where solitude and the happiness of rural life give to the mind the sense of detachment and independence which is necessary for adequately and impartially comprehending human affairs, of analysing the trend of events, and of applying general conceptions to existing needs and circumstances. It is the absence of external impulse that gives to the writings of Edmund Burke the authority of an oracle.

In 1756 Burke gave to the world the first products of his pen, and about the same time he married the daughter of Dr. Nugent, a physician, whom he met at Bath, and who was, later, a member of the Club. The Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas on the Sublime and Beautiful investigated psychologically a theme which influenced the work of the author of Laökoon, and which had a classical precedent. His work, A Vindication of Natural Society, was an imitation of Bolingbroke, so successfully carried out that it deceived both Chesterfield and Warburton. The style of the work resembles that of Bolingbroke in its outward flourishes, and the book itself has in it not a little that might interestingly compare with Rousseau's Contrat Social. In comparison with the work of the author of the Idea of a Patriot King it marks acutely the transition in eighteenth century thought to political rationalism. The work fixed the life-long cast of Burke's mind, for he perceived that an unrestrained and purely intellectual criticism of social institutions would wreck the fabric of civilization itself.

Minor literary work, and finally his connexion with the Annual Register, brought him prominently under the notice of public men, till at length he was introduced to William Hamilton. The introduction was hardly of permanent advantage. Burke accompanied Hamilton to Ireland in some minor, perhaps secretarial, capacity, when the latter went there as Secretary under the Halifax Government. In his homeland he received, through the influence of Hamilton, a pension on the Irish establishment; but when his patron sought to have his industry and knowledge permanently at his own disposal, the young man, conscious of his power, broke off a connexion which could not but place a barrier in the path of his progress.

With his Irish career terminated, Burke was fortunate

in receiving from the Marquis of Rockingham the offer of a private secretaryship. The Marquis was the head of the new ministry of Whigs that had succeeded the Grenville administration, but which was not remarkable for the intellectual talents of its members. To such an administration Burke was an inestimable_boon, but preferment did not come without opposition. Rumour ran her malignant course he was a Jesuit in disguise, an Irish adventurer, a spy educated at St. Omer, and, to crown all, his real name was not Burke, but O'Bourke. Though the Duke of Newcastle aided in disseminating such falsehoods, yet the confidence of Rockingham in Burke was not shattered thereby but rather strengthened, and their friendship remained unbroken till it was severed by death. The private secretaryship placed Burke in the very centre of political influence, and his election to the pocket-borough of Wendover, through the influence of Lord Verney, placed him in direct contact with the House of Commons. His speech on the Declaratory Resolutions gave him an independent political reputation, and it mattered little to him that the Rockingham administration fell. He could, had he so desired, have taken office with the new government, but he has described, in language bordering almost on an abuse of diction, his reasons for not doing so :

Chatham made an administration so checkered and speckled; he put together a piece of joinery so crossly indented and whimsically dovetailed; a cabinet so variously inlaid; such a piece of diversified mosaic; 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.

Out of office, however, he helped the Rockingham Whigs by crossing swords with Grenville in his Observations on the Present State of the Nation. Grenville was then the established authority in matters economic, but Burke, in this work, revealed himself as a master of detail as regards the economic and commercial relations of the nation. The superficial cries, the cheap sneers, by which men, who boast themselves eminently practical, try to down opponents such as Burke, could not avail, for with flashes of rare genius he lit up his subject in a manner with which

1 Morley, Life of Burke.

Grenville's duller method could ill compare, making it straightway apparent that he combined literary power with knowledge of detail.

*

About this time in his career some light clouds gather around his life. His action in not accepting office, and his purchase of the land and house at Beaconsfield are thought inconsistent with the resource of his purse. Sir Joseph Napier, however, has, I believe, dispelled for all, except the malevolent, any taint on Burke's honour. He never did, nor never would, accept public office like a bird of prey, and Mr. Birrell has jestingly remarked that he got the money for purchasing Beaconsfield after an Irish fashion-by not getting it at all.' His visible means of livelihood and his political prospects guarantee the honourableness of his actions, and it were wrong, as a consequence, to pry unduly into the private facts-not wholly inexplicable-attaching to the life of this altruistic man-this man whose services gold could not buy, nor jealousy obscure.

At a time when Burke was laying the foundations of his own personal well-being, the rapid changes of government, and the popular movement that centred around the name of Wilkes, indicated the internal weakness of the country. Chatham had, it is true, raised the power and prestige of England, but the hatred for the Scotch, the unseemly struggle for power among the oligarchs, the strained relations between the King's friends and his enemies, and, in America, the faint whispering of the coming storm, foretold the danger of national dissolution. Burke's Thoughts on the Present Discontents displays no mere curious interest in the confused whirl of turbulent events-he sought a remedy for the national crisis. He saw in the attempt to deprive Wilkes of his seat in Parliament the possibility of the abolition of the Opposition and the revival, in the name of the Commons, of the dispensing and suspending power of an absolute monarchy. The Opposition being bound up with the idea of party government, the principle underlying his work is the principle underlying his defence of party. His work, whatever may have been its effect on the Executive, remains as a permanent analysis of constitutional principles and systems of government. In A Vindication of Natural Society Burke was plainly under the influence of Rousseau; in this work he

applied the historical method of Montesquieu to combating the philosophy of Bolingbroke. Law and the Constitution could not, he considered, be examined in isolated political phenomena, nor could the law or the principles of the Constitution be applied without taking into account the state, the whole system of society, to which they related. In the idea of economy in politics Burke found the function of statesmanship, and he found in the judicious application of the laws their greatest efficacy. To doctrinaire conceptions of a constitution he was opposed, and he was a conservative from intellectual conviction, because he had examined the laws historically and had come to regard the Constitution as a complex living organism woven into the very fabric of society itself. The work ends, as is well known, with a defence of Party, which he defines as a body of men united for promoting, by their joint endeavours, the national interest, upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed.' The defence was based on the principle that when bad men combine the good must associate'; and on the idea of efficiency in government derived from the principles held by the great Junto of a former reign: They believed that no men could act with effect, who did not act in concert; that no men could act in concert, who did not act with confidence; that no men could act with confidence who were not bound together by common opinions, common affections, and common interests.' Against one of the specious objections to Party, he wrote:

6

It is an advantage to all narrow wisdom and narrow morals that their maxims have a plausible air; and on a cursory view, appear equal to first principles. They are light and portable. They are as current as copper coin, and about as valuable. They serve equally the first capacities and the lowest; and they are at least as useful to the worst men as the best. Of this stamp is the cant of Not men but measures ; a sort of charm by which many people get loose from every honourable engagement. When I see a man acting this desultory and disconnected part, with as much detriment to his own fortune as prejudice to the cause of any party, I am not persuaded that he is right; but I am ready to believe he is in earnest. But when a gentleman, with great visible emoluments, abandons the party in which he has long acted, and tells you it is because he proceeds upon his own judgment; that he acts on the merits of the several measures as they arise; and that he is obliged to follow his own conscience, and not that of others, he gives reasons which it is impossible to controvert, and discovers a character which it is impossible to mistake. What shall we think of him who never d'ffered from a certain set of men until the moment they lost power, and who never agreed with them in a single instance afterwards.

These words have indeed a greater significance than in their mere relation to party, for they apply with equal force to the esprit de corps that should prevail, in a greater or less degree, among all men who have entered into honourable connexions. Thus, when a man performs an action in opposition to the interests and esprit de corps of, say, an institution or corporation, and defends his action on the merit of the case, or by saying his conscience forbade him act otherwise, the reason cannot be controverted or the character mistaken.

Burke, as I have previously remarked, sought in his Thoughts on the Present Discontents a remedy for the latter. He suggested the abolition of rotten boroughs and a more direct control by the constituents over their members of Parliament. In a particular manner it was his endeavour to remedy what he called the distempers of Parliament, and not to suffer that last of evils to predominate in the country men without popular confidence, public opinion, natural connexion, or mutual trust, invested with all the powers of government.' What, however, influenced home politics more than the eloquence of Burke, and influenced perhaps France more than the writings of Rousseau and the Encyclopædists-without which Paine might have been ignored and Robespierre remained a provincial lawyerwas the affray at Lexington. It must appear, therefore, a matter of irony that Burke, one of the few men who had a real insight into the trend of events in the Colonies, was offered at this time the Chairmanship of an Indian Commission. Had he allowed himself to be sidetracked, for that was what the offer really amounted to, the Rockingham Whigs would have been dissolved, and foreign events and home politics might have been considerably altered.

About this time he visited France, where, having left his son at Auxerre, there was opened up to him a new vision of the literary and political world. In Paris Madame du Deffand introduced him to the gay life of the salons, where he met the Duchess of Luxembourg, and she who belonged to another school, Mademoiselle de l'Espinasse, the letter-writer. He also came into contact with Diderot, whose school of thought was to aid in plunging into night the society which the court of Versailles crowned; the court at which, in the open air, he caught that vision of the Dauphiness, which inspired the most eloquent passage in