Jacobins at the Common Hall ; the fierce day of the 20th of June (1T92), when the mob flooded the Tuileries, and the bloodier day of the 10th of August, when the Swiss guard was massacred and the royal family flung into prison ; the murders in the prisons in September; the trial and execution of the king in January (1793) ; the proscription of the Girondins in June, the execution of the queen in October if we realize the impression likely to be made upon the sober and homely English imagination by such a heightening of horror by horror, we may easily understand how people came to listen to Burke s voice as the voice of inspiration, and to look on his burning anger as the holy
fervour of a prophet of the Lord.Fox still held to his old opinions as stoutly as he could, and condemned and opposed the war which England had declared against the French republic Burke, who was profoundly incapable of the meanness of letting personal estrangement blind his eyes to what was best for the commonwealth, kept hoping against hope that each new trait of excess in France would at length bring the great Whig leader to a better mind He used to declaim by the hour in the conclaves at Burlington House upon the necessity of securing Fox; upon the strength which his genius would lend to the administration in its task of grappling with the sanguinary giant; upon the impossibility, at least, of doing either with him or without him. Fox's most important political friends who had long wavered, at length, to Burke's great satisfaction, went over to the side of the Government. In July 1794, the duke of Portland, Lord Fitzwilliam, Windham, and Grenville took office under Pitt. Fox was left with a minority which was satirically said not to have been more than enough to fill a hackney coach. " That is a calumny," said one of the party, " we should have filled two." The war was prosecuted with the aid of both the great parliamentary parties of the country, and with the approval of the great bulk of the nation. Perhaps the one man in England who in his heart approved of it less than any other was William Pitt. The difference between Pitt and Burke was nearly as great as that between Burke and Fox. Burke would be content with nothing short of a crusade against France, and war to the death with her rulers. " I cannot persuade myself," he said, " that this war bears any the least resemblance to any that has ever existed in the world. I cannot persuade myself that any examples or any reasonings drawn from other wars and other politics are at all applicable to it" (Corr. iv. 219). Pitt, on the other hand, as Lord Bussell truly says, treated Robespierre and Carnot as he would has^e treated any other French rulers, whose ambition was to be resisted, and whose interference in the affairs of other nations was to be checked. And he entered upon the matter in the spirit of a man of business, by sending ships to seize some islands belonging to France in the West Indies, so as to make certain of repayment of the expenses of the war.
In the summer of 1794 Burke was struck to the ground by a blow to his deepest affection in life, and he never recovered from it. His whole soul was wrapped up in his only son, of whose abilities he had the most extravagant estimate and hope. All the evidence goes to show that Richard Burke was one of the most presumptuous and empty-headed of human beings. " He is the most impudent and opiniative fellow I ever knew," said Wolfe Tone. Gilbert Elliott, a very different man, gives the same account. " Burke," he says, describing a dinner party at Lord Fitzwilliam s in 1793, " has now got such a train after him as would sink anybody but himself : his son, who is quite nauseated by all mankind ; his brother who is liked better than his son, but is rather oppressive with animal spirits and brogue ; and his cousin, William Burke, who is just returned unexpectedly from India, as much ruined as when he went years ago, and who is a fresh charge on any prospects of power Burke may ever have. Mrs Burke has in her train Miss French [Burke s niece], the most perfect She Paddy that ever was caught. Notwithstanding these disadvantages Burke is in himself a sort of power in the state. It is not too much to say that he is a sort of power in Europe, though totally without any of those means or the smallest share in them which give or maintain power in other men." Burke accepted the position of a power in Europe seriously. Though no man was ever more free from anything like the egoism of the intellectual coxcomb, yet he abounded in that active self-confidence and self-assertion which is natural in men who are conscious of great powers, and strenuous in promoting great causes. In the summer of 1791 he despatched his sou to Coblentz to give advice to the royalist exiles, then under the direction of Calonne, and to report to Beaconsfield their disposition and prospects. Richard Burke was received with many compliments, but of course nothing came of his mission, and the only impression that remains with the reader of his prolix story is his tale of the two royal brothers, who afterwards became Louis XVIII. and Charles X., meeting after some parting, and embracing one another with many tears on board a boat in the middle of the Rhine, while some of the courtiers raised a cry of " Long live the king " the king who had a few weeks [before been carried back in triumph to his capital with Mayor Potion in his coach. When we think of the pass to which things had come in Paris by this time, and of the unappeasable ferment that boiled round the court, there is a certain touch of the ludicrotis in the notion of poor Richard Burke writing to Louis XVI. a letter of wise advice how to comport himself.
At the end of the same year, with the approval of his father, he started for Ireland as the adviser of the Catholic Association. He made a wretched emissary, and there was no limit to his arrogance, noisiness, and indiscretion. The Irish agitators were glad to givs him two thousand guineas and to send him home. The mission is associated with a more important thing, his father s Letters to Sir Hercules Langrishe, advocating the admission of the Irish Catholics to the franchise. This short piece abounds richly in maxims of moral and political prudence. And Burke exhibited considerable courage in writing it; for many of its maxims seem to involve a contradiction, first, to the principles on which he withstood the movement in France, and second, to his attitude upon the subject of parliamentary reform. The contradiction is in fact only superficial. Burke was not the man to fall unawares into a trap of this kind. His defence of Catholic relief, and it had been the conviction of a life-time, was very properly founded on propositions which were- true of Ireland, and were true neither of France nor of the quality of parliamentary representation in England. Yet Burke threw such breadth and generality over all he wrote that even these propositions, relative as they were, form a short manual of statesmanship.
Hastings had come to an end, and Burke bade farewell to Parliament. Richard Burke was elected in his father s place at Malton. The king was bent on making the champion of the old order of Europe a peer. His title was to be Lord Beaconsfield, and it was designed to annex to the title an income for three lives. The patent was being made ready, when all was arrested by the sudden death of the son who was to Burke more than life. The old man s grief was agonizing and inconsolable. " The storm has gone over me," he wrote in words which are well known, but which can hardly be repeated too often for any who have an ear for the cadences of noble and pathetic speech, " The storm has gone over me, and I lie like one of those
old oaks which the late hurricane has scattered about me.
