INTRODUCTION.

"What makes Burke stand out so splendidly among politicians is that he treats politics with his thought and imagination; therefore whether one agrees with him or not, he always interests you, stimulates you, and does you good."-Matthew Arnold's Letters, I. 249.

I. N.

READERS of J. R. Green's Short History of the English People know his skill in seizing upon the contradictory elements in some historical character, and combining them into an unforgettable portrait. He follows this familiar method in the fine paragraph which he devotes to Edmund Burke. "The heavy,

Quaker-like figure," he notes, "the scratch wig, the round spectacles, the cumbrous roll of paper which loaded Burke's pocket, gave little promise of a great orator, and less of the characteristics of his oratory— its passionate ardor, its poetic fancy, its amazing prodigality of resources; the dazzling succession in which irony, pathos, invective, tenderness, the most brilliant word-pictures, the coolest argument followed each other." Green's instinct for recording the picturesque was never more justified than in the case of the singular man whom he is here portraying. There is something nondescript about Burke.

His per

sonality is full of contradictions. He was a puzzle to the majority of his contemporaries, and the hundred years that have elapsed since his death have not yet blurred into harmony the sharp contrasts presented to us in his character and career.

As for the man himself, there is no question of his integrity. The "hunt of obloquy" which pursued him throughout his life, as he pathetically complained near its close, was powerless to do more than make him in some quarters an object of suspicion. There is no stain upon his honor. The anecdotes of Burke in Boswell's Life of Johnson are sufficient, were there no other evidence, to convince us of his uprightness, and of his generous, affectionate nature. Dr. Johnson was never weary of talking about his friend "'Mund Burke," and Burke showed his real self in the company of Johnson. In all the relations of private life he was a man to be respected and loved, and if he sometimes broke willfully and passionately a lifelong friendship,-like that with Fox,-it was because he believed, however however mistakenly, that public duty demanded the sacrifice. He was ever loyal to the troop of poor relations" who lived upon his hospitality, and whose dubious character often seemed to compromise his own. The son of a Protestant father and a Catholic mother, and educated by a Quaker schoolmaster, he lived to be an adherent and panegyrist of the Established Church, without ever successfully convincing his English constituents that he was not a Jesuit in disguise. In a word, Burke was an 'Irishman; he had the hot head, the queer logic, the warm heart, and the ill luck of his race.

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II.

His oratory, for instance, was praised-justly or unjustly-beyond that of any man of his time, yet, as everybody knows, he was called "the dinner-bell of the House," from his power of emptying the benches. Lord Erskine used to say that on one occasion he. grew so tired of hearing Burke in a debate on the India Bill, that, not liking Burke should see him leave the House of Commons while he was speaking, he crept along under the benches and got out and went to the Isle of Wight. Afterward that very speech was published, and Lord Erskine found it "so very beautiful that I actually wore it to pieces by reading it." Strangers in the House marveled at the great orator's eccentricities: the "tight brown coat and "the little bob wig with curls "; the harsh, hurried tones and awkward gestures and Irish brogue; or the occasional violence, as in the famous scene of 1792, when he dashed a Birmingham dagger upon the floor of the House. After his magnificent speech on the Nabob of Arcot's Debts, the ministerial leaders whispered a moment, and decided that it was not worth while to answer it, so little practical impression had it made upon the audience. The country members who were thrilled by the fervid commonplaces of the elder Pitt, or the generous ardors of Fox, stared wonderingly at Burke, yawned after a little, and went out. Yet this was the orator who, in opening the trial of Warren Hastings, "made every listener, including the great criminal, hold his breath in agony and horror "; who, by his ludicrous pictures of the employment of Indians