for a dozen years, or else Lord North was the

guiltiest political instrument since Strafford. Burke attempted to defend

the alliance on the ground of the substantial agreement between Fox and

North in public aims. The defence is wholly untenable. The Rockingham Whigs

were as substantially in agreement on public affairs with the Shelburne

Whigs as they were with Lord North. The movement was one of the worst in

the history of English party. It served its immediate purpose, however, for

Lord Shelburne found himself (February 24, 1783) too weak to carry on the

government, and was succeeded by the members of the coalition, with the

duke of Portland for prime minister (April 2, 1783). Burke went back to his

old post at the pay-office and was soon engaged in framing and drawing the

famous India Bill. This was long supposed to be the work of Fox, who was

politically responsible for it. We may be sure that neither he nor Burke

would have devised any government for India which they did not honestly

believe to be for the advantage both of that country and of England. But it

cannot be disguised that Burke had thoroughly persuaded himself that it was

indispensable in the interests of English freedom to strengthen the party

hostile to the court. As we have already said, dread of the peril to the

constitution from the new aims of George III. was the main inspiration of

Burke's political action in home affairs for the best part of his political

life. The India Bill strengthened the anti-court party by transferring the

government of India to seven persons named in the bill, and neither

appointed nor removable by the crown. In other words, the bill gave the

government to a board chosen directly by the House of Commons; and it had

the incidental advantage of conferring on the ministerial party patronage

valued at £300,000 a year, which would remain for a fixed term of years out

of reach of the king. In a word, judging the India Bill from a party point

of view, we see that Burke was now completing the aim of his project of

economic reform. That measure had weakened the influence of the crown by

limiting its patronage. The measure for India weakened the influence of the

crown by giving a mass of patronage to the party which the king hated. But

this was not to be. The India Bill was thrown out by means of a royal

intrigue in the Lords, and the ministers were instantly dismissed (December

18, 1783). Young William Pitt, then only in his twenty-fifth year, had been

chancellor of the exchequer in Lord Shelburne's short ministry, and had

refused to enter the coalition government from an honourable repugnance to

join Lord North. He was now made prime minister. The country in the

election of the next year ratified the king's judgment against the Portland

combination; and the hopes which Burke had cherished for a political

lifetime were irretrievably ruined.

The six years that followed the great rout of the orthodox Whigs were years

of repose for the country, but it was now that Burke engaged in the most

laborious and formidable enterprise of his life, the impeachment of Warren

Hastings for high crimes and misdemeanours in his government of India. His

interest in that country was of old date. It arose partly from the fact of

William Burke's residence there, partly from his friendship with Philip

Francis, but most of all, we suspect, from the effect which he observed

Indian influence to have in demoralizing the House of Commons. "Take my

advice for once in your life," Francis wrote to Shee; "lay aside 40,000

rupees for a seat in parliament: in this country that alone makes all the

difference between somebody and nobody." The relations, moreover, between

the East India Company and the government were of the most important kind,

and occupied Burke's closest attention from the beginning of the American

war down to his own India Bill and that of Pitt and Dundas. In February

1785 he delivered one of the most famous of all his speeches, that on the

nabob of Arcot's debts. The real point of this superb declamation was

Burke's conviction that ministers supported the claims of the fraudulent

creditors in order to secure the corrupt advantages of a sinister

parliamentary interest. His proceedings against Hastings had a deeper

spring. The story of Hastings's crimes, as Macaulay says, made the blood of

Burke boil in his veins. He had a native abhorrence of cruelty, of

injustice, of disorder, of oppression, of tyranny, and all these things in

all their degrees marked Hastings's course in India. They were, moreover,

concentrated in individual cases, which exercised Burke's passionate

imagination to its profoundest depths, and raised it to such a glow of

fiery intensity as has never been rivalled in our history. For it endured

for fourteen years, and was just as burning and as terrible when Hastings

was acquitted in 1795, as in the select committee of 1781 when Hastings's

enormities were first revealed. "If I were to call for a reward," wrote

Burke, "it would be for the services in which for fourteen years, without

intermission, I showed the most industry and had the least success, I mean

in the affairs of India; they are those on which I value myself the most;

most for the importance; most for the labour; most for the judgment; most

for constancy and perseverance in the pursuit." Sheridan's speech in the

House of Commons upon the charge relative to the begums of Oude probably

excelled anything that Burke achieved, as a dazzling performance abounding

in the most surprising literary and rhetorical effects. But neither

Sheridan nor Fox was capable of that sustained and overflowing indignation

at outraged justice and oppressed humanity, that consuming moral fire,

which burst forth again and again from the chief manager of the

impeachment, with such scorching might as drove even the cool and intrepid

Hastings beyond all self-control, and made him cry out with protests and

exclamations like a criminal writhing under the scourge. Burke, no doubt,

in the course of that unparalleled trial showed some prejudice; made some

minor overstatements of his case; used many intemperances; and suffered

himself to be provoked into expressions of heat and impatience by the

cabals of the defendant and his party, and the intolerable incompetence of

the tribunal. It is one of the inscrutable perplexities of human affairs,

that in the logic of practical [v.04 p.0831] life, in order to reach

conclusions that cover enough for truth, we are constantly driven to

premises that cover too much, and that in order to secure their right

weight to justice and reason good men are forced to fling the two-edged

sword of passion into the same scale. But these excuses were mere trifles,

and well deserve to be forgiven, when we think that though the offender was

in form acquitted, yet Burke succeeded in these fourteen years of laborious

effort in laying the foundations once for all of a moral, just,

philanthropic and responsible public opinion in England with reference to

India, and in doing so performed perhaps the most magnificent service that

any statesman has ever had it in his power to render to humanity.

Burke's first decisive step against Hastings was a motion for papers in the

spring of 1786; the thanks of the House of Commons to the managers of the

impeachment were voted in the summer of 1794. But in those eight years some

of the most astonishing events in history had changed the political face of

Europe. Burke was more than sixty years old when the states-general met at

Versailles in the spring of 1789. He had taken a prominent part on the side

of freedom in the revolution which stripped England of her empire in the

West. He had taken a prominent part on the side of justice, humanity and

order in dealing with the revolution which had brought to England new

empire in the East. The same vehement passion for freedom, justice,

humanity and order was roused in him at a very early stage of the third

great revolution in his history--the revolution which overthrew the old

monarchy in France. From the first Burke looked on the events of 1789 with

doubt and misgiving. He had been in France in 1773, where he had not only

the famous vision of Marie Antoinette at Versailles, "glittering like the

morning star, full of life, and splendour and joy," but had also supped and

discussed with some of the destroyers, the encyclopaedists, "the

sophisters, economists and calculators." His first speech on his return to

England was a warning (March 17, 1773) that the props of good government

were beginning to fail under the systematic attacks of unbelievers, and

that principles were being propagated that would not leave to civil society

any stability. The apprehension never died out in his mind; and when he

knew that the principles and abstractions, the un-English dialect and

destructive dialectic, of his former acquaintances were predominant in the

National Assembly, his suspicion that the movement would end in disastrous

miscarriage waxed into certainty.

The scene grew still more sinister in his eyes after the march of the mob

from Paris to Versailles in October, and the violent transport of the king

and queen from Versailles to Paris. The same hatred of lawlessness and

violence which fired him with a divine rage against the Indian malefactors

was aroused by the violence and lawlessness of the Parisian insurgents. The

same disgust for abstractions and naked doctrines of right that had stirred

him against the pretensions of the British parliament in 1774 and 1776, was

revived in as lively a degree by political conceptions which he judged to

be identical in the French assembly of 1789. And this anger and disgust

were exasperated by the dread with which certain proceedings in England had

inspired him, that the aims, principles, methods and language which he so

misdoubted or abhorred in France were likely to infect the people of Great

Britain.

In November 1790 the town, which had long been eagerly expecting a

manifesto from Burke's pen, was electrified by the _Reflections on the

Revolution in France, and on the proceedings in certain societies in London

relative to that event_. The generous Windham made an entry in his diary of

his reception of the new book. "What shall be said," he added, "of the

state of things, when it is remembered that the writer is a man decried,

persecuted and proscribed; not being much valued even by his own party, and

by half the nation considered as little better than an ingenious madman?"

But the writer now ceased to be decried, persecuted and proscribed, and his

book was seized as the expression of that new current of opinion in Europe

which the more recent events of the Revolution had slowly set flowing. Its

vogue was instant and enormous. Eleven editions were exhausted in little

more than a year, and there is probably not much exaggeration in the

estimate that 30,000 copies were sold before Burke's death seven years

afterwards. George III. was extravagantly delighted; Stanislaus of Poland

sent Burke words of thanks and high glorification and a gold medal.

Catherine of Russia, the friend of Voltaire and the benefactress of

Diderot, sent her congratulations to the man who denounced French

philosophers as miscreants and wretches. "One wonders," Romilly said, by

and by, "that Burke is not ashamed at such success." Mackintosh replied to

him temperately in the _Vindiciae Gallicae_, and Thomas Paine replied to

him less temperately but far more trenchantly and more shrewdly in the

_Rights of Man_. Arthur Young, with whom he had corresponded years before

on the mysteries of deep ploughing and fattening hogs, added a cogent

polemical chapter to that ever admirable work, in which he showed that he

knew as much more than Burke about the old system of France as he knew more

than Burke about soils and roots. Philip Francis, to whom he had shown the

proof-sheets, had tried to dissuade Burke from publishing his performance.

The passage about Marie Antoinette, which has since become a stock piece in

books of recitation, seemed to Francis a mere piece of foppery; for was she

not a Messalina and a jade? "I know nothing of your story of Messalina,"

answered Burke; "am I obliged to prove judicially the virtues of all those

I shall see suffering every kind of wrong and contumely and risk of life,

before I endeavour to interest others in their sufferings?... Are not high

rank, great splendour of descent, great personal elegance and outward

accomplishments ingredients of moment in forming the interest we take in

the misfortunes of men?... I tell you again that the recollection of the

manner in which I saw the queen of France in 1774, and the contrast between

that brilliancy, splendour and beauty, with the prostrate homage of a

nation to her, and the abominable scene of 1780 which I was describing,

_did_ draw tears from me and wetted my paper. These tears came again into

my eyes almost as often as I looked at the description,--they may again.

You do not believe this fact, nor that these are my real feelings; but that

the whole is affected, or as you express it, downright foppery. My friend,

I tell you it is truth; and that it is true and will be truth when you and

I are no more; and will exist as long as men with their natural feelings

shall exist" (_Corr._ iii. 139).

Burke's conservatism was, as such a passage as this may illustrate, the

result partly of strong imaginative associations clustering round the more

imposing symbols of social continuity, partly of a sort of corresponding

conviction in his reason that there are certain permanent elements of human

nature out of which the European order had risen and which that order

satisfied, and of whose immense merits, as of its mighty strength, the

revolutionary party in France were most fatally ignorant. When Romilly saw

Diderot in 1783, the great encyclopaedic chief assured him that submission

to kings and belief in God would be at an end all over the world in a very

few years. When Condorcet described the Tenth Epoch in the long development

of human progress, he was sure not only that fulness of light and

perfection of happiness would come to the sons of men, but that they were

coming with all speed. Only those who know the incredible rashness of the

revolutionary doctrine in the mouths of its most powerful professors at

that time; only those who know their absorption in ends and their

inconsiderateness about means, can feel how profoundly right Burke was in

all this part of his contention. Napoleon, who had begun life as a disciple

of Rousseau, confirmed the wisdom of the philosophy of Burke when he came

to make the Concordat. That measure was in one sense the outcome of a mere

sinister expediency, but that such a measure was expedient at all sufficed

to prove that Burke's view of the present possibilities of social change

was right, and the view of the Rousseauites and too sanguine

Perfectibilitarians wrong. As we have seen, Burke's very first niece, the

satire on Bolingbroke, sprang from his conviction that merely rationalistic

or destructive criticism, applied to the vast complexities of man [v.04

p.0832] in the social union, is either mischievous or futile, and

mischievous exactly in proportion as it is not futile.

To discuss Burke's writings on the Revolution would be to write first a

volume upon the abstract theory of society, and then a second volume on the

history of France. But we may make one or two further remarks. One of the

most common charges against Burke was that he allowed his imagination and

pity to be touched only by the sorrows of kings and queens, and forgot the

thousands of oppressed and famine-stricken toilers of the land. "No tears

are shed for nations," cried Francis, whose sympathy for the Revolution was

as passionate as Burke's execration of it. "When the provinces are scourged

to the bone by a mercenary and merciless military power, and every drop of

its blood and substance extorted from it by the edicts of a royal council,

the case seems very tolerable to those who are not involved in it. When

thousands after thousands are dragooned out of their country for the sake

of their religion, or sent to row in the galleys for selling salt against

law,--when the liberty of every individual is at the mercy of every

prostitute, pimp or parasite that has access to power or any of its basest

substitutes,--my mind, I own, is not at once prepared to be satisfied with

gentle palliatives for such disorders" (_Francis to Burke_, November 3,

1790). This is a very terse way of putting a crucial objection to Burke's

whole view of French affairs in 1789. His answer was tolerably simple. The

Revolution, though it had made an end of the Bastille, did not bring the

only real practical liberty, that is to say, the liberty which comes with

settled courts of justice, administering settled laws, undisturbed by

popular fury, independent of everything but law, and with a clear law for

their direction. The people, he contended, were no worse off under the old

monarchy than they will be in the long run under assemblies that are bound

by the necessity of feeding one part of the community at the grievous

charge of other parts, as necessitous as those who are so fed; that are

obliged to flatter those who have their lives at their disposal by

tolerating acts of doubtful influence on commerce and agriculture, and for

the sake of precarious relief to sow the seeds of lasting want; that will

be driven to be the instruments of the violence of others from a sense of

their own weakness, and, by want of authority to assess equal and

proportioned charges upon all, will be compelled to lay a strong hand upon

the possessions of a part. As against the moderate section of the

Constituent Assembly this was just.

One secret of Burke's views of the Revolution was the contempt which he had

conceived for the popular leaders in the earlier stages of the movement. In

spite of much excellence of intention, much heroism, much energy, it is

hardly to be denied that the leaders whom that movement brought to the

surface were almost without exception men of the poorest political

capacity. Danton, no doubt, was abler than most of the others, yet the

timidity or temerity with which he allowed himself to be vanquished by

Robespierre showed that even he was not a man of commanding quality. The

spectacle of men so rash, and so incapable of controlling the forces which

they seemed to have presumptuously summoned, excited in Burke both

indignation and contempt. And the leaders of the Constituent who came first

on the stage, and hoped to make a revolution with rose-water, and hardly

realized any more than Burke did how rotten was the structure which they

had undertaken to build up, almost deserved his contempt, even if, as is

certainly true, they did not deserve his indignation. It was only by

revolutionary methods, which are in their essence and for a time as

arbitrary as despotic methods, that the knot could be cut. Burke's vital

error was his inability to see that a root and branch revolution was, under

the conditions, inevitable. His cardinal position, from which he deduced so

many important conclusions, namely, that, the parts and organs of the old

constitution of France were sound, and only needed moderate invigoration,

is absolutely mistaken and untenable. There was not a single chamber in the

old fabric that was not crumbling and tottering. The court was frivolous,

vacillating, stone deaf and stone blind; the gentry were amiable, but

distinctly bent to the very last on holding to their privileges, and they

were wholly devoid both of the political experience that only comes of

practical responsibility for public affairs, and of the political sagacity

that only comes of political experience. The parliaments or tribunals were

nests of faction and of the deepest social incompetence. The very sword of

the state broke short in the king's hand. If the king or queen could either

have had the political genius of Frederick the Great, or could have had the

good fortune to find a minister with that genius, and the good sense and

good faith to trust and stand by him against mobs of aristocrats and mobs

of democrats; if the army had been sound and the states-general had been

convoked at Bourges or Tours instead of at Paris, then the type of French

monarchy and French society might have been modernized without convulsion.

But none of these conditions existed.

When he dealt with the affairs of India Burke passed over the circumstances

of our acquisition of power in that continent. "There is a sacred veil to

be drawn over the beginnings of all government," he said. "The first step

to empire is revolution, by which power is conferred; the next is good

laws, good order, good institutions, to give that power stability." Exactly

on this broad principle of political force, revolution was the first step

to the assumption by the people of France of their own government. Granted

that the Revolution was inevitable and indispensable, how was the nation to

make the best of it? And how were surrounding nations to make the best of

it? This was the true point of view. But Burke never placed himself at such

a point. He never conceded the postulate, because, though he knew France

better than anybody in England except Arthur Young, he did not know her

condition well enough. "Alas!" he said, "they little know how many a weary

step is to be taken before they can form themselves into a mass which has a

true political personality."

Burke's view of French affairs, however consistent with all his former

political conceptions, put an end to more than one of his old political

friendships. He had never been popular in the House of Commons, and the

vehemence, sometimes amounting to fury, which he had shown in the debates

on the India Bill, on the regency, on the impeachment of Hastings, had made

him unpopular even among men on his own side. In May 1789--that memorable

month of May in which the states-general marched in impressive array to

hear a sermon at the church of Notre Dame at Versailles--a vote of censure

had actually been passed on him in the House of Commons for a too severe

expression used against Hastings. Fox, who led the party, and Sheridan, who

led Fox, were the intimates of the prince of Wales; and Burke would have

been as much out of place in that circle of gamblers and profligates as

Milton would have been out of place in the court of the Restoration. The

prince, as somebody said, was like his father in having closets within

cabinets and cupboards within closets. When the debates on the regency were

at their height we have Burke's word that he was not admitted to the

private counsels of the party. Though Fox and he were on friendly terms in

society, yet Burke admits that for a considerable period before 1790 there

had been between them "distance, coolness and want of confidence, if not

total alienation on his part." The younger Whigs had begun to press for

shorter parliaments, for the ballot, for redistribution of political power.

Burke had never looked with any favour on these projects. His experience of

the sentiment of the populace in the two greatest concerns of his

life,--American affairs and Indian affairs,--had not been likely to

prepossess him in favour of the popular voice as the voice of superior

political wisdom. He did not absolutely object to some remedy in the state

of representation (_Corr._ ii. 387), still he vigorously resisted such

proposals as the duke of Richmond's in 1780 for manhood suffrage. The

general ground was this:--"The machine itself is well enough to answer any

good purpose, provided the materials were sound. But what signifies the

arrangement of rottenness?"

Bad as the parliaments of George III. were, they contained their full share

of eminent and capable men; and, what is more, their very defects were the

exact counterparts of what we now look back upon as the prevailing

stupidity in the country. [v.04 p.0833] What Burke valued was good

government. His _Report on the Causes of the Duration of Mr Hastings's

Trial_ shows how wide and sound were his views of law reform. His _Thoughts

on Scarcity_ attest his enlightenment on the central necessities of trade

and manufacture, and even furnished arguments to Cobden fifty years

afterwards. Pitt's parliaments were competent to discuss, and willing to

pass, all measures for which the average political intelligence of the

country was ripe. Burke did not believe that altered machinery was at that

time needed to improve the quality of legislation. If wiser legislation

followed the great reform of 1832, Burke would have said this was because

the political intelligence of the country had improved.

Though averse at all times to taking up parliamentary reform, he thought

all such projects downright crimes in the agitation of 1791-1792. This was

the view taken by Burke, but it was not the view of Fox, nor of Sheridan,

nor of Francis, nor of many others of his party, and difference of opinion

here was naturally followed by difference of opinion upon affairs in

France. Fox, Grey, Windham, Sheridan, Francis, Lord Fitzwilliam, and most

of the other Whig leaders, welcomed the Revolution in France. And so did

Pitt, too, for some time. "How much the greatest event it is that ever

happened in the world," cried Fox, with the exaggeration of a man ready to

dance the carmagnole, "and how much the best!" The dissension between a man

who felt so passionately as Burke, and a man who spoke so impulsively as

Charles Fox, lay in the very nature of things. Between Sheridan and Burke

there was an open breach in the House of Commons upon the Revolution so

early as February 1790, and Sheridan's influence with Fox was strong. This

divergence of opinion destroyed all the elation that Burke might well have

felt at his compliments from kings, his gold medals, his twelve editions.

But he was too fiercely in earnest in his horror of Jacobinism to allow

mere party associations to guide him. In May 1791 the thundercloud burst,

and a public rupture between Burke and Fox took place in the House of

Commons.

The scene is famous in English parliamentary annals. The minister had

introduced a measure for the division of the province of Canada and for the

establishment of a local legislature in each division. Fox in the course of

debate went out of his way to laud the Revolution, and to sneer at some of

the most effective passages in the _Reflections_. Burke was not present,

but he announced his determination to reply. On the day when the Quebec

Bill was to come on again, Fox called upon Burke, and the pair walked

together from Burke's house in Duke Street down to Westminster. The Quebec

Bill was recommitted, and Burke at once rose and soon began to talk his

usual language against the Revolution, the rights of man, and Jacobinism

whether English or French. There was a call to order. Fox, who was as sharp

and intolerant in the House as he was amiable out of it, interposed with

some words of contemptuous irony. Pitt, Grey, Lord Sheffield, all plunged

into confused and angry debate as to whether the French Revolution was a

good thing, and whether the French Revolution, good or bad, had anything to

do with the Quebec Bill. At length Fox, in seconding a motion for confining

the debate to its proper subject, burst into the fatal question beyond the

subject, taxing Burke with inconsistency, and taunting him with having

forgotten that ever-admirable saying of his own about the insurgent

colonists, that he did not know how to draw an indictment against a whole

nation. Burke replied in tones of firm self-repression; complained of the

attack that had been made upon him; reviewed Fox's charges of

inconsistency; enumerated the points on which they had disagreed, and

remarked that such disagreements had never broken their friendship. But

whatever the risk of enmity, and however bitter the loss of friendship, he

would never cease from the warning to flee from the French constitution.

"But there is no loss of friends," said Fox in an eager undertone. "Yes,"

said Burke, "there _is_ a loss of friends. I know the penalty of toy

conduct. I have done my duty at the price of my friend--our friendship is

at an end." Fox rose, but was so overcome that for some moments he could

not speak. At length, his eyes streaming with tears, and in a broken voice,

he deplored the breach of a twenty years' friendship on a political

question. Burke was inexorable. To him the political question was so vivid,

so real, so intense, as to make all personal sentiment no more than dust in

the balance. Burke confronted Jacobinism with the relentlessness of a

Jacobin. The rupture was never healed, and Fox and he had no relations with

one another henceforth beyond such formal interviews as took place in the

manager's box in Westminster Hall in connexion with the impeachment.

A few months afterwards Burke published the _Appeal from the New to the Old

Whigs_, a grave, calm and most cogent vindication of the perfect

consistency of his criticisms upon the English Revolution of 1688 and upon

the French Revolution of 1789, with the doctrines of the great Whigs who

conducted and afterwards defended in Anne's reign the transfer of the crown

from James to William and Mary. The _Appeal_ was justly accepted as a

satisfactory performance for the purpose with which it was written. Events,

however, were doing more than words could do, to confirm the public opinion

of Burke's sagacity and foresight. He had always divined by the instinct of

hatred that the French moderates must gradually be swept away by the

Jacobins, and now it was all coming true. The humiliation of the king and

queen after their capture at Varennes; the compulsory acceptance of the

constitution; the plain incompetence of the new Legislative Assembly; the

growing violence of the Parisian mob, and the ascendency of the Jacobins at

the Common Hall; the fierce day of the 20th of June (1792), when the mob

flooded the Tuileries, and the bloodier day of the 10th of August, when the

Swiss guard was massacred and the royal family flung into prison; the

murders in the prisons in September; the trial and execution of the king in

January (1793); the proscription of the Girondins in June, the execution of

the queen in October--if we realize the impression likely to be made upon

the sober and homely English imagination by such a heightening of horror by

horror, we may easily understand how people came to listen to Burke's voice

as the voice of inspiration, and to look on his burning anger as the holy

fervour of a prophet of the Lord.

Fox still held to his old opinions as stoutly as he could, and condemned

and opposed the war which England had declared against the French republic.

Burke, who was profoundly incapable of the meanness of letting personal

estrangement blind his eyes to what was best for the commonwealth, kept

hoping against hope that each new trait of excess in France would at length

bring the great Whig leader to a better mind. He used to declaim by the

hour in the conclaves at Burlington House upon the necessity of securing

Fox; upon the strength which his genius would lend to the administration in

its task of grappling with the sanguinary giant; upon the impossibility, at

least, of doing either with him or without him. Fox's most important

political friends who had long wavered, at length, to Burke's great

satisfaction, went over to the side of the government. In July 1794 the

duke of Portland, Lord Fitzwilliam, Windham and Grenville took office under

Pitt. Fox was left with a minority which was satirically said not to have

been more than enough to fill a hackney coach. "That is a calumny," said

one of the party, "we should have filled two." The war was prosecuted with

the aid of both the great parliamentary parties of the country, and with

the approval of the great bulk of the nation. Perhaps the one man in

England who in his heart approved of it less than any other was William

Pitt. The difference between Pitt and Burke was nearly as great as that

between Burke and Fox. Burke would be content with nothing short of a

crusade against France, and war to the death with her rulers. "I cannot

persuade myself," he said, "that this war bears any the least resemblance

to any that has ever existed in the world. I cannot persuade myself that

any examples or any reasonings drawn from other wars and other politics are

at all applicable to it" (_Corr._ iv. 219). Pitt, on the other hand, as

Lord Russell truly says, treated Robespierre and Carnot as he would have

treated any other French rulers, whose ambition was to be resisted, and

whose interference in the affairs of other nations was to be checked. And

he entered upon the matter [v.04 p.0834] in the spirit of a man of

business, by sending ships to seize some islands belonging to France in the

West Indies, so as to make certain of repayment of the expenses of the war.

In the summer of 1794 Burke was struck to the ground by a blow to his

deepest affection in life, and he never recovered from it. His whole soul

was wrapped up in his only son, of whose abilities he had the most

extravagant estimate and hope. All the evidence goes to show that Richard

Burke was one of the most presumptuous and empty-headed of human beings.

"He is the most impudent and opiniative fellow I ever knew," said Wolfe

Tone. Gilbert Elliot, a very different man, gives the same account.

"Burke," he says, describing a dinner party at Lord Fitzwilliam's in 1793,

"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 oppressive with animal spirits and

brogue; and his cousin, William Burke, who is just returned unexpectedly

from India, as much ruined as when he went years ago, and who is a fresh

charge on any prospects of power Burke may ever have. Mrs Burke has in her

train Miss French [Burke's niece], the most perfect _She Paddy_ that ever

was caught. Notwithstanding these disadvantages Burke is in himself a sort

of power in the state. It is not too much to say that he is a sort of power

in Europe, though totally without any of those means or the smallest share

in them which give or maintain power in other men." Burke accepted the

position of a power in Europe seriously. Though no man was ever more free

from anything like the egoism of the intellectual coxcomb, yet he abounded

in that active self-confidence and self-assertion which is natural in men

who are conscious of great powers, and strenuous in promoting great causes.

In the summer of 1791 he despatched his son to Coblenz to give advice to

the royalist exiles, then under the direction of Calonne, and to report to

him at Beaconsfield their disposition and prospects. Richard Burke was

received with many compliments, but of course nothing came of his mission,

and the only impression that remains with the reader of his prolix story is

his tale of the two royal brothers, who afterwards became Louis XVIII. and

Charles X., meeting after some parting, and embracing one another with many

tears on board a boat in the middle of the Rhine, while some of the

courtiers raised a cry of "Long live the king"--the king who had a few

weeks before been carried back in triumph to his capital with Mayor Pétion

in his coach. When we think of the pass to which things had come in Paris

by this time, and of the unappeasable ferment that boiled round the court,

there is a certain touch of the ludicrous in the notion of poor Richard

Burke writing to Louis XVI. a letter of wise advice how to comport himself.