(Edmund), was born in the city of Dublin on the 1st of January 1730. His father was an attorney of considerable knowledge in his profession, and of extensive practice; and the family from which he sprung was ancient and honourable. He received the rudiments of his classical education under Abraham Shackleton, a Quaker, who kept a private school or academy, as it has been called, at Ballytoore, near Carlow, and is said to have been a very skilful and successful teacher.

Under the tuition of this master Burke devoted himself with great ardour, industry, and perseverance, to his studies; and manifested, even from his boyish days, a distinguished superiority over his contemporaries. He was the pride of his preceptor, who prognosticated everything great from his genius, and who was, in return, treated by his illustrious pupil, for forty years, with respect and gratitude.

From school Burke was sent to Trinity-college, Dublin, where it was asserted by Goldsmith and others his contemporaries, that he displayed no particular eminence in the performance of his exercises. Like Swift, he despised the logic of the schools; and like him too, he devoted his time and his talents to more useful pursuits.

Johnson, though proud of being an Oxonian, did not much employ himself in academical exercises; and Dryden and Milton, who studied at Cambridge, were neither of them ambitious of college distinctions. Let not, however, the example of a Burke, a Johnson, a Dryden, or a Milton, seduce into by-paths the ordinary student; for though great genius either finds or makes its own way, common minds must be content to pursue the beaten track. Shakespeare, with very little learning, was the greatest dramatic poet that ever wrote; but how absurd would it be to infer from this fact, that every illiterate man may excel in dramatic poetry?

Whilst at college Burke applied himself with sufficient diligence to those branches of mathematical and physical science which are most subservient to the purposes of life; and though he neglected the syllogistic logic of Aristotle, he cultivated the method of induction pointed out by Bacon. Pneumatology, likewise, and ethics, occupied a considerable portion of his attention; and whilst attending to the acquisition of knowledge, he did not neglect the means of communicating it. He studied rhetoric and the art of composition, as well as logic, physics, history, and moral philosophy; and had at an early period of his life, says Dr. Bisset, planned a confutation of the metaphysical theories of Berkeley and Hume.

For such a task as this, we do not think that nature intended him. Through the ever-active mind of Burke ideas seem to have flowed with too great rapidity to permit him to give that patient attention to minute distinctions, without which it is vain to attempt a confutation of the subtleties of Berkeley and Hume. The ablest antagonist of these two philosophers was remarkable for patient thinking, and even apparent slowness of apprehension; and we have not a doubt, but that if he had possessed the rapidity of thought which characterized Burke, his confutation of Hume and Berkeley, would have been far from conclusive. It might have been equal to the Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth, but would not have been what we find it in The Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense, and in The Essays on the Intellectual and Affine Powers of Man.

A task much better suited to Burke's talents than the writing of metaphysical disquisitions on the sublata of body, presented itself to him in the year 1749, and a task which was likewise more immediately useful. At that period one Lucas, a democratic apothecary, wrote a number of very daring papers against government, and acquired by them as great popularity at Dublin as Mr. Wilkes afterwards obtained by his North Briton in London. Burke, though a boy, perceived, almost intuitively, the pernicious tendency of such levelling doctrines, and resolved to counteract it. He wrote several essays in the style of Lucas, imitating it so exactly as to deceive the public; pursuing his principles to consequences necessarily resulting from them, and shewing at the same time their absurdity and their danger. Thus was his first literary effort, like his last, calculated to guard his country against anarchical innovations.

Whilst employed in treasuring up knowledge, which at a future period was to command the admiration of listening senates, he did not neglect the means necessary to render himself agreeable in the varied intercourse of private life. To the learning of a scholar he added the manners of a gentleman. His company was sought among the gay and the fashionable, for his pleasing conversation and easy deportment; as much as among the learned, for the force and brilliancy of his genius, and the extent and depth of his knowledge. But though the object of very general regard in his native country, he had hardly any prospect of obtaining in it an independent settlement. He therefore applied, some time after the publication of his letters exposing the doctrines of Lucas, for the professorship of logic, which had then become vacant in the university of Glasgow: but whether that application was made too late, or that the university was unwilling to receive a stranger, certain it is that the vacant chair was filled by another, and that Burke was disappointed of an office in which he was eminently qualified to excel. For many years very little attention has been paid in the universities of Scotland, perhaps even too little, to the Aristotelian logic; and the professors, instead of employing their time in the analyzing of syllogisms, deliver lectures on rhetoric and the principles of composition—lectures which no man was more capable of giving than the unsuccessful candidate for the professorship in Glasgow.

Disappointment of early views has frequently been the means of future advancement. Had Johnson become master of the Staffordshire school, talents might have been consumed in the tuition of boys which Providence formed for the instruction of men; and had Burke obtained the professorship of logic in Glasgow, he would have been the most eloquent lecturer in that university, instead of the most brilliant speaker in the British senate: but whether his talents might not have been as usefully employed in the university as in the senate, may perhaps be a question, though there can be no question whether they would have invested himself with an equal blaze of splendour.

Disappointed in Glasgow, he went to London, where he immediately entered himself at the Temple; and as there is reason to believe that he was in straitened circumstances, he submitted to the drudgery of regularly writing for daily, weekly, and monthly publications, essays on general literature and particular politics. The profits arising from such writings were at first small; but they were so necessary to their author, that the intense application which they required gradually impaired his health, till at last a dangerous illness ensued, when he resorted for medical advice to Dr Nugent, a physician whose skill in his profession was equalled only by the benevolence of his heart. The Doctor, considering that the noise, and various disturbances incidental to chambers, must retard the recovery of his patient, furnished him with apartments in his own house, where the attention of every member of the family contributed more than medicines to the restoration of his health. It was during this period that the amiable manners of Miss Nugent, the Doctor's daughter, made a deep impression on the heart of Burke; and as she could not be indifferent to such merit as his, they felt for each other a mutual attachment, and were married soon after his recovery.

Hitherto his mental powers and acquirements were known in their full extent only to his friends and more intimate companions; but they were now made public in his first acknowledged work, intitled, A Vindication of Natural Society. The object of this performance was to expose the dangerous tendency of Lord Bolingbroke's philosophy. By the admirers of that nobleman his principles were deemed inimical only to revealed religion and national churches, which they would have been glad to see overturned, provided our civil establishment had been preserved; and to the civil establishment they perceived no danger in the writings of the author of The Patriot King. Mr Burke thought very differently; and endeavoured to convince them, that if Lordship's philosophy should become general, it would ultimately destroy their rank, their consequence, and their property, and involve the church and state in one common ruin. In his ironical attack upon artificial society, he makes use of the same common-place mode of unfair reasoning which his noble antagonist had employed against religion and religious establishments. He argues, from the incidental abuses of political society, that political society must itself be evil; he goes over every form of civil polity, pointing out its defects in the most forcible language; and, in perfect imitation of the sceptical philosophy, he pulls them all down, one after another, without propounding any thing in their stead. So complete is the irony, that to many not acquainted with such disquisitions, he would appear to be ferociously inveighing against civil government; and we have actually heard some of the advocates for modern innovation mention this work as a proof how different Mr Burke's opinions in politics once were from what they appear to have been when he wrote his Reflections on the French Revolution.

The truth, however, is, that there is no inconsistency between The Vindication of Natural Society and the latest publications of its illustrious author. At the period when that work was published, infidelity had infected only the higher orders of men, and such of the lower as had got the rudiments of a liberal education. Of these we believe a single individual was not then to be found, who supposed that society could subsist both without government and without religion; and therefore whilst they laboured to overturn the church, and to prove that Christianity itself is an imposture, they all pretended to be zealously attached to our civil government as established in king, lords, and commons. Except the clergy of the established church, there was no order of men whom they indiscriminately reviled. Hence it was that not Burke only, but Warburton, and almost every other opponent of Lord Bolingbroke, began their detentions of revelation, by shewing the indissoluble connection between our civil and ecclesiastical establishments; and all the difference was, that he did, through the medium of the most refined irony, the very same thing which they had done by serious reasoning.

Soon after his Vindication of Natural Society, Burke published A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful; a work which soon made its author universally known and admired, and which has been studied by every English reader of taste. It is therefore needless for us to hazard any opinion either of its general merit or its particular defects. In one of the literary journals of that day, Mr Murphy urged objections against some of its fundamental principles, which, in our opinion, it would be very difficult to answer; whilst Johnson, who was certainly a severe judge, judge, considered it as a model of philosophical criticism. "We have (said he) an example of true criticism in Burke's Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful. There is no great merit in shewing how many plays have ghosts in them, or how this ghost is better than that; you must shew how terror is impressed on the mind."

In consequence of this manifestation of Burke's intellectual powers, his acquaintance was courted by men of distinguished talents, and, among others, by Johnson and Sir Joshua Reynolds. The literary club, which has been mentioned (Encyc.) in the life of Johnson, was instituted for their entertainment and instruction, and consisted at first of Johnson, Burke, Reynolds, Goldsmith, Dr Nugent, Mr Tonham Benoelere, Sir John Hawkins, Mr Chamier, and Mr Bennet Langton, who were all men of letters and general information, though far above the rest. Burke and Johnson. Of Burke indeed, Johnson declared, upon all occasions, that he was the greatest man living; whilst Burke, on a very solemn occasion, said of Johnson, "He has made a chain, which not only nothing can fill up, but which nothing has a tendency to fill up. Johnson is dead. Let us go to the next best—there is nobody—No man can be said to put you in mind of Johnson." Nor was the opinion which these two illustrious men held of each other's powers peculiar to themselves alone: all the members of the club observed, that, in colloquial talents, they were nearly matched, and that Johnson never discoursed with such animation and energy as when his powers were called forth by those of Burke.

Some years before the institution of this club, Burke, who had devoted much of his time to the study of history and politics, proposed to Mr Doddley, an eminent bookseller, a plan of an Annual Register of the civil, political, and literary transactions of the times; and the proposal being acceded to, the work was begun and carried on for many years, either by Burke himself, or under his immediate inspection. It bears indeed internal marks of his genius, his learning, and his candour, being by much the most elegant and impartial periodical history which has perhaps appeared in any age or nation. Even when the heat of opposition made him, in his speeches, sometimes misrepresent the conduct of administration, the Annual Register, under his management, continued to render justice to all parties.

He still continued to write occasionally political essays for other publications than the Annual Register; and some of these essays in the Public Advertiser having attracted the notice of the Marquis of Rockingham, that nobleman sought the acquaintance of their author. It was in the year 1765 that the first interview took place between them; and the Marquis, who was then at the head of the treasury, offering to make Burke his own secretary, the offer was readily accepted. On this occasion he gave a remarkable proof of disinterestedness and delicate integrity. Through the influence of Mr Hamilton, known by the appellation of Single-Speech Hamilton, and long supposed to be the author of Junius's Letters, he had some time before obtained a pension of £300 a year on the Irish establishment; but this pension he now thought it incumbent upon him to resign, because he had connected himself with a party opposite in many things to the party whose measures were supported by his friend.

During the Rockingham administration he was chosen member of parliament for the borough of Wendover in the county of Bucks; and he prepared himself for becoming a public speaker, by studying, still more closely than he had yet done, history, poetry, and philosophy; and by storing his mind with facts, images, reasonings, and sentiments. He paid great attention likewise to parliamentary usage; and was at much pains to become acquainted with old records, patents, and precedents, so as to render himself complete master of the business of office. That he might communicate without embarrassment the knowledge which he had thus laboriously acquired, he frequented, with many other men of eminence, the Robin Hood Society, where he practised the replies and contentions of eloquence; and to acquire a graceful action, with the proper management of his voice, he was a very diligent observer of Garrick in Drury Lane theatre. He procured his seat in 1765; and in the ensuing session delivered his maiden speech; which was such a display of eloquence as excited the admiration of the House, and drew very high praise from its most distinguished member Mr Pitt, afterwards Earl of Chatham.

The principal objects which engaged the attention of the Rockingham administration were the ferments in America, which was then in a state little short of rebellion, on account of the famous Stamp Act. Parliament was divided in opinion respecting that measure. Whilst Mr Grenville and his party (under whose auspices the Stamp Act had passed into law) were for enforcing obedience to it by coercive measures, Mr Pitt and his followers denied that the parliament of Great Britain had a right to tax the Americans; and the Marquis of Rockingham, who was hardly able to carry any measure in opposition to both these parties, had to consider, on this occasion, whole sentiments he would adopt. By the advice, it is said, of Mr Burke, he chose a middle course between the two opposite extremes. To gratify the Americans, he repealed the Stamp Act; and to vindicate the honour of Britain, he got a law passed declaratory of her right to legislate for America in taxation as in every other case.

This measure, whoever was its author, was certainly not the offspring either of wisdom or vigour. If the mother country had a right to legislate in all cases for America, obedience to the Stamp Act should certainly have been enforced; and the minority which relinquished an acknowledged right, to gratify the factious disposition of distant colonies, was obviously unfit to guide the helm of a great empire. Lord Rockingham and his friends were accordingly dismissed from office; and a new administration was formed under the auspices of Mr Pitt, now created earl of Chatham.

Burke, in the mean time, wrote in defence of the party with which he was connected; and assumed great credit to it for composing the difficulties of the British empire by the repeal of the American Stamp Act, whilst the constitutional superiority of Great Britain was preserved by the act for securing the dependence of the colonies. After defending his friends, he proceeded to attack those who had succeeded them in office. Of Lord Chatham he says—"He has once more designed to take the reins of government into his own hands, and will, no doubt, drive with his wonted speed, and raise a deal of dust around him. His horsecars all matched..." matched to his mind; but as some of them are young and skittish, it is said he has adopted the new contrivance lately exhibited by Sir Francis Delaval on Westminster bridge: whenever they begin to snort and toss up their heads, he touches the spring, throws them loose, and away they go, leaving his lordship safe and snug, and as much at his ease as if he sat on a wool-pack."

The letter, of which this is an extract, was printed in the Public Advertiser; and is said to have contributed, in no small degree, to lessen the popularity of the illustrious statesman against whom it was written. The ministry, indeed, which he had formed, consisted of very heterogeneous materials, and was not heartily approved of by the nation. It therefore soon fell in pieces by its own discord, and Lord Chatham retired in disgust.

The parliament being dissolved in 1768, Burke was re-elected for Weymouth, and took his seat, when the house met, in November. The duke of Grafton was now prime minister, and was opposed by two powerful parties in parliament; that of the marquis of Rockingham, and that of which Mr Grenville was considered as the leader. These two parties, however, differed widely between themselves. Mr Grenville had published a pamphlet, intitled, "The Present State of the Nation;" in which he very ably vindicated his own measures, and of course condemned the measures of those who had succeeded him; and Burke replied to him, with greater eloquence, but, perhaps, with less of argument, in a tract, intitled Observations on the Present State of the Nation, in which he makes a very high panegyric on his own patron, and the connections of the party, and animadverses with cutting severity on their successors in office.

About this period commenced the national frenzy which was excited by the expulsion of Wilkes from the house of commons, for having printed and published a seditious libel, and three obscene and impious libels. In the controversy to which this transaction gave rise, Burke and Johnson took opposite sides. Johnson, in his False Alarm, contends, with great ability, that the expulsion of a member from the house of commons for the commission of a crime, amounts to a disqualification of that member from sitting in the parliament from which he is expelled; whilst Burke, though he disapproved of the conduct of Wilkes as much as his friend, laboured to prove, that nothing but an act of the legislature can disqualify any person from sitting in parliament who is regularly chosen, by a majority of electors, to fill a vacant seat. It does not appear that this difference of opinion produced the smallest abatement of mutual regard between him and Johnson. They both attended the weekly club, and were as much pleased with each other as formerly.

The proceedings of the Grafton administration, respecting Wilkes and other subjects, gave rise to the celebrated Letters of Junius. That those compositions were, in clearness, neatness, and precision of style, infinitely superior to perhaps every other series of newspaper invectives, has never been controverted; and that they display a vast extent of historical and political information, is known to all who are not themselves strangers to the history of this kingdom. Unclaimed by any author, and superior to the productions of most authors, they have been given to Burke, to his brother Richard, a man likewise of very bright talents, to Mr Hamilton, and to Lord George Germaine. We should hardly hesitate to adopt the opinion of those who attribute them to Burke, had he not disavowed them to his friend Johnson. "I should have believed Burke to be Junius (said Johnson), because I know no man but Burke who is capable of writing these letters; but Burke spontaneously denied it to me. The case would have been different had I asked him if he was the author. A man may think he has a right to deny when so questioned as to an anonymous publication." The difference between the style of these letters and that of Burke's acknowledged writings, would have had no weight with us; because such was his command of language, that he could assume, and occasionally did assume, any style which he chose to imitate. He had already so closely imitated the very different styles of Lucas and Bolingbroke as to deceive the public; and what was to hinder him from imitating the style of Lord George Germaine, which certainly has a strong resemblance to that of Junius? We think, however, with Johnson, that his spontaneous diffusion of these letters ought to be held as sufficient proof that he was not their author.

Burke had now gotten a very pleasant villa near Beaconsfield in Buckinghamshire; and being one of the freeholders of the county, he drew up a petition to the king, complaining of the conduct of the house of commons respecting the Middlesex election, and praying for a dissolution of the parliament. The petition, tho' explicit and firm, was temperate and decorous, and as unlike to one on the same subject from the livery of London, as the principles of a moderate Whig are to those of a turbulent democrat.

About this period he stated very clearly his own political principles in a pamphlet intitled, "Thoughts on the Causes of the Present Discontents;" and his plan for removing these discontented had not a grain of democracy in its composition. He proposed to place the government in the hands of an open aristocracy of talents, virtue, property, and rank, combined together on avowed principles, and supported by the approbation and confidence of the people; and the aristocracy which he thought fitted for this great trust, was a combination of those Whig families which had most powerfully supported the revolution and consequent establishments. He expressed, in strong terms, his disapprobation of any change in the constitution and duration of parliament; and declared himself as averse from an administration which should have no other support than popular favour, as from one brought forward merely by the influence of the court.

In this plan there is not that wisdom or liberality which might have been expected from a man of Burke's cultivated mind and extensive reading. The Whigs, when in power, had been as venal as the Tories; and the imprisonment of Lord Oxford, the banishment of Atterbury bishop of Rochester, and the revolution of the house of commons to fit for seven years, when it had been chosen by its constituents for no more than three, were certainly greater violations of the constitution than the disqualification of Wilkes, or any other measure that had been carried by the court during the administrations of Grenville and the duke of Grafton. Burke showed himself in this publication to be indeed no republican; but every sentence of it breathed the spirit of party.

Lord North was now prime minister; and in order to tranquillize America, he proposed, in the beginning of his administration, to repeal the obnoxious laws of his predecessors in office, and to reserve the duty on tea merely to maintain the authority of parliament. The consequences of this conduct we have detailed elsewhere (see Britain, Encyclopaedia); and they are too well known to all our readers. The part which Burke acted during his administration will not, in our opinion, admit of any plausible defence. It was not indeed the part of a democrat, but of a man determined to oppose every measure of those in power. In the beginning of the contest, he certainly displayed more wisdom and patriotism than the minister; for, without entering directly into the question whether the mother-country had or had not a right to tax the colonies? he contented himself with warning the house against dangerous innovations. "The Americans," said he, "have been very serviceable to Britain under the old system; do not, therefore, let us enter rashly upon new measures. Our commercial interests have hitherto greatly promoted by our friendly intercourse with the colonies; do not let us endanger possession for contingency; do not let us substitute untried theories for a system experimentally ascertained to be useful."

This was undoubtedly sound reasoning, and every way becoming a lover of his country; but his continued opposition to government, after all Europe had league against Great Britain, was a conduct which will admit of no vindication, and for which the only possible apology must be found in that ardour of temper which made his friend Hamilton say, on another occasion, "Whatever opinion Burke, from any motive, supports, so ductile is his imagination, that he soon conceives it to be right." In his most violent opposition, however, though his expressions were often extravagant and indecent, he never for a moment gave his support to the metaphysical doctrine of the imperceptible rights of man, or to the actual innovations which some meant to introduce on the basis of that doctrine. His upright mind was indeed sufficiently guarded against these novelties by what he had observed in France during the year 1772. Whilst he remained in that country, his literary and political eminence made him courted by all the anti-monarchical and infidel philosophers of the time; and in the religious scepticism and political theories of Voltaire, Helvetius, Rousseau, and D'Alembert, he saw, even at that period, the probable overthrow of religion and government. His sentiments on this subject he took occasion, immediately on his return, to communicate to the house of commons; and to point out the conspiracy of atheism to the watchful policy of every government. He professed, that he was not over fond of calling in the aid of the secular arm to suppress doctrines and opinions; but he recommended a grand alliance among all believers against those ministers of rebellious darkness, who were endeavouring to shake all the works of God established in beauty and in order.

The American war proving unsuccessful, though Great Britain never made a more glorious stand, Lord North and his friends retired from office; and, in February 1782, a new ministry was formed, at the head of which was placed the marquis of Rockingham; Lord Shelburne and Mr Fox were the secretaries of state; and Mr Burke, who was appointed pay-master to the forces, exulted, rather childishly, in the house of commons, on the happiness which was to accrue, both to the king and to the people, from the able and upright conduct of the new ministers. The time in which the greater part of them continued in office was too short to permit them to do either much good or much evil.

On the 1st of July the marquis of Rockingham died; and the earl of Shelburne being placed at the head of the treasury, Fox and Burke resigned in disgust, and, to the astonishment of the nation, formed the famous coalition with Lord North, whose measures they had so long, and so vehemently, opposed. In the coalition of North and Burke there would have been nothing wonderful. In the intercourse of private life, these two statesmen had always met on terms of friendship and mutual regard; they had the same ideas of the excellence of the constitution, and the same aversion to innovation under the name of reform; even their studies and amusements were very similar, being both men of taste and classical learning; and though Burke opposed the taxation of America by the British parliament, his opposition proceeded rather from motives of prudence and expediency than from any settled conviction that the measure was unconstitutional. But the political enmity of Fox and North had proceeded, not only to personal abuse, but to professions of mutual abhorrence; and perhaps there was hardly an unprejudiced person in the kingdom who entertained not suspicions, that the unexpected union of such enemies was cemented by a principle less pure than patriotism.

Mr Pitt was now chancellor of the exchequer; and when he announced to the house of commons the peace which was concluded in January 1783, he found the terms on which it had been made severely condemned by North, Fox, Burke, and all their friends. The censure passed on it by Lord North and his followers was perfectly consistent with their former conduct, and with the opinions which they had uniformly maintained; but it was with no good grace that Fox and Burke, who had offered an unconditional peace to the Dutch, and so frequently propounded to recognize the independence of America, condemned the peace which had been concluded by Lord Shelburne. On this, as on many other occasions, they acted, not as enlightened politicians, but as the rancorous leaders of a party.

In consequence of a vote of censure passed by the commons, the ministers resigned their employments, and were succeeded by the duke of Portland, Lord North, Mr Fox, Mr Burke, and their friends. Burke had his former employment of paymaster to the forces; Lord North and Mr Fox were secretaries of state, and the duke of Portland was first lord of the treasury. To many persons this ministry had the appearance of greater strength than any that had governed the kingdom since the time of Sir Robert Walpole; but its duration was not longer than that of the preceding. On the 18th of November, Mr Fox introduced his famous India-bill, into the merits of which it is foreign from our purpose to enter: suffice it to say, that after being strongly supported by Burke, and ably opposed by Pitt and Dundas, it passed the house of commons by a very great majority; but was lost in the house of peers, Mr Pitt was now placed at the head of the treasury, where he has remained ever since, notwithstanding the violent and powerful opposition which he met with at first from North and Fox and their coalesced friends; the voice of the nation has been on his side; and that voice will always drown the bellowings of patriotism.

The principal events in which Burke signalized himself, since the year 1784, were the trial of Hastings, the deliberations of the house on the proposed regency during the lamented illness of the king, and the French revolution; and on each of these occasions he displayed talents which astonished the nation. He has, indeed, been severely blamed for the pertinacity with which he prosecuted Mr Hastings, and his conduct has been attributed to very unworthy motives; but of this there is neither proof nor probability. The temperament of his mind was such, that, into whatever measure he entered, he entered with a degree of ardour of which cooler heads can hardly form a conception. Burke was but one member of a committee which found, or thought it found, evidences of the guilt of Hastings; and, in forming his opinion, it is little likely that he should have been baffled by interest or resentment, whose delicate sense of rectitude would not permit him to retain a pension when he could no longer support the party of that friend who had obtained it for him.

When the establishment of a regency was thought necessary, he took the part, as it was called, of the prince of Wales, in opposition to the plan proposed by Lord Thurlow and the minister; and we doubt not but he was actuated by the purest principles; but the language which he used in the house was vehement, and some of his expressions were highly indecent. Our regard for his memory makes us wish to forget them.

Soon after the recovery of the king, the attention of Burke was attracted to the most momentous event of modern times,—an event which has convulsed all Europe, and of which, from the very first, his sagacity foresaw the consequences. Many of his friends in parliament, as well as numbers of wise and good men out of it, augured, from the meeting of the states-general of France, great benefit to that nation, of which the government was considered as despotic and oppressive; and some were sanguine enough to prognosticate a new and happy order of things to all the nations connected with France, when its government should become more free. Burke thought very differently: He was well acquainted with the genius of the French people, and with the principles of those philosophers, as they called themselves, by whom a total revolution in church and state had long been projected; and from the commencement of their career in the constituent assembly, when they established, as the foundation of all legal government, the metaphysical doctrine of the rights of man, he predicted that torrent of anarchy and irreligion which they have since attempted to pour over all Europe. Fox and some of the other leading men in opposition affected to consider this as a vain fear; and a coolness took place between them and Burke, though they still acted together in parliament. At last, perceiving the French doctrines of liberty and equality, and atheism, spreading through this nation, not only among those who had talents for such disquisitions, but in clubs and societies, of which the members could be no judges of metaphysical reasonings, he expressed his apprehension of the consequences in the house of commons. This brought on a violent altercation between him and Fox, who was supported by Sheridan; and a rupture took place between these old friends which was never healed. He no more attended the meetings of the opposition members; and in 1790 he published his celebrated Reflections on the French Revolution.

By the friends of government this work was admired as the most seasonable, as well as one of the ablest defences of the British constitution that ever was written; whilst Fox and his friends, with the great body of English dissenters, though they admitted it to be the offspring of uncommon genius, affected to consider it as declamatory rather than argumentative, and as inconsistent with the principles which its author had hitherto uniformly maintained. Many answers were written to it; of which the most conspicuous were Vindiciae Gallica by Mr Macintosh, and The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine. To these Burke deigned not to make a direct reply. He vindicated his general principles, as well as some of his particular reasonings, in A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly; and he very completely evinced the consistency of his principles in his Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs.

Of this great work, for great it undoubtedly is, the merits as well as the demerits have been much exaggerated; and some have made it a question, Whether it has on the whole been productive of good or of harm? By the enemies of the author, it is represented as having given rise to the spirit of discontent, by exciting such writers as Paine and his adherents, who, but for the provocation given by The Reflections, might have remained in silence and obscurity. This was from the first a very improbable supposition; for the spirit of democracy has at all times been rife; but since the appearance of Professor Robison's Proofs of a Conspiracy, and Barnwell's History of Jacobinism, it must be known to every reader to be a supposition contrary to fact. The conspirators were busy long before Burke wrote his Reflections; and the friends of order and religion are his debtors, for having so forcibly roused them from their slumber, and put them on their guard. With respect to composition, it is certainly neither so energetic nor so argumentative as the political tracts of Johnson, to which some have affected to consider it as superior; but it is more poetical, gives scope for a greater display of the knowledge of human nature; and being written on a more interesting subject, it has had a much greater number of readers than those unrivalled pieces of political controversy.

Burke being now associated with Mr Pitt, continued to write from time to time memorials and remarks on the state of France, and the alliance that was formed against the new order of things in that distracted country, of which some have been published since his death; and having resolved to quit the battle of public life as soon as the trial of Mr Hastings should be concluded, he vacated his seat when that gentleman was acquitted, and retired to his villa at Beaconsfield, where on the 2d of August 1794 he met with a heavy domestic loss in the death of his only son. In the beginning of the same year he had lost his brother Richard, whom he tenderly loved; but though this reiterated stroke of death Burke deeply affected him; it never relaxed the vigour of his mind, nor lessened the interest which he took in the public weal.

In this retreat, while he was labouring for the good of all around him, he was disturbed by a very unprovoked attack upon his character by some distinguished speakers in the house of peers. Soon after the death of his son the king was graciously pleased to bestow a pension on him and Mrs Burke; and this those noble lords were pleased to represent as the reward of what they termed the change of his principles and the defection of his friends. The injustice of this charge must be obvious to every impartial mind, since the pension was given after he had retired from parliament, and could not by his eloquence either support the ministry or gall the opposition. He was not a man to submit tamely to such an insult. He published a letter on the occasion, addressed to a noble lord (Earl Fitzwilliam), in which he repels the attack on his character, and retaliates on those by whom it was made, in terms of such eloquent and keen sarcasm, as will be read with admiration as long as the language of the letter shall be understood.

Burke having employed every effort which benevolence and wisdom could devise to stimulate civilized governments to unite in opposition to the impiety and anarchy of France, laboured likewise in private to relieve those who had suffered exile and proscription from the direful system. Through his influence a school was established in his neighbourhood for the education of those whose parents, for their adherence to principle, were rendered unable to afford to their children useful instruction; and that school, which on his deathbed he recommended to Mr Pitt, continues to flourish under his powerful protection.

When the appearance of melioration in the principles and government of France induced our sovereign to make overtures of peace to the French directory, Burke resumed his pen; and in a series of letters, intitled, Thoughts on the Prospect of a Regicide Peace, displayed a force of genius which is certainly not surpassed, and perhaps not equalled, even in his far-famed Reflections on the French Revolution. This was his last work, and was considered by himself as in its nature testamentary.

From the beginning of June 1797 his health rapidly declined; but his understanding exerted itself with undiminished force and uncontracted range; and his dispositions retained all their amiable sweetness. On the 7th of July, when the French revolution was mentioned, he spoke with pleasure of the conscious rectitude of his own intentions in what he had done and written respecting it; intreated those about him to believe, that if any unguarded expression of his on the subject had offended any of his former friends, no offence was by him intended; and he declared his unfeigned forgiveness of all who had on account of his writings, or for any other cause, endeavoured to do him an injury. On the day following he desired to be carried to another room; and whilst one of his friends, assisted by some servants, was complying with his request, Mr Burke faintly uttering, "God bless you," fell back and expired in the 68th year of his age.

From this detail, we trust that our readers are already sufficiently acquainted with his general character. In genius, variety of knowledge, and readiness of expres-