ing me is invidiously comparing the bounty of the Crown with the deserts of the defender of his order, and in the same moment fawning on those who have the knife half out of the sheath,-poor innocent!

'Pleased to the last, he crops the flowery food,

And licks the hand just raised to shed his blood.'”

CHAPTER VIII.

Revolutionary War-Letters on a Regicide Peace-True Principle of British Success-Nature of Party-Policy of the Revolution of 1688.

THE life of Burke is remarkably distinguishable by epochs. His appointment to the private secretaryship of Hamilton,-his entrance into the House of Commons, his secession from the Whigs, and the loss of his son, all characterise periods, from each of which his career assumed a totally distinct colour. He was now in voluntary and final retirement; the death of Richard Burke had scarcely more separated that lamented person from the world, than his father. From this time the ardent and daring speculator was transmuted into the calm and lofty philosopher. His language is touched by the tomb; it has the solemn dignity and pure fervour of a devotional offering. Even where it is nerved by indignation at public vice, or labours with alarm and anxiety at public danger, its cha

A

racter is reflective; it deals with man less as the instrument or the victim of temporary party, than as the object of supreme justice. In the wilder convulsions of European polity, Burke seems to look upon the general collision from a superior sphere. He unquestionably saw with a clearer vision than any of his contemporaries the principles of those changes, and pronounced upon them with a firmer and more decisive wisdom. On looking over the general productions of his day, we frequently find eloquence, and sometimes powerful anticipations of the good or evil forthcoming. But we find them flung out with the confused and mystic indecision of a pagan oracle. Burke drew his political wisdom from a higher source than the tripod where Faction sat, inflated and frenzied with blasts from the subterranean cells of treason. His oracles were the

high inspiration of a powerful understanding, guided by a sincere heart, and both, at this time, elevated to clearer views, even by the fatal blow which had disunited the patriot and the man of genius from all his old connexion with the passions of men.

But the death of his son had neither impaired Burke's actual vigour of mind, nor diminished his original interest in the concerns of the empire. With Party he never more descended into the field; but, when the sound of national danger reached him in his retreat, no man was more ready to shake off his dejection, and rush to the front of the encounter. He had now wholly withdrawn from public business; he saw none of his public friends, scarcely any private society; and his

chief employment was in protecting and modelling a school established within a few miles of Beaconsfield, for the orphan sons of the French emigrants. This dejection was altogether real; he was no chagrined statesman, affecting independence. He was equally far from the common affectation, of disdaining the honours and emoluments of society, under a real sense of their having escaped his ambition. He was, as he described himself, a heart-broken old man, who, having ventured his last stake of human happiness on one object, and having lost it, believed that he had nothing -more to do, than to prepare to follow. In a letter, written subsequently to a friend who proposed taking a distinguished French Noble to visit him, he declines the proposal in this language: "Alas! my dear friend, I am not what I was two years ago. Society is too much for my nerves. I sleep ill at night; and am drowsy, and sleep much in the day. Every exertion of spirits which I make for the society which I cannot refuse, costs me much, and leaves me doubly heavy and dejected after it. Such is the person you come to see; or rather the wreck of what has never been a very first-rate vessel. Such as I am, I feel infinitely for the kindness of those old friends who remember me with compassion; as to new, I never see one, but such French as come to visit the school, which supplies to me the void in my own family, and is my only comfort. For the sake of that, I still submit to see some who are still more miserable than I am."

But this great man was speedily to furnish a proof

of the inherent strength of his intellect, and of the living sensibility with which he felt for the cause of England as the cause of mankind.

The war with France had been begun by the unanimous impulse of all that constituted the virtue, manliness, and public principle of the Empire. The murder of the unhappy Louis, and the more than murder, the long and detestable atrocities which embittered the last hours, of Marie Antoinette; a woman once all but worshipped, and deserving of every homage that could be paid to dignity of mind, and innocence of heart, had roused all England into a solemn and resolute desire to be totally separated from connexion with a people covered with blood. England still had her Jacobins ; but their voices were lost in the general burst of horror; rebellion hid its head for the time, and loyalty was universal. The first successes of the war justified and sustained the national feeling. The Republican armies were broken, driven within their own frontier, and chased from camp to camp within that frontier. The great triple line of fortresses, which had so long been boasted of as the iron bulwark of France, as the perfection of military art, and impregnable to all European force, had been penetrated and seized; the Allied armies had advanced to within ten marches of the capital, and the Jacobin government was on the point of dissolution. But this scene was suddenly clouded. Some fatality, to this hour scarcely accounted for, checked the invasion, and thenceforth all was disaster. In less than two years the French armies changed from tumul