pansion is hopeless, it is little glory to have escaped distortion. Nor is it any blame that the rich fermentation of grapes should disturb the transparency of their golden fluids. Fox had nothing new to tell us, nor did he hold a position amongst men that required, or would even have allowed, him to tell anything new. He was helmsman to a party; what he had to do, though seeming to give orders, was simply to repeat their orders. "Port your helm," said the party; "Port it is," replied the helmsman. But Burke was no steersman; he was the Orpheus that sailed with the Argonauts; he was their seer, seeing more in his visions than was always intelligible even to himself; he was their watcher through the starry hours; he was their astrological interpreter. Who complains of a prophet for being a little darker of speech than a post-office directory? or of him that reads the stars for being sometimes perplexed? Yet, even as to facts, Schlosser is always blundering. Post-office directories would be of no use to him, nor link-boys, nor blazing tar-barrels. He wanders in a fog such as sits upon the banks of Cocytus, fancying that Burke in his lifetime was popular, perhaps too popular. Of course, it is so natural to be popular by means of "wearisome tediousness," that Schlosser, above all people, ought to credit such a tale. Burke has been dead just sixty-one years come next autumn. I remember the time from this accident, that my own nearest relative stepped, on a golden day of 1797, into that same suite of rooms at Bath (North Parade) from which, three hours before, the great man had been carried out to die at Beaconsfield. It is, therefore, you see, threescore years and one. Now, ever since then, his collective works have been growing in bulk by the incorporation of juvenile essays (such as his "European Settlements," his "Essay on the Sublime," on "Lord Bolingbroke," &c.), or (as more recently) by the posthumous publication of his MSS.; and yet, ever since then, in spite of growing age and growing bulk, are becoming more in demand. At this time, half-a-century after his last sigh, Burke is popular; a thing, let me tell * "Of his MSS. :"-And, if all that I have heard be true, much has somebody to answer for, that so little has been yet published. The two executors of Burke were, Dr Lawrence of Doctors' Commons, a wellknown M.P. in forgotten days, and Windham, a man too like Burke in compass and elasticity of mind ever to be spoken of in connection with forgotten things. Which of them was to blame I know not. But Mr R. Sharpe, M.P. for I know not what borough, told the following story. Let me pause at this name. R., as the reader will rightly suppose, represented the Christian name which his godfathers and his godmothers had indorsed upon him at the baptismal font. Originally this R. had represented Richard: but when Richard had swelled into portly proportions, had become an adult, and taken his seat in the House of Commons, the Pagan public of London raised him to the rank of River; and thenceforwards R. S. stood for "River Sharpe" this honorary augmentation of old hereditary name being understood to indicate the aregavroλoyia (or world-without-ending-ness of his eternal talk); in prophetic anticipation of which the poet Horace is supposed to have composed his two famous lines + "Rusticus expectat dum defluat amnis at ille Labitur et labetur in omne volubilis ovum." This Mr R. Sharpe, by the way, was a man of multitudinous dodges. He could (and he did, if you look into the parliamentary mirrors of those days) make a very neat speech upon occasion, and when time was plentiful, else he was generally hurried by business; for he was a London merchant (in the English sense, observe-not the Scottish), exporting, therefore, to every latitude in countless longitudes; so that his own mer "Famous lines:"-Of which the following translation was executed, the first line by the late Mr William Cobbett (who hated Sharpe), and the last by Dryden: "Chaw-bacon loiters till the stream be gone; Which flows-and, as it flows, for ever shall flow on." But naturalists object (to Horace more properly than to Mr Cobbett) that of all men Chaw-bacon, as a rusticus familiar with all features of the rus, is least likely to make such a mistake as that of waiting for a river to run down. A cit, a townsman bred and born, is what Horace must have meant. you, Schlosser, which never happened before, in island or in continent, amongst Christians or Pagans, to a writer steeped to his lips in personal politics. What a tilth of intellectual lava must that man have interfused amongst the refuse and scoria of such mouldering party rubbish, to 66 cantile letters exhausted his whole power of franking. This made him wear a selfish expression of countenance to that army of letter-writing ladies in whose eyes the final cause of an M.P. was, that he might give franks to his female acquaintances--a matter of some importance when a double letter usually cost you a pretty half-crown, which, and not five shillings, is what the French always mean by an écu. Mr Sharpe was chivalrous, nevertheless, and conceived himself a master in the most insinuating modes of deferential gallantry. But his seat in Parliament cost him exactly a thousand pounds sterling per annum. This sum he had to fetch back by franking, which lucrative privilege he applied naturally to all the heaviest despatches of his own firm. And under such circumstances, where each civility to his fair friends could be put into the scales and weighed in his counting-house, reasonably he neither stood nor understood any nonsense." Usque ad aras-i. e., so far as the ledger permitted-he wished to conduct himself towards women en grand seigneur, or even en prince. But to waste a frank upon their “ nonsense"-a frank that paid all expenses from the Cornish Scillys northwards to John Groat, Esq., in Caithness-was the high road to bankruptcy. Consequently Mr Sharpe was less popular than else he might have been, with so abundant a treasure of anecdotes, of gossip, and (amongst select friends) of high-flavoured scandal. Him, the said Sharpe, I heard more than once at Wordsworth's say, that one or both of the executors had offered to him (the river) a huge travelling trunk, perhaps an imperial or a Salisbury boot (equal to the wardrobe of a family), filled with Burke's MSS., on the simple condition of editing them, with annotations. An Oxford man, and also the celebrated Mr Christian Curwen, then member for Cumberland, made, in my hearing, the same report. The Oxford man, in particular, being questioned as to the probable amount of MS., lamented that the gods had not made him an exciseman, with the gift of gauging barrels and other repositories; that he could not speak upon oath to the cubical contents; but this he could say, that having stripped up his coat-sleeve, he had endeavoured, by such poor machinery as nature had allowed him, to take the soundings of the trunk, but apparently there were none; with his middle finger he could find no bottom, for it was stopped by a dense stratum of MS.; below which, you know, other strata might lie ad infinitum. For anything proved to the contrary, the trunk might be bottomless. force up a new verdure and laughing harvests, annually increasing for new generations! Popular he is now, but popular he was not in his own generation. And how could Schlosser have the face to say that he was? Did he never hear the notorious anecdote, that at one period Burke obtained the sobriquet of "dinner-bell?" And why? Not as one who invited men to a banquet by his gorgeous eloquence, but as one that gave a signal to shoals in the House of Commons for seeking refuge in a literal dinner from the oppression of his philosophy. This was, perhaps, in part a scoff of his opponents. Yet there must have been some foundation for the scoff, since, at an earlier stage of Burke's career, Goldsmith had independently said, that this great orator "Went on refining, And thought of convincing, whilst they thought of dining.” I blame neither party. It ought not to be expected of any popular body that it should be patient of abstractions amongst the intensities of party strife, and the immediate necessities of voting. No deliberative body would less have tolerated such philosophic exorbitations from public business than the agora of Athens or the Roman Senate. So far the error was in Burke, not in the House of Commons. Yet also, on the other side, it must be remembered, that an intellect of Burke's, combining power and enormous compass, could not, from necessity of nature, abstain from such speculations. For a man to reach a remote *I do not believe that at any time he was so designated, unless playfully and in special coteries. That the young, who were wearied, that the intensely practical, who distrusted him as a speculator, that the man of business, natus rebus agendis, who viewed him as a trespasser on the disposable time of the House, should combine intermittingly in giving expression to their feelings is conceivable, or even probable. The rest is exaggeration. posterity, it is sometimes necessary that he should throw his voice over to them in a vast arch-it must sweep a parabola; which, therefore, rises high above the heads of those that stand next to him, and is heard by the bystanders but indistinctly, like bees swarming in the upper air before they settle on the spot fit for hiving. See, therefore, the immeasurableness of misconception. Of all public men that stand confessedly in the first rank as to splendour of intellect, Burke was the least popular at the time when our blind friend Schlosser assumes him to have run off with the lion's share of popularity. Fox, on the other hand, as the leader of opposition, was at that time a household term of love or reproach from one end of the island to the other. To the very children playing in the streets, Pitt and Fox, throughout Burke's generation, were pretty nearly as broad distinctions, and as much a war-cry, as English and French, Roman and Punic. Now, however, all this is altered. As regards the relations between the two Whigs whom Schlosser so steadfastly delighteth to misrepresent, Now is the winter of our discontent as respects that intellectual potentate, Edmund Burke, the man whose true mode of power has never yet been truly investigated; whilst Charles Fox is known only as an echo is known; and, for any real effect of intellect upon this generation, for anything but the "whistling of a name," the Fox of 1780-1807 sleeps where the carols of the larks are sleeping that gladdened the spring-tides of those years -sleeps with the roses that glorified the beauty of their summers. * A man in Fox's situation is sure, whilst living, to draw after him trains of sycophants; and it is the evil necessity of newspapers the most |