Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 4.djvu/612

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BUR—BUR
I am stripped of all my honours; I am torn up by the roots and lie prostrate on the earth. . . . I am alone. I have none to meet my enemies in the gate. . . . I live in an inverted order. They who ought to have succeeded me have gone before me. They who should have been to me as posterity are in the place of ancestors.”

A pension of £2500 was all that Burke could now be persuaded to accept. The duke of Bedford and Lord Lauderdale made some remarks in Parliament upon this paltry reward to a man who, in conducting a great trial on the public behalf, had worked harder for nearly ten years than any minister in any cabinet of the reign. But it was not yet safe to kick up heels in face of the dying lion. The vileness of such criticism was punished, as it deserved to be, in the Letter to a Noble Lord (1796), in which Burke showed the usual art of all his compositions in shaking aside the insignificances of a subject. He turned mere personal defence and retaliation into an occasion for a lofty enforcement of constitutional principles, and this, too, with a relevancy and pertinence of consummate skilfulness. There was to be one more great effort before the end.

In the spring of 1796 Pitt's constant anxiety for peace had become more earnest than ever. He had found out the instability of the coalition and the power of France. Like the thrifty steward he was, he saw with growing concern the waste of the national resources and the strain upon commerce, with a public debt swollen to what then seemed the desperate sum of £400,000,000. Burke at the notion of negotiation flamed out in the Letters on a Regicide Peace, in some respects the most splendid of all his compositions. They glow with passion, and yet with all their rapidity is such steadfastness, the fervour of imagination is so skilfully tempered by close and plausible reasoning, and the whole is wrought with such strength and fire, that we hardly know where else to look either in Burke's own writings or elsewhere for such an exhibition of the rhetorical resources of our language. We cannot wonder that the whole nation was stirred to the very depths, or that they strengthened the aversion of the king, of Windham, and other important personages in the Government, against the plans of Pitt. The prudence of their drift must be settled by external considerations. Those who think that the French were likely to show a moderation and practical reasonableness in success, such as they had never shown in the hour of imminent ruin, will find Burke's judgment full of error and mischief. Those, on the contrary, who think that the nation which was on the very eve of surrendering itself to the Napoleonic absolutism was not in a hopeful humour for peace and the European order, will believe that Burke's protests were as perspicacious as they were powerful, and that anything which chilled the energy of the war was as fatal as he declared it to be.

When the third and most impressive of these astonishing productions came into the hands of the public, the writer was no more. Burke died on the 8th of July 1797. Fox, who with all his faults was never wanting in a fine and generous sensibility, proposed that there should be a public funeral, and that the body should lie among the illustrious dead in Westminster Abbey. Burke, however, had left strict injunctions that his burial should be private; and he was laid in the little church at Beaconsfield. It was the year of Campo Formio. So a black whirl and torment of rapine, violence, and fraud was encircling the Western World, as a life went out which, notwithstanding some eccentricities and some aberrations, had made great tides in human destiny very luminous.

BURKE, Robert O'Hara (1821–1861), one of the great explorers of the continent of Australia, was born in 1821 at St Clerans in Galway, Ireland. He left the Belgian college where he had been educated to enter the military service of Austria, but in 1848 returned to Ireland, and obtained a post in the mounted police. He next went to Australia, and served for some time as police-inspector, first in Melbourne and then in the district of Beechworth, till the outbreak of the Crimean War induced him to return to Europe to take part in the campaign. Peace was restored, however, before he arrived, and he accordingly went back to Australia and resumed his connection with the police force. In 1860 he was appointed one of the leaders of a Government exploring expedition, and in this capacity had the honour of being one of the first Europeans to traverse the continent from south to north. A short account of the enterprise—so brilliantly successful in its achievements and so disastrous in its termination—is given in the article Australia, vol. iii. p. 106; and fuller details will be found in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society for 1862. The remains of the explorer were interred by Howitt's relief party in 28° 20′ S. lat. and 141° E. long.

BURLAMAQUI, Jean Jacques (1694–1748), a celebrated writer on natural law, was born at Geneva on the 24th June 1694. He received a careful education, and while passing through his university course devoted himself with such success to the study of ethics and law of nature, that at the age of twenty-five he was designated honorary professor. Before taking possession of his chair he travelled through France and England, and made the acquaintance of the most eminent writers of the period. On his return he began his lectures, and soon gained a wide reputation, from the simplicity of his style and the precision of his views. He continued to lecture for fifteen years, when he was compelled to resign from ill-health. His fellow-citizens at once elected him a member of the council of state, and he gained as high a reputation for his practical sagacity as he had for his theoretical knowledge. He died at Geneva on the 3d April 1748. His works were Principes du Droit Naturel, 1747, and Principes du Droit Politique, 1751. These have passed through many editions, and were very extensively used as text-books. The most convenient collected edition is that by Dupin, in 5 vols., 1820. Burlamaqui's style is simple and clear, and his arrangement of the material good. His fundamental principle may be described as rational utilitarianism, and it in many ways resembles that of Cumberland.

BURLINGTON, a city and port of entry of the United States, capital of Chittenden county, in Vermont, 38 miles N.W. of Montpelier, in 44° 27′ N. lat., and 73° 10′ W. long. It has a fine situation on the eastern shore of Lake Champlain, and is laid out with great regularity around a central square. Its principal buildings are the Vermont University (which occupies the summit of the slope on which the city is built), the Vermont Episcopal Institute, the court-houses, a jail, a custom-house, and a marine-hospital. The university was founded in 1791, and was endowed by the State with 29,000 acres of land,—to which in 1865 were added 150,000 acres of national grant by the incorporation of the agricultural college. There is a medical school attached. Burlington carries on an extensive trade in lumber, and has the most important share in the shipping traffic of the lake. Its harbour is defended by a breakwater, and a lighthouse was erected at the mouth of the bay in 1862. To the north of the Onion River, but united to Burlington by a bridge, lies the flourishing village of Winooski, with factories and mills. The history of Burlington only dates from 1783; its first church from 1795, and its incorporation as a city from 1864. Population in 1870, 14,387.

BURLINGTON, a city and port of entry of the United States in Burlington county, New Jersey, 18 miles N.E. of Philadelphia, on the Delaware, in 40° 5′ N. lat. and 73°