without vividness or impression; and in either case, it must sink down into a dry and barren chronology. But more than this. To many of the highest elements of the philosophic and poetical characters, must be added all the indomitable patience and dull industry of a Dutch commentator; a capacity of research which will shrink from no details, however perplexing or insignificant, nor leave any sources of information unperused, however uncouth their style or voluminous their contents. Still further; there must not only be this capacity for dry research, but all the tasks which such research can impose must be endured without impairing the vigour of the reason or dimming the lustre of the fancy. These higher faculties must submit to be checked and repressed without impatience; and yet to retain amidst inactivity all their freshness and vigour, in defiance of the stupifying influence of such uncongenial pursuits. Judgment must patiently stand by till the most laboured and toilsome research has supplied all the materials which are to exercise it; and imagination, unextinguished by all the foul and mephitic vapours of these subterraneous recesses, must again brighten up the moment it emerges from them, and be ready once more to shed over the composition its immortal radiance. In a word, a perfect historian would be a creature made up of incongruities and contradictions; a harmony of discords; a being born under the contending influences of Mercury and Saturn. Such a perfect historian was of course never seen; yet it is not too much to affirm that Burke approached more nearly to such various intellectual excellence, and more nearly reconciled these apparent contradictions and inconsistencies, than any other man. To profound talents for speculation, especially in the department of political science, he added all the splendour of an imagination seldom equalled and never surpassed. With these were conjoined, in most marvellous union, the utmost patience of investigation, an industry equal to the most tedious and uninteresting research. Seldom before have these more homely household virtues of intellect been associated with the coronetted splendours of genius. Not only so. As the philosophical and imaginative faculties never unfitted him for the meanest drudgeries of investigation, so they recovered all their elasticity at a single bound, the moment he bade them resume their proper office. He preserved, strange to say, all the ruddy glow of intellectual health, amidst the daily and nightly toil of the shop and the factory. As to style, it has been already remarked that he was master of all its various excellences. It may be safely affirmed that history has not that scene for which he could not have mixed appropriate colours. Above all, his diversified powers, if exercised on remote events, would have had nothing to fear from the violence of passion; that judgment which, where prejudice had no room to operate, (as in political economy, for instance,) uniformly showed itself so singularly perspicacious and comprehensive, would never have been misled by any sinister bias. The imagination loves to dwell on the beauties of the work which such various powersso admirably attempered and proportioned-might have produced, had they been employed in their full maturity, on some grand and inspiring theme of history; it loves to dwell on the profound principles of political wisdom, and the ennobling and sublime sentiments, which would perpetually have dignified the page; on the splendour of illustration which would have adorned it! Under the fecundity of such a genius, even the dullest periods— the most sterile and desolate patches of history, would have become rich in philosophy and wisdom; and under the magic influence of such an intensely vivid imagination, the illustrious dead would have been called up as by the power of necromancy, and the long series of past events made to pass before us with the distinctness of some splendid piece of phantasmagoria! Such would have been the vivid and life-like descriptions which would have filled his rich and tapestried page; while a thousand nameless graces of poetical epithet and classical allusion would have almost equalled him with the masters of epic song, in rendering names and places attractive and musical. Indeed, it is not too much to affirm, that to embellish this stupendous monument of genius, the historic muse would have snatched some grace or other from every one of the inspired sisterhood. But lest we should be suspected of dealing in little else than wholesale and indiscriminate eulogy, we must justify these remarks on the peculiar adaptation of Burke's genius for history, by bringing together some few specimens of his wondrous power of description. This is easily done; for though Burke did not devote himself to history, he has left behind him brief sketches, which fully vindicate all that has been said of what he could have accomplished, had he attempted some great historical work. The gallery shall open with three portraits. They are those of Mr. Grenville, Charles Townshend, and Lord Chatham; all in one speech, that on American Taxation. What discrimination of character, what delicacy of taste and execution, in the following! "No man can believe, that at this time of day I mean to lean on the venerable memory of a great man, whose loss we deplore in common. Our little party differences have been long ago composed; and I have acted more with him, and certainly with more pleasure with him, than ever I acted against him. Undoubtedly Mr. Grenville was a first-rate figure in this country. With a masculine understanding, and a stout and resolute heart, he had an application undissipated and unwearied. He took publick business not as a duty which he was to fulfil, but as a pleasure he was to enjoy; and he seemed to have no delight out of this house, except in such things as some way related to the business that was to be done within it. If he was ambitious, I will say this for him, his ambition was of a noble and generous strain. It was to raise himself, not by the low, pimping politicks of a court, but to win his way to power through the laborious gradations of publick service; and to secure himself a well earned rank in parliament, by a thorough knowledge of its constitution, and a perfect practice in all its business. "Sir, if such a man fell into errours, it must be from defects not intrinsical; they must be rather sought in the particular habits of his life; which, though they do not alter the ground-work of character, yet tinge it with their own hue. He was bred in a profession. He was bred to the law, which is, in my opinion, one of the first and noblest of human sciences; a science which does more to quicken and invigorate the understanding, than all the other kinds of learning put together; but it is not apt, except in persons very happily born, to open and to liberalize the mind exactly in the same proportion. Passing from that study he did not go very largely into the world; but plunged into business; I mean into the business of office; and the limited and fixed methods and forms established there. Much knowledge is to be had undoubtedly in that line; and there is no knowledge which is not valuable. But it may be truly said, that men too much conversant in office are rarely minds of remarkable enlargement. Their habits of office are apt to give them a turn to think the substance of business not to be much more important than the forms in which it is conducted. These forms are adapted to ordinary occasions; and therefore persons who are nurtured in office do admirably well as long as things go on in their common order; but when the high roads are broken up and the waters out, when a new and troubled scene is opened, and the file affords no precedent, then it is that a greater knowledge of mankind, and a far more extensive comprehension of things is requisite, than ever office gave, or than office can ever give. Mr. Grenville thought better of the wisdom and power of human legislation than in truth it deserves. He conceived, and many conceived along with him, that the flourishing trade of this country was greatly owing to law and institution, and not quite so much to liberty; for but too many are apt to believe regulation to be commerce, and taxes to be revenue." "I have done with the third period of your policy; that of your repeal; and the return of your ancient system, and your ancient tranquillity and concord. Sir, this period was not as long as it was happy. Another scene was opened, and other actors appeared on the stage. The state, in the condition I have described it, was delivered into the hands of Lord Chatham-a great and celebrated name; a name that keeps the name of this country respectable in every other on the globe. It may be truly called, Clarum et venerabile nomen 66 Sir, the venerable age of this great man, his merited rank, his superiour eloquence, his splendid qualities, his eminent services, the vast space he fills in the eye of mankind; and, more than all the rest, his fall from power, which, like death, canonizes and sanctifies a great character, will not suffer me to censure any part of his conduct. I am afraid to flatter him; I am sure I am not disposed to blame him. Let those, who have betrayed him by their adulation, insult him with their malevolence. But what I do not presume to censure, I may have leave to lament. For a wise man, he seemed to me at that time to be governed too much by general maxims. I speak with the freedom of history, and I hope without offence. One or two of these maxims, flowing from an opinion not the most indulgent to our unhappy species, and surely a little too general, led him into measures that were greatly mischievous to himself; and for that reason, among others, perhaps fatal to his country; measures, the effects of which, I am afraid, are for ever incurable. He made an administration, so checkered and speckled; he put together a piece of joinery, so crossly indented and whimsically dove-tailed; a cabinet so variously inlaid; such a piece of diversified Mosaick; such a tesselated pavement without cement; here a bit of black stone, and there a bit of white; patriots and courtiers, king's friends and republicans; Whigs and Tories; treacherous friends and open enemies; that it was indeed a very curious show; but utterly unsafe to touch, and unsure to stand on. The colleagues whom he had assorted at the same boards, stared at each other, and were obliged to ask, Sir, your name ?-Sir, you have the advantage of me—Mr. Such-a-one-I beg a thousand pardons-" I venture to say, it did so happen, that persons had a single office divided between them, who had never spoke to each other in their lives, until they found themselves, they knew not how, pigging together, heads and points, in the same truckle-bed. 66 "Sir, in consequence of this arrangement, having put so much the larger part of his enemies and opposers into power, the confusion was such, that his own principles could not possibly have any effect or influence in the conduct of affairs. If ever he fell into a fit of the gout, or if any other cause withdrew him from publick cares, principles directly the contrary were sure to predominate. When he had executed his plan, he had not an inch of ground to stand upon. When he had accomplished his scheme of administration, he was no longer a minister. "When his face was hid but for a moment, his whole system was on a wide sea, without chart or compass. The gentlemen, his particular friends, who, with the names of various departments of ministry, were admitted to seem as if they acted a part under him, with a modesty that becomes all men, and with a confidence in him which was justified even in its extravagance by his superiour abilities, had never, in any instance, presumed upon any opinion of their own. Deprived of his guiding influence, they were whirled about, the sport of every gust, and easily driven into any port; and as those who joined with them in manning the vessel were the most directly opposite to his opinions, measures, and character, and far the most artful and most powerful of the set, they easily prevailed, so as to seize upon the vacant, unoccupied, and derelict minds of his friends; and instantly they turned the vessel wholly out of the course of his policy. As if it were to insult as well as to betray him, even long before the close of the first session of his administration, when every thing was publickly transacted, and with great parade, in his name, they made an act, declaring it highly just and expedient to raise a revenue in America. For even then, Sir, even before this splendid orb was entirely set, and while the western horizon was in a blaze with his descending glory, on the opposite quarter of the heavens arose another luminary, and, for his hour, became lord of the ascendant. "This light too is passed and set for ever. You understand, to be sure, that I speak of Charles Townshend, officially the re-producer of this fatal scheme: whom I cannot even now remember without some degree of sensibility. In truth, Sir, he was the delight and ornament of this house, and the charm of every private society which he honoured with his presence. Perhaps there never arose in this country, nor in any country, a man of a more pointed and finished wit; and (where his passions were not concerned) of a more refined, exquisite, and penetrating judgment. If he had not so great a stock, as some have had who flourished formerly, of knowledge long treasured up, he knew better by far, than any man I ever was acquainted with, how to bring together within a short time, all that was necessary to establish, to illustrate, and to decorate that side of the question he supported. He stated his matter skilfully and powerfully. He particularly excelled in a most luminous explanation and dis* Supposed to allude to the Right Honourable Lord North, and George Cooke, Esq. who were made joint paymasters in the summer of 1766, on the removal of the Rockingham administration. f play of his subject. His style of argument was neither trite and vulgar, nor subtle and abstruse. He hit the house just between wind and water.-And not being troubled with too anxious a zeal for any matter in question, he was never more tedious, or more earnest, than the pre-conceived opinions and present temper of his hearers required; to whom he was always in perfect unison. He conformed exactly to the temper of the house; and he seemed to guide, because he was always sure to follow it." The next shall be the celebrated description of the New Englanders, from the "Speech on Conciliation with America." 66 I pass therefore to the colonies in another point of view, their agriculture. This they have prosecuted with such a spirit, that, besides feeding plentifully their own growing multitude, their annual export of grain, comprehending rice, has some years ago exceeded a million in value. Of their late harvest, I am persuaded, they will export much more. At the beginning of the century some of those colonies imported corn from the mother country. For some time past, the old world has been fed from the new. The scarcity which you have felt would have been a desolating famine, if this child of your old age, with a true filial piety, with a Roman charity, had not put the full breast of its youthful exuberance to the mouth of its exhausted parent. "As to the wealth which the colonies have drawn from the sea by their fisheries, you had all that matter fully opened at your bar. You surely thought those acquisitions of value, for they seemed even to excite your envy; and yet the spirit by which that enterprising employment has been exercised ought rather, in my opinion, to have raised your esteem and admiration. And pray, Sir, what in the world is equal to it? Pass by the other parts, and look at the manner in which the people of New England have of late carried on the whale fishery. Whilst we follow them among the tumbling mountains of ice, and behold them penetrating into the deepest frozen recesses of Hudson's Bay and Davis's Streights, whilst we are looking for them beneath the arctick circle, we hear that they have pierced into the opposite region of polar cold, that they are at the antipodes, and engaged under the frozen serpent of the south. Falkland Island, which seemed too remote and romantick an object for the grasp of national ambition, is but a stage and resting-place in the progress of their victorious industry. Nor is the equinoctial heat more discouraging to them, than the accumulated winter of both the poles. We know that whilst some of them draw the line and strike the harpoon on the coast of Africa, others run the longitude, and pursue their gigantick game along the coast of Brazil. No sea but what is vexed by their fisheries. No climate that is not witness to their toils. Neither the perseverance of Holland, nor the activity of France, nor the dexterous and firm sagacity of English enterprise, ever carried this most perilous mode of hard industry to the extent to which it has been pushed by this recent people; a people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood. When I contemplate these things; when I know that the colonies in general owe little or nothing to any care of ours, and that they are not squeezed into this happy form by the constraints of watchful and suspicious government, but that, through a wise and salutary neglect, a generous nature has been suffered to take her own way to perfection; when I reflect upon these effects, when I see how profitable they have been to us, I feel all the pride of power sink, and all presumption in the wisdom of human contrivances melt, and die away within me. My rigour relents. I pardon something to the spirit of liberty." The next shall be from the "Speech on Economical Reform:" it is an exquisite description of the feudal vestiges that still lingered in the constitution of the royal household. "This establishment, in my opinion, is exceedingly abusive in its constitution. It is formed upon manners and customs that have long since expired. In the first place, it is formed, in many respects, upon feudal principles. In the feudal times, it was not uncommon, even among subjects, for the lowest offices to be held by considerable persons; persons as unfit by their incapacity, as improper from their rank, to occupy such employments. They were held by patent, sometimes for life, and sometimes by inheritance. If my memory does not deceive me, a person of no slight consideration held the office of patent hereditary cook to an Earl of Warwick-The Earl of Warwick's soups, I fear, were not the better for the dignity of his kitchen. I think it was an Earl of Gloucester, who officiated as steward of the household to the Archbishops of Canterbury. Instances of the same kind may in some degree be found in the Northumberland house-book, and other family records. There was some reason in ancient necessities for these ancient customs. Protection was wanted; and the domestick tie, though not the highest, was the closest. "The king's household has not only several strong traces of this feudality, but it is formed also upon the principles of a body corporate; it has its own magistrates, courts, and by-laws. This might be necessary in the ancient times, in order to have a government within itself, capable of regulating the vast and often unruly multitude which composed and attended it. This was the origin of the ancient court called the Green Cloth-composed of the marshal, treasurer, and other great officers of the household, with certain clerks. The rich subjects of the kingdom, who had formerly the same establishments, (only on a reduced scale,) have since altered their economy; and turned the course of their expence from the maintenance of vast establishments within their walls, to the employment of a great variety of independent trades abroad. Their influence is lessened; but a mode of accommodation, and a style of splendour, suited to the manners of the times, has been increased. Royalty itself has insensibly followed; and the royal household has been carried away by the resistless tide of manners: but with this very material difference;-private men have got rid of the establishments along with the reasons of them; whereas the royal household has lost all that was stately and venerable in the antique manners, without retrenching any thing of the cumbrous charge of a Gothick establishment. It is shrunk into the polished littleness of modern elegance and personal accommodation; it has evaporated from the gross concrète into an essence and rectified spirit of expence, where you have tuns of ancient pomp in a vial of modern luxury. "But when the reason of old establishments is gone, it is absurd to preserve nothing but the burthen of them. This is superstitiously to embalm a carcass not worth an ounce of the gums that are used to preserve it. It is to burn precious oils in the tomb; it is to offer meat and drink to the dead,—not so much an honour to the deceased, as a disgrace to the survivors. Our palaces are vast inhospitable halls. There the bleak winds, there Boreas, and Eurus, and Caurus, and Argestes loud,' howling through the vacant lobbies, and clattering the doors of deserted guard-rooms, appal the imagination, and conjure up the grim spectres of departed tyrants-the Saxon, the Norman, and the Dane; the stern Edwards and fierce Henries-who stalk from desolation to desolation, through the dreary vacuity, and melancholy succession of chill and comfortless chambers. When this tumult subsides, a dead, and still more frightful, silence would reign in this desert, if every now and then the tacking of hammers did not announce, that those constant attendants upon all courts in all ages, Jobs, were still alive; for whose sake alone it is, that any trace of ancient grandeur is suffered to remain. These palaces are a true emblem of some governments; the inhabitants are decayed, but the governours and magistrates still flourish. They put me in mind of Old Sarum, where the representatives, more in number than the constituents, only serve to inform us, that this was once a place of trade, and sounding with the busy hum of men,' though now you can only trace the streets by the colour of the corn; and its sole manufacture is in members of parliament. "These old establishments were formed also on a third principle, still more adverse to the living economy of the age. They were formed, Sir, on the principle of purveyance, and receipt in kind. In former days, when the household was vast, and the supply scanty and precarious, the royal purveyors, sallying forth from under the Gothick portcullis, to purchase provision with power and prerogative instead of money, brought home the plunder of a hundred markets, and all that could be seized from a flying and hiding country, and deposited their spoil in a hundred caverns, with each its keeper. There, every commodity, received in its rawest condition, went through all the process which fitted it for use. This inconvenient receipt produced an economy suited only to itself. It multiplied offices beyond all measure; buttery, pantry, and all that rabble of places, which, though profitable to the holders, and expensive to the state, are almost too mean to mention. "All this might be, and I believe was, necessary at first; for it is remarkable, that purveyance, after its regulation had been the subject of a long line of statutes, (not fewer, I think, than twenty-six,) was wholly taken away by the twelfth of Charles the Second; yet in the next year of the same reign, it was found necessary to revive it by a special act of parliament, for the sake of the king's journies. This, Sir, is curious; and what would hardly be expected in so reduced a court as that of Charles the Second, and so improved a country as England might then be thought. But so it was. In our time, |