IN IRELAND--PARLIAMENT--BEACONSFIELD
Burke was thirty years old before he approached even the threshold of
the arena in which he was destined to be so great a figure. He had
made a mark in literature, and it was to literature rather than to
public affairs that his ambition turned. He had naturally become
acquainted with the brother-authors who haunted the coffee-houses in
Fleet Street; and Burke, along with his father-in-law, Dr. Nugent,
was one of the first members of the immortal club where Johnson did
conversational battle with all comers. We shall, in a later chapter,
have something to say on Burke's friendships with the followers of
his first profession, and on the active sympathy with which he helped
those who were struggling into authorship. Meanwhile, the fragments
that remain of his own attempts in this direction are no considerable
contributions. His _Hints for an Essay on the Drama_ are jejune and
infertile, when compared with the vigorous and original thought of
Diderot and Lessing at about the same period. He wrote an Account of
the European Settlements in America. His _Abridgment of the History of
England_ comes down no further than to the reign of John. A much more
important undertaking than his history of the past was his design for
a yearly chronicle of the present. The _Annual Register_ began to
appear in 1759. Dodsley, the bookseller of Pall Mall, provided the
sinews of war, and he gave Burke a hundred pounds a year for his
survey of the great events which were then passing in the world. The
scheme was probably born of the circumstances of the hour, for this
was the climax of the Seven Years' War. The clang of arms was heard in
every quarter of the globe, and in East and West new lands were being
brought under the dominion of Great Britain.
In this exciting crisis of national affairs, Burke began to be
acquainted with public men. In 1759 he was introduced, probably by
Lord Charlemont, to William Gerard Hamilton, who only survives in our
memories by his nickname of Single-speech. As a matter of fact, he
made many speeches in Parliament, and some good ones, but none so
good as the first, delivered in a debate in 1755, in which Pitt, Fox,
Grenville, and Murray all took part, and were all outshone by the
new luminary. But the new luminary never shone again with its first
brilliance. He sought Burke out on the strength of the success of the
_Vindication of Natural Society_, and he seems to have had a taste for
good company. Horace Walpole describes a dinner at his house in the
summer of 1761. "There were Garrick," he says, "and a young Mr. Burke,
who wrote a book in the style of Lord Bolingbroke, that is much
admired. He is a sensible man, but has not worn off his authorism yet,
and thinks there is nothing so charming as writers, and to be one. He
will know better one of these days." The prophecy came true in time,
but it was Burke's passion for authorism that eventually led to a
rupture with his first patron. Hamilton was a man of ability, but
selfish and unreasonable. Dr. Leland afterwards described him
compendiously as a sullen, vain, proud, selfish, canker-hearted,
envious reptile.
In 1761 Hamilton went to Ireland as secretary to Lord Halifax, and
Burke accompanied him in some indefinite capacity. "The absenteeism of
her men of genius," an eminent historian has said, "was a worse wrong
to Ireland than the absenteeism of her landlords. If Edmund Burke had
remained in the country where Providence had placed him, he might have
changed the current of its history." [1] It is at least to be said
that Burke was never so absorbed in other affairs as to forget the
peculiar interests of his native land. We have his own word, and his
career does not belie it, that in the elation with which he was filled
on being elected a member of Parliament, what was first and uppermost
in his thoughts was the hope of being somewhat useful to the place of
his birth and education; and to the last he had in it "a dearness of
instinct more than he could justify to reason." In fact the affairs
of Ireland had a most important part in Burke's life at one or two
critical moments, and this is as convenient a place as we are likely
to find for describing in a few words what were the issues. The brief
space can hardly be grudged in an account of a great political writer,
for Ireland had furnished the chief ordeal, test, and standard of
English statesmen.
[Footnote 1: Fronde's _Ireland_, ii. 214.]
Ireland in the middle of the eighteenth century was to England just
what the American colonies would have been, if they had contained,
besides the European settlers, more than twice their number of
unenslaved negroes. After the suppression of the great rebellion of
Tyrconnel by William of Orange, nearly the whole of the land was
confiscated, the peasants were made beggars and outlaws, the Penal
Laws against the Catholics were enacted and enforced, and the
grand reign of Protestant Ascendancy began in all its vileness and
completeness. The Protestants and landlords were supreme; the peasants
and the Catholics were prostrate in despair. The Revolution brought
about in Ireland just the reverse of what it effected in England. Here
it delivered the body of the nation from the attempted supremacy of a
small sect. There it made a small sect supreme over the body of the
nation. "It was, to say the truth," Burke wrote, "not a revolution but
a conquest," and the policy of conquest was treated as the just and
normal system of government. The last conquest of England was in the
eleventh century. The last conquest of Ireland was at the very end of
the seventeenth.
Sixty years after the event, when Burke revisited Ireland, some
important changes had taken place. The English settlers of the
beginning of the century had formed an Irish interest. They had become
Anglo-Irish, just as the colonists still further west had formed a
colonial interest and become Anglo-American. The same conduct on
the part of the mother country promoted the growth of these hostile
interests in both cases. The commercial policy pursued by England
towards America was identical with that pursued towards Ireland. The
industry of the Anglo-Irish traders was restricted, their commerce
and even their production fettered, their prosperity checked, for the
benefit of the merchants of Manchester and Bristol. _Crescit Roma
Albae ruinis_. "The bulk of the people," said Stone, the Primate, "are
not regularly either lodged, clothed, or fed; and those things which
in England are called necessaries of life, are to us only accidents,
and we can, and in many places do, subsist without them." On the
other hand, the peasantry had gradually taken heart to resent their
spoliation and attempted extirpation, and in 1761 their misery
under the exactions of landlords and a church which tried to spread
Christianity by the brotherly agency of the tithe-proctor, gave birth
to Whiteboyism--a terrible spectre, which, under various names and
with various modifications, has ridden Ireland down to our own time.
Burke saw the Protestant traders of the dependency the victims of
the colonial and commercial system; the Catholic landowners legally
dispossessed by the operation of the penal laws; the Catholic
peasantry deeply penetrated with an insurgent and vindictive spirit;
and the Imperial Government standing very much aloof, and leaving the
country to the tender mercies of the Undertakers and some Protestant
churchmen. The Anglo-Irish were bitterly discontented with the
mother country; and the Catholic native Irish were regarded by their
Protestant oppressors with exactly that combination of intense
contempt and loathing, and intense rage and terror, which their
American counterpart would have divided between the Negro and the Red
Indian. To the Anglo-Irish the native peasant was as odious as the
first, and as terrible as the second. Even at the close of the century
Burke could declare that the various descriptions of the people were
kept as much apart as if they were not only separate nations, but
separate species. There were thousands, he says, who had never talked
to a Roman Catholic in their whole lives, unless they happened to talk
to a gardener's workman or some other labourer of the second or third
order; while a little time before this they were so averse to have
them near their persons, that they would not employ even those who
could never find their way beyond the stables. Chesterfield, a
thoroughly impartial and just observer, said in 1764 that the poor
people in Ireland were used worse than negroes by their masters and
the middlemen. We should never forget that in the transactions with
the English Government during the eighteenth century, the people
concerned were not the Irish, but the Anglo-Irish, the colonists
of 1691. They were an aristocracy, as Adam Smith said of them, not
founded in the natural and respectable distinctions of birth and
fortune, but in the most odious of all distinctions, those of
religious and political prejudices--distinctions which, more than any
other, animate both the insolence of the oppressors and the hatred and
indignation of the oppressed.
The directions in which Irish improvement would move were clear from
the middle of the century to men with much less foresight than
Burke had. The removal of all commercial restrictions, either by
Independence or Union, on the one hand, and the gradual emancipation
of the Catholics, on the other, were the two processes to which every
consideration of good government manifestly pointed. The first proved
a much shorter and simpler process than the second. To the first
the only obstacle was the blindness and selfishness of the English
merchants. The second had to overcome the virulent opposition of the
tyrannical Protestant faction in Ireland, and the disgraceful but
deep-rooted antipathies of the English nation. The history of the
relation between the mother country and her dependency during Brake's
life, may be characterised as a commercial and legislative struggle
between the imperial government and the Anglo-Irish interest, in which
each side for its own convenience, as the turn served, drew support
from the Catholic majority.
A Whiteboy outbreak, attended by the usual circumstances of disorder
and violence, took place while Burke was in Ireland. It suited the
interests of faction to represent these commotions as the symptoms of
a deliberate rebellion. The malcontents were represented as carrying
on treasonable correspondence, sometimes with Spain and sometimes
with France; they were accused of receiving money and arms from their
foreign sympathisers, and of aiming at throwing off the English rule.
Burke says that he had means and the desire of informing himself to
the bottom upon the matter, and he came strongly to the conclusion
that this was not a true view of what had happened. What had happened
was due, he thought, to no plot, but to superficial and fortuitous
circumstances. He consequently did not shrink from describing it as
criminal, that the king's Catholic subjects in Ireland should have
been subjected, on no good grounds, to harassing persecution, and that
numbers of them should have been ruined in fortune, imprisoned, tried,
and capitally executed for a rebellion which was no rebellion at all.
The episode is only important as illustrating the strong and manly
temper in which Burke, unlike too many of his countrymen with fortunes
to make by English favour, uniformly considered the circumstances of
his country. It was not until a later time that he had an opportunity
of acting conspicuously on her behalf, but whatever influence he came
to acquire with his party was unflinchingly used against the cruelty
of English prejudice.
Burke appears to have remained in Ireland for two years (1761-63). In
1763 Hamilton, who had found him an invaluable auxiliary, procured for
him, principally with the aid of the Primate Stone, a pension of three
hundred pounds a year from the Irish Treasury. In thanking him for
this service, Burke proceeded to bargain that the obligation should
not bind him to give to his patron the whole of his time. He insisted
on being left with a discreet liberty to continue a little work which
he had as a rent-charge upon his thoughts. Whatever advantages he had
acquired, he says, had been due to literary reputation, and he could
only hope for a continuance of such advantages on condition of doing
something to keep the same reputation alive. What this literary design
was, we do not know with certainty. It is believed to have been a
history of England, of which, as I have said, a fragment remains.
Whatever the work may have been, it was an offence to Hamilton. With
an irrational stubbornness, that may well astound us when we think of
the noble genius that he thus wished to confine to paltry personal
duties, he persisted that Burke should bind himself to his service for
life, and to the exclusion of other interests. "To circumscribe my
hopes," cried Burke, "to give up even the possibility of liberty, to
annihilate myself for ever!" He threw up the pension, which he had
held for two years, and declined all further connection with Hamilton,
whom he roundly described as an infamous scoundrel. "Six of the
best years of my life he took me from every pursuit of my literary
reputation, or of improvement of my fortune.... In all this time you
may easily conceive how much I felt at seeing myself left behind
by almost all of my contemporaries. There never was a season more
favourable for any man who chose to enter into the career of public
life; and I think I am not guilty of ostentation in supposing my own
moral character and my industry, my friends and connections, when Mr.
Hamilton first sought my acquaintance, were not at all inferior to
those of several whose fortune is at this day upon a very different
footing from mine."
It was not long before a more important opening offered itself, which
speedily brought Burke into the main stream of public life. In the
summer of 1765 a change of ministry took place. It was the third since
the king's accession five years ago. First, Pitt had been disgraced,
and the old Duke of Newcastle dismissed. Then Bute came into power,
but Bute quailed before the storm of calumny and hate which his Scotch
nationality, and the supposed source of his power over the king, had
raised in every town in England. After Lord Bute, George Grenville
undertook the Government. Before he had been many months in office,
he had sown the seeds of war in the colonies, wearied Parliament,
and disgusted the king. In June 1765 Grenville was dismissed. With
profound reluctance the king had no other choice than to summon Lord
Rockingham, and Lord Rockingham, in a happy moment for himself and his
party, was induced to offer Burke a post as his private secretary.
A government by country gentlemen is too apt to be a government of
ignorance, and Lord Rockingham was without either experience or
knowledge. He felt, or friends felt for him, the advantage of having
at his side a man who was chiefly known as an author in the service
of Dodsley, and as having conducted the _Annual Register_ with great
ability, but who even then was widely spoken of as nothing less than
an encyclopaedia of political knowledge.
It is commonly believed that Burke was commended to Lord Rockingham by
William Fitzherbert. Fitzherbert was President of the Board of Trade
in the new government, but he is more likely to be remembered as Dr.
Johnson's famous example of the truth of the observation, that a
man will please more upon the whole by negative qualities than by
positive, because he was the most acceptable man in London, and yet
overpowered nobody by the superiority of his talents, made no man
think worse of himself by being his rival, seemed always to listen,
did not oblige you to hear much from him, and did not oppose what
you said. Besides Fitzherbert's influence, we have it on Burke's own
authority that his promotion was partly due to that mysterious person,
William Burke, who was at the same time appointed an under-secretary
of state. There must have been unpleasant rumours afloat as to the
Burke connection, and we shall presently consider what they were
worth. Meanwhile, it is enough to say that the old Duke of Newcastle
hurried to the new premier, and told him the appointment would never
do; that the new secretary was not only an Irish adventurer, which was
true, but that he was an Irish papist, which was not true; that he was
a Jesuit, that he was a spy from Saint Omer's, and that his real name
was O'Bourke. Lord Rockingham behaved like a man of sense and honour,
sent for Burke, and repeated to him what he had heard. Burke warmly
denounced the truthlessness of the Duke's tattle. He insisted that
the reports which his chief had heard would probably, even unknown to
himself, create in his mind such suspicions as would stand in the way
of a thorough confidence. No earthly consideration, he said, should
induce him to continue in relations with a man whose trust in him was
not entire; and he pressed his resignation. To this Lord Rockingham
would not consent, and from that time until his death, seventeen
years afterwards, the relations between them were those of loyal and
honourable service on the one hand, and generous and appreciative
friendship on the other. Six and twenty years afterwards (1791) Burke
remembered the month in which he had first become connected with a
man whose memory, he said, will ever be precious to Englishmen of
all parties, as long as the ideas of honour and virtue, public and
private, are understood and cherished in this nation.
The Rockingham ministry remained in office for a year and twenty days
(1765-66). About the middle of this term (December 26, 1765) Burke was
returned to Parliament for the borough of Wendover, by the influence
of Lord Verney, who owned it, and who also returned William Burke for
another borough. Lord Verney was an Irish peer, with large property in
Buckinghamshire; he now represented that county in Parliament. It
was William Burke's influence with Lord Verney that procured for his
namesake the seat at Wendover. Burke made his first speech in the
House of Commons a few days after the opening of the session of 1766
(January 27), and was honoured by a compliment from Pitt, still the
Great Commoner. A week later he spoke again on the same momentous
theme, the complaints of the American colonists, and his success was
so marked that good judges predicted, in the stiff phraseology of the
time, that he would soon add the palm of the orator to the laurel of
the writer and the philosopher. The friendly Dr. Johnson wrote to
Langton that Burke had gained more reputation than any man at his
first appearance had ever gained before. The session was a great
triumph to the new member, but it brought neither strength nor
popularity to the administration. At the end of it the king dismissed
them, and the Chatham Government was formed--that strange combination
which has been made famous by Burke's description of it as a piece of
joinery so crossly indented and whimsically dovetailed, such a piece
of diversified mosaic, such a tessellated pavement without cement,
that it was indeed a very curious show, but utterly unsafe to touch
and unsure to stand upon. There was no obvious reason why Burke should
not have joined the new ministry. The change was at first one of
persons rather than of principles or of measures. To put himself, as
Burke afterwards said, out of the way of the negotiations which were
then being carried on very eagerly and through many channels with the
Earl of Chatham, he went to Ireland very soon after the change of
ministry. He was free from party engagements, and more than this, he
was free at the express desire of his friends; for on the very day of
his return the Marquis of Rockingham wished him to accept office under
the new system. Burke "believes he might have had such a situation,
but he cheerfully took his fate with his party." In a short time he
rendered his party the first of a long series of splendid literary
services by writing his _Observations on the Present State of the
Nation_ (1769). It was a reply to a pamphlet by George Grenville, in
which the disappointed minister accused his successors of ruining the
country. Burke, in answering the charge, showed a grasp of commercial
and fiscal details at least equal to that of Grenville himself, then
considered the first man of his time in dealing with the national
trade and resources. To this easy mastery of the special facts of the
discussion, Burke added the far rarer art of lighting them up by broad
principles, and placing himself and his readers at the highest and
most effective point of view for commanding their general bearings.
If Burke had been the Irish adventurer that his enemies described, he
might well have seized with impatience the opening to office that the
recent exhibition of his powers in the House of Commons had now made
accessible to him. There was not a man in Great Britain to whom the
emoluments of office would have been more useful. It is one of the
standing mysteries in literary biography how Burke could think of
entering Parliament without any means that anybody can now trace of
earning a fitting livelihood. Yet at this time Burke, whom we saw not
long ago writing for the booksellers, had become affluent enough to
pay a yearly allowance to Barry, the painter, in order to enable him
to study the pictures in the great European galleries, and to make a
prolonged residence at Rome. A little later he took a step which
makes the riddle still more difficult, and which has given abundant
employment to wits who are _maximi in minimis_, and think that every
question which they can ask, yet to which history has thought it worth
while to leave no answer, is somehow a triumph of their own learning
and dialectic.
In 1769 Burke purchased a house and lands known as Gregories, in the
parishes of Penn and Beaconsfield, in the county of Bucks. It has
often been asked, and naturally enough, how a man who, hardly more
than a few months before, was still contented to earn an extra hundred
pounds a year by writing for Dodsley, should now have launched out as
the buyer of a fine house and estate, which cost upwards of twenty-two
thousand pounds, which could not be kept up on less than two thousand
five hundred a year, and of which the returns did not amount to
one-fifth of that sum. Whence did he procure the money, and what is
perhaps more difficult to answer, how came he first to entertain the
idea of a design so ill-proportioned to anything that we can now
discern in his means and prospects? The common answer from Burke's
enemies, and even from some neutral inquirers, gives to every lover
of this great man's high character an unpleasant shock. It is alleged
that he had plunged into furious gambling in East India stock. The
charge was current at the time, and it was speedily revived when
Burke's abandonment of his party, after the French Revolution, exposed
him to a thousand attacks of reckless and uncontrolled virulence. It
has been stirred by one or two pertinacious critics nearer our own
time, and none of the biographers have dealt with the perplexities
of the matter as they ought to have done. Nobody, indeed, has ever
pretended to find one jot or tittle of direct evidence that Burke
himself took a part in the gambling in India or other stocks. There is
evidence that he was a holder of the stock, and no more. But what is
undeniable is that Richard Burke, his brother, William Burke, his
intimate if not his kinsman, and Lord Verney, his political patron,
were all three at this time engaged together in immense transactions
in East India stock; that in 1769 the stock fell violently; that they
were unable to pay their differences; and that in the year when Edmund
Burke bought Gregories, the other three were utterly ruined, two of
them beyond retrieval. Again it is clear that, after this, Richard
Burke was engaged in land-jobbing in the West Indies; that his claims
were disputed by the Government as questionable and dishonest; and
that he lost his case. Edmund Burke was said, in the gossip of the
day, to be deeply interested in land at Saint Vincent's. But there
is no evidence. What cannot be denied is that an unpleasant taint of
speculation and financial adventurership hung at one time about the
whole connection, and that the adventures invariably came to an
unlucky end.
Whether Edmund Burke and William Burke were relations or not, and if
so, in what degree they were relations, neither of them ever knew;
they believed that their fathers sometimes called one another cousins,
and that was all that they had to say on the subject. But they were as
intimate as brothers, and when William Burke went to mend his broken
fortunes in India, Edmund Burke commended him to Philip Francis--then
fighting his deadly duel of five years with Warren Hastings at
Calcutta--as one whom he had tenderly loved, highly valued, and
continually lived with in an union not to be expressed, quite since
their boyish years. "Looking back to the course of my life," he wrote
in 1771, "I remember no one considerable benefit in the whole of it
which I did not, mediately or immediately, derive from William Burke."
There is nothing intrinsically incredible, therefore, considering this
intimacy and the community of purse and home which subsisted among the
three Burkes, in the theory that when Edmund Burke bought his property
in Buckinghamshire, he looked for help from the speculations of
Richard and William. However this may have been, from them no help
came. Many years afterwards (1783) Lord Verney filed a bill in
Chancery claiming from Edmund Burke a sum of £6000, which he alleged
that he had lent at the instigation of William Burke, to assist in
completing the purchase of Beaconsfield. Burke's sworn answer denied
all knowledge of the transaction, and the plaintiff did not get the
relief for which he had prayed.
In a letter to Shackleton (May 1, 1768), Burke gave the following
account of what he had done:--"I have made a push," he says, "with all
I could collect of my own, and the aid of my friends, to cast a little
root in this country. I have purchased a house, with an estate of
about six hundred acres of land, in Buckinghamshire, twenty-four miles
from London. It is a place exceedingly pleasant; and I propose, God
willing, to become a farmer in good earnest. You, who are classical,
will not be displeased to know that it was formerly the seat of
Waller, the poet, whose house, or part of it, makes at present the
farmhouse within an hundred yards of me." The details of the actual
purchase of Beaconsfield have been made tolerably clear. The price was
twenty-two thousand pounds, more or less. Fourteen thousand were left
on mortgage, which remained outstanding until the sale of the property
by Mrs. Burke in 1812. Garret Burke, the elder brother, had shortly
before the purchase made Edmund his residuary legatee, and it is
guessed that of this bequest two thousand pounds were in cash. The
balance of six thousand was advanced by Lord Rockingham on Burke's
bond.
The purchase after all was the smallest part of the matter, and it
still remains a puzzle not only how Burke was able to maintain so
handsome an establishment, but how he could ever suppose it likely
that he would be able to maintain it. He counted, no doubt, on making
some sort of income by farming. The Irish estate, which he had
inherited from his brother, brought in five hundred a year (Arthur
Young's _Ireland_, ii. 193). For a short time he received a salary of
seven hundred pounds a year as agent for New York. We may perhaps
take for granted that he made as much more out of his acres. He
received something from Dodsley for his work on the _Annual Register_
down to 1788. But when all these resources have been counted up, we
cannot but see the gulf of a great yearly deficit. The unhappy truth
is that from the middle of 1769, when we find him applying to Garrick
for the loan of a thousand pounds, down to 1794, when the king gave
him a pension, Burke was never free from the harassing strain of debts
and want of money. It has been stated with good show of authority,
that his obligations to Lord Rockingham amounted to not less than
thirty thousand pounds. When that nobleman died (1782), with a
generosity which is not the less honourable to him for having been so
richly earned by the faithful friend who was the object of it, he
left instructions to his executors that all Burke's bonds should be
destroyed.
We may indeed wish from the bottom of our hearts that all this had
been otherwise. But those who press it as a reproach against Burke's
memory, may be justly reminded that when Pitt died, after drawing the
pay of a minister for twenty years, he left debts to the amount of
forty thousand pounds. Burke, as I have said elsewhere, 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. At least, every creditor was paid in good time, and nobody
suffered but himself. Those who think these disagreeable matters of
supreme importance, and allow such things to stand between them and
Brake's greatness, are like the people--slightly to alter a figure
from a philosopher of old--who, when they went to Olympia, could only
perceive that they were scorched by the sun, and pressed by the crowd,
and deprived of comfortable means of bathing, and wetted by the rain,
and that life was full of disagreeable and troublesome things, and so
they almost forgot the great colossus of ivory and gold, Phidias's
statue of Zeus, which they had come to see, and which stood in all its
glory and power before their perturbed and foolish vision.
There have been few men in history with whom personal objects counted
for so little as they counted with Burke. He really did what so many
public men only feign to do. He forgot that he had any interests of
his own to be promoted, apart from the interests of the party with
which he acted, and from those of the whole nation, for which he held
himself a trustee. What William Burke said of him in 1766 was true
throughout his life, "Ned is full of real business, intent upon doing
solid good to his country, as much as if he was to receive twenty
per cent from the Empire." Such men as the shrewd and impudent Bigby
atoned for a plebeian origin by the arts of dependence and a judicious
servility, and drew more of the public money from the pay-office in
half a dozen quarter-days than Burke received in all his life. It was
not by such arts that Burke rose. When we remember all the untold
bitterness of the struggle in which he was engaged, from the time when
the old Duke of Newcastle tried to make the Marquis of Rockingham
dismiss his new private secretary as an Irish Jesuit in disguise
(1765), down to the time when the Duke of Bedford, himself battening
"in grants to the house of Russell, so enormous as not only to outrage
economy, but even to stagger credibility," assailed the Government for
giving Burke a moderate pension, we may almost imagine that if Johnson
had imitated the famous Tenth Satire a little later, he would have
been tempted to apply the poet's cynical criticism of the career
heroic to the greater Cicero of his own day. "I was not," Burke said,
in a passage of lofty dignity, "like his Grace of Bedford, swaddled
and rocked and dandled into a legislator; _Nitor in adversum_ is the
motto for a man like me. I possessed not one of the qualities, nor
cultivated one of the arts, that recommend men to the favour and
protection of the great. I was not made for a minion or a tool. As
little did I follow the trade of winning the hearts, by imposing on
the understandings of the people. At every step of my progress in
life, for in every step was I traversed and opposed, and at every
turnpike I met, I was obliged to show my passport, and again and again
to prove my sole title to the honour of being useful to my country, by
a proof that I was not wholly unacquainted with its laws and the whole
system of its interests both abroad and at home; otherwise no rank, no
toleration even for me."