and it is defective in no description of savage nature. They pursue even such as I, into the obscurest retreats, and haul them before their revolu. tionary tribunals. They have so determined a hatred to all privileged orders, that they deny even to the departed the sad immunities of the grave. Their turpitude purveys to their malice; they unplumb the dead for bullets to assassinate the living. If all Revolutionists were not proof against all caution, I should recommend it to their consideration, that no persons were ever known in his tory, either sacred or profane, to vex the sepulchre, and by their sorceries to call up the prophetic dead, with any other event than the prediction of their own disastrous fate. Leave me, oh, leave me to repose! In one thing I can excuse the Duke of Bedford for his attack upon me and my mortuary pension. He cannot comprehend the transaction he condemns. What I have obtained was the fruit of no bargain, the production of no intrigue, the result of no compromise, the effect of no solicitation. The first suggestion of it never came from me, mediately, or immediately, to his Majesty, or any of his Ministers. It was long known, that the instant my engagements would permit, and before the heaviest of all calamities had condemned me to obscurity and sorrow, I had resolved on a total retreat. I had executed that design. I was entirely out of the way of serving or hunting any statesman or party, before the Ministers carried into effect the spontaneous bounty of the Crown. Both descriptions have acted as became them. When I could no longer serve them, Ministers have considered my situation. When I could no longer hurt them, the Revolutionists have trampled on my infirmity."

With that application to first principles, which forms the charm, and makes the imperishable value of his writings, he then touches on the ground of public reward. "I decline his Grace's jurisdiction as a judge. I challenge the Duke of Bedford as a juror upon the value of my services. I cannot recognise, in his few and idle years, the competence to judge of my long and laborious life. His Grace thinks I have obtained too much. I answer, that

my exertions, whatever they have been, were such as no hope of pecuniary reward could possibly excite, and no pecuniary compensation can possibly reward them. Between money and such services, (if done by abler men than I am,) there is no common principle of comparison. They are qualities incommensurable. Money is made for the comfort and convenience of animal life. It cannot be a reward for what mere animal life must indeed sustain, but never can inspire. With submission to his Grace, I have not had more than sufficient. As to any noble use, I trust I know how to employ, as well as he, a much greater fortune than he possesses. When I say I have not received more than I deserve, is this the language I hold to Majesty? No. Before that presence I claim no merit at all. One style to a gracious benefactor; another to a proud and insulting foe."

In this language Burke states at once the maxim of a wise government, and the error of a foolish people. In our day, when the mob are the masters, money, the idol of the rabble, is naturally supposed to be the measure of every thing. The artificer measures the work of his hands by its worth in wages; and having no other standard, and being capable, from his gross and handicraft education, of no other, he thinks that he can ascertain the weight of genius, eloquence, virtue, and the noble energies of hearts living and dying for the great interests of mankind, by a guinea more or less in the scale. When revolution is creeping through the multitude, the first cry is always, Economy. This is the sole principle on which the Humes and charlatans of that coarse and miserable class, propose to build their regeneration of mankind. The temple is to have no priest but the money-changer. The nation is to traffic for statesmen as the pedlar traffics for his wares,-buy them at the cheapest rate, and then make the most of them. The question with the new authorities from the workshop, is not, which is the highest-minded, the most accomplished, the most ardent, active, and manly Cabinet, but which is the Cabinet that will be content to work for the lowest wages. The whole system is constructed on the

old Jewry principle. The lopping off five hundred a-year from the income of a Minister, is a victory which these men think deserving of all the honours of triumphant patriotism. Envy and malice, aided by the true Republican uncharitableness, which suspects every man to be a villain on the first opportunity, doubtless have their weight with the rabble, and, in nine instances out of ten, are the whole and sincere motives of the charlatans, who trick them into vice and folly. To a low mind, to a vulgar antagonist, to a miserable struggler for influence, which he finds always withheld where his claims are to be tried on the standard of gentlemen, no enjoyment is equal to that of proving that he can molest, if he cannot wound; that if he cannot degrade the honour of the rival whose talents throw him into perpetual contempt, he can at least narrow his income; that if his arguments are cast back helplessly upon himself, his patriotic pretences stripped, and his name turned into a burlesque, he can at least be felt in his arithmetic, and mulct his lofty scorner in the shape of so many shillings patriotically shorn from his subsistence. Prodigality is one thing, and parsimony is another. The true principle is, that the men who administer the government, are to receive all the national subsistence which can enable them to do their office in the most effectual manner. To the fulfilment of their public duties, all other considerations are totally trivial, and must be postponed. The object of England must be to have first-rate men; and to have the whole time and thought, the whole heart and mind of those men, devoted to the guardianship of her interests. Money must be an entirely subordinate consideration. Money ceases to be an element, when the calculation is of the fate of Empires and posterity. In the presence of things of such overwhelming magnitude, salaries and personal means fall into dust, and are nothing. The wisdom of one man averts a war, which would have cost us a hundred millions of money. The intelligence of another establishes a commercial code, which covers the land with activity. The valour of a third sends his spirit into the fainting glories of

the land, coerces victory, and brings home the national banner covered with inscriptions of triumph, and waving in the acclamations of the world. The eloquence of a fourth, accomplishing the still more capacious success, tramples down revolutionary violence at home, puts it to shame abroad, and throwing light at once on the evil and the good, withers the treachery, by the same flash which opens the face of heaven to the virtue, piety, and fortitude of the Empire. What money could produce such services, or what money can recompense them? But the narrowness of public liberality may seriously cramp and distract the powers and the uses of such men. The policy that reigns now will soon reason itself into the advantage of making our couriers travel on foot, fighting our battles with not-proof gunpowder, and dismounting our cavalry until the trumpet announces the enemy, and dismantling our ships until the battle is to be fought in the chops of the Channel. The public man who is uneasy in his personal circumstances, is so far compelled to withdraw his mind from the service of the State. The public man who feels that the decent expenditure of his station is rapidly sinking into encumbrances, must be uneasy. The public man who, in contemplating the natural effect of years, looks upon the future as opening to him only a vista of poverty, must be often disturbed, when it is essential to the highest interests of the State that he should be free from all disturbance. The public man whose eyes cannot fall upon the circle of his family without thinking of the certain difficulty, if not the actual destitution which must be their lot, aggravated too by their fall from the station of their father, and the pain of being followed by the public gaze into their obscurity, must have thoughts obtruding themselves on the hour when on his undivided council may hang the fate of his country-may have prognostics and fears driving sleep from his pillow, and withering into an early grave the heart, every pulse of which should have been given to the glory and the good of mankind. Pitt died at fortyseven, overwhelmed with debt. No man could charge this greatest of all British Statesmen with personal

waste; no gaming-table, no horserace, no dissipated banqueting, no pomp of expenditure, could be alleged against this virtuous and highminded man. Yet it is clear that his means were too narrow for his situation. None could be too magnificent for his services. We cannot enter into the recesses of the great statesman's mind; but who can say, how far the sense of this state of his affairs might not be among the causes of a death, thus occurring in the vigour of years? Pitt's elder brother is still living. What invaluable services might not have been obtained from the master mind of Pitt during the long vicissitudes of Europe since the day that saw him laid in the grave his principle, his purity, his fortitude, matured by the experience of thirty years! From what miserable changes of party might not the national character have been defended; from what gross degradations of public men, issuing in what fatal inroads on the constitution, might we not have been rescued? From what rising atrocities of Republicanism, already gathering its folds, and lifting its crested head and darting out its venomed tongue over the struggling liberty of the land, might we not have been delivered by the strong hand which crushed its neck, in what was scarcely more than the infancy and immaturity of his political being? Or, with what still nobler vigour, reserved for a still more perilous time, might we not see him grasping the deceiver, "that old serpent, which now goeth about to deceive all nations;" and plunging the evil angel of Revolution into the dungeon, to abide there for a thousand years? And, after all, what saving, even in the most vulgar sense of the word, is effected? The Committees, Reports, and Commissioners, originating in Mr Hume's rhetoric, and the weakness of the Legislature, which stooped to listen to that indiscriminate disciple of the counting-house, have amounted to, probably, ten times the sum which would have sustained every member of the Cabinet in the independence essential to their office and politic in the nation. Let us not be conceived to be the advocates for throwing away a single shilling. Our advocacy is for the true economy which knows that a bad commodity is dear at any price, and denies that

to be a saving at all, by which, while we save farthings, we lose millions, and sparing our pockets, suffer an empire to go to decay.

Burke, in allusion to his own efforts in the reduction of the sinecures of the Civil List Establishment, states more of those general principles. He had found two opinions on the subject of the reduction. One pronounced all change absurd, from the complication of the abuse; another would sweep all away at once. "Nothing but coarse amputation, or coarser taxation, was talked of. Blind zeal, or factious fury, were the whole contribution brought by the most noisy on the occasion." He then finely observes, in that style in which his imagination acts as his reason, and a most splendid allusion is invigorated into a convincing argument,-"Let me tell my youthful censor, that the necessities of that time required something very different from what others then suggested, or what his Grace now conceives. Let me inform him, that it was one of the most critical periods in our annals. Astronomers have supposed, that if a certain comet, whose path intercepted the ecliptic, had met the earth in some (I forget what) sign, it would have whirled us along with it in its eccentric course, into heaven knows what regions of heat and cold. Had the portentous comet of the 'Rights of Man,' which from its horrid hair shakes pestilence and war, and with fear of change perplexes monarchs,' crossed upon us in that internal state of England, nothing human could have prevented our being hurried into all the vices, crimes, horrors, and miseries of the French Revolution. Happily, France was not then jacobinized-her hostility was at a good distance. We had a limb cut off, but we preserved the body. There was much intestine heat, there was a dreadful fermentation. Wild and savage insurrection quitted the woods, and prowled about our streets in the shape of Reform. Many of the changes, by a great misnomer called Parliamentary Reforms, went, in their certain and not very remote effect, home to the utter destruction of the constitution of the kingdom. Had they taken place, not France, but England, would have had the honour of leading up the death-dance of democratic Revolution. * ** At that

time I was connected with men of high place in the community. They loved liberty, at least as much as the Duke of Bedford can do, and they understood it at least as well. The liberty they pursued was a liberty inseparable from order, morals, and religion, and was neither hypocritically nor fanatically followed. They did not wish that liberty, in itself the first of blessings, should in its perversion become the greatest curse that could fall upon mankind. The desires of the people (partly natural, and partly infused into them by art) appeared in so wild and inconsiderate a manner, with regard to the economical object, (I set aside the dreadful tampering with the body of the constitution itself,) that if their petitions had been literally complied with, the State would have been convulsed, and a gate would have been opened through which all property might be ravaged."

He then strikes out more broadly into the general question. "It cannot at this time be too often repeated, line upon line, and precept upon precept, until it comes into the currency of a proverb, To innovate is not to reform. The French Revolutionists complained of every thing. They refused to reform any thing; they left nothing unchanged. The consequences are before us-not in remote history, not in future prognostication -they are about us, they are upon us. They shake public security, they menace private enjoyment, they dwarf the young, they break the quiet of the old. Knowledge is rendered worse than ignorance, by the enormous evils of this dreadful innovation. The Revolution harpies of France, sprung from Night and Hell, or from that chaotic anarchy which generates all monstrous, all prodigious things,' hatch their eggs in the nest of every neighbouring state." He then gives a passing look at his helpless Grace of Bedford. "I was not, like his Grace, swaddled, and rocked, and dandled into a legislator. ‹ Nitor in adversum' is the motto for a man like me. I possessed not one of the qualities, nor cultivated one of the arts, that recommend men to the favour and protection of the great. I was not made for a minion or a tool. As little did I follow the trade of winning the hearts, by imposing on the understandings of the people.

At every step of my progress in life, (for at every step I was traversed and opposed,) and at every turnpike I met, I was forced to shew my pass port."

He now comes more directly to the Duke's charge, and retorts it with an effect which, if that shallow nobleman could ever derive any lesson from experience, must have made him wish the day of his unlucky speech blotted out of the calendar." The Duke of Bedford conceives that he is obliged to call the attention of the House of Peers to his Majesty's grant to me, which he considers as excessive. I know not how it has happened, but it seems that, while his Grace was meditating his well-considered censure upon me, he fell into a sort of sleep. Homer nods, and the Duke of Bedford may dream; and as dreams (even his golden dreams) are apt to be incongruously put together, his Grace preserved the idea of reproach to me, but took the subject from the Crown grants to his own family. In that way of putting things together his Grace is perfectly right. The grants to the house of Russell were so enormous, as not only to outrage all economy, but even to stagger credibility. The Duke of Bedford is the Leviathan among all the creatures of the Crown. He tumbles about his unwieldy bulk; he plays and frolics in the ocean of the Royal bounty. Huge as he is, and while he lies floating many a rood,' he is still a creature. His ribs, his fins, his whalebone, the very spiracles through which he spouts a torrent of brine against his origin, and covers me all over with the spray; every thing of him and about him is from the throne. Is it for him to question the dispensation of the Royal favour? * * * * It would be not gross adulation, but uncivil irony, to say that he has any public merit of his own, to keep alive the idea of the services by which his vast landed pensions were obtained. It is his ancestor, the original pensioner, that has laid up this inexhaustible fund of merit, which makes his Grace so very delicate about the merit of all other grantees of the Crown. * The first Peer of the name, the first purchaser of the grants, was a Mr Russell, a person of an ancient gentleman's family, raised by being a minion of Henry VIII. The first of those immoderate grants

was taken, not from the ancient demesne of the Crown, but from the recent confiscations of the nobility of the land. The lion, having sucked the blood of his prey, threw the offal carcass to the jackall in waiting. Having once tasted the food of confiscation, the favourite became fierce and ravenous. This worthy favourite's first grant was made from the lay nobility. The second, infinitely improving on the enormity of the first, was from the plunder of the Church. In truth, his Grace is somewhat excusable in his dislike to a grant like mine, not only in its quantity, but in its kind, so different from his own.

"Mine was from a mild and benevolent Sovereign. His was from Henry VIII.

"Mine had not its fund in the murder of any innocent person of illustrious rank, or in the pillage of any body of unoffending men. His grants were from the consolidated funds of judgments iniquitously legal, and from possessions voluntarily surrendered by their owners, with the gibbet at their door. The merit of the original grantee from whom he derives, was that of being a prompt and greedy instrument of a levelling tyrant. The merit of the original grantee was in giving his hand to the work, and partaking the spoil with a Prince who plundered the national Church. His founder's merits were, by acts in which he served his master and made his fortune, to bring poverty, wretchedness, and depopulation, upon his country. His founder's merit was that of a gentleman raised by the arts of a Court, and the protection of a Wolsey, to eminence. His merit in that eminence was, by instigating a tyrant to injustice, to provoke a people to rebellion. The political merit of the first pensioner of his Grace's house, was that of being concerned, as a Counsellor of State, in advising, and in his person executing, the conditions of a dishonourable peace with France; the surrendering the fortress of Boulogne, then our outguard upon the continent. By that surrender, Calais, the key of France, and the bridle in the mouth of that power, was, not many years afterwards, finally lost. The labour of his Grace's founder merited the curses, not loud but deep, of the Commons of England,

in whom he and his master had effected a complete Parliamentary Reform, by making them, in their slavery and humiliation, the true and adequate representatives of a debased, degraded, and undone people.

Let the Duke of Bedford reject with scorn and horror, the counsels of the lecturers; those wicked panders to avarice and ambition, who would tempt him, in the troubles of his country, to seek another enormous fortune in the forfeitures of another nobility, and the plunder of another Church. * Then will he forget the rebellions which, by a doubtful priority in crime, his ancestor had provoked and extinguished.

"The Crown has considered me after long services. The Crown has paid the Duke of Bedford in advance. He has had a long credit for any service which he may perform hereafter. But let him beware how he endangers that constitution which secures his own utility or his own insignificance. The learned professors of the rights of men,' regard prescription not as a title to bar all claim, set up against all possession, but as itself a bar against the possessor. Such are their ideas, such their religion, such their law. But, to our country and our race, so long as the well-compacted structure of our Church and State, the Sanctuary, the Holy of Holies of that ancient Law, defended by reverence, defended by power, at once a fortress and a temple, shall stand inviolate on the brow of the British Lion; as long as the British monarchy, not more limited than fenced by the Orders of the State, shall, like the proud Keep of Windsor, girt with the double belt of its kindred and coeval towers, coerce and guard the subject land, so long the mounds and dykes of the low, fat Bedford level will have nothing to fear from all the pickaxes of all the levellers of France. But, if the rude inroad of Gallic tu. mult, with its sophistical rights of man, to falsify the account, and its sword as a makeweight to throw into the scale, shall be introduced into our city by a misguided populace, set on by proud, great men, themselves blinded and intoxicated by a frantic ambition, we shall, all of us, perish, and be overwhelmed in a common