the county of Buckingham. It was about GOO 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 suspicious 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 inuendoes 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 Buckingham 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 Rocking- ham, 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 indiffer ence to his private affairs. Burke, on the contrary, was assiduous and orderly, and had none of the vices of profu sion. 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 line 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 aris tocracy 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 bril liant group of his earlier friends. He was one of the com manding 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 Rock ingham 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 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. Like some other men in our history, he showed that books are a better pre paration 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 our 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 formulas 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 com position. 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.
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