to his son, had lately received a mitre from Lord Mansfield, and abuse of his seventeen years' friend might seem to have been the condition of the gift. He called Burke a beargarden railer and declaimer; charged his companions with the malignity of treason, and himself with things dangerous and desperate; told him the world cried out against such arrogance in a man of his condition, and warned him against turning his house into a hole of adders. The ministry seconded these zealous supporters, and went about to fasten Junius upon him. Their papers had been rife with that suspicion, ever since the letters began. Even the Whigs became alarmed, and sent the brother of Tommy Townshend to obtain his formal disclaimer. Burke gave it, though not without reluctant and galled submission to the right implied in demanding it; and was thenceforth, beyond all question, to be for ever held acquitted of the charge. 'Sir,' said Johnson, 'I should have believed Burke to be 'Junius, because I know no man but Burke who is capable ' of writing these letters; but Burke spontaneously denied 'it to me.' Better, however, than even such spontaneous denial, and satisfactory where Townshend's disclaimer had failed to satisfy, should have been the evidence afforded by the letters themselves. This was the year when Garrick, smiling and happy amid the great who fondled and flattered him; sending meddling messages to the palace that Junius would write no more; writing himself to his Carissimo Edmundo' that what alone prevents their meeting is a gouty twinge in the knee from dining yesterday with an arch bishop;' found himself, in that supreme prosperity, suddenly and contemptuously struck in the face, with a blow that appalled him. To believe that Burke's was the hand so lifted against his friend; that the vagabond' was told to 'keep to his pantomimes;' by one who so lately had confessed the dearest obligations to him; would be to fix upon Burke an incredible imputation of dishonour. I do not even believe, that, if he had taken any part in the letters (though far from supposing that some portion of the secret may not have fallen into his reluctant keeping), he would have continued to sit down at their common Club table, in all the frankness of familiar intercourse, with the well-abused Antony Chamier. The stronger presumption is, that in his ordinary daily duties as secretary in the War Office, Chamier sat much nearer Junius than ever he sat in Gerrard Street. But in clearing Burke of this remarkable authorship, which would have detracted from his character in proportion as it added to his fame (for it matters little that the hilt is diamond-studded or the blade of unequalled temper, if the rapier be drawn only in the dark), it is not so easy to clear him of having so shaped his course somewhat later, as to show he still winced from the charge. Now was the time, profiting by the opportunities of George Grenville's death, and the general party confusion created by Wilkes and Junius, to have freed both himself and the Rockinghams; now was the time to have so enlarged the battle-field for both, as to bring in issue something greater than the predominance of Whig families with Whig principles: yet now, even while his was the solitary voice that invoked retribution for the most infamous crime of nations, the partition of Poland, he had no thought or wish to throw for a higher stake in politics and government, than a premiership for Rockingham and an exoteric paymastership for himself. 'My dear Lord,' he said to Richmond, 'you dissipate your 'mind with too great a variety of minute pursuits.' 'My ' dear Burke,' said the Duke,' you have more merit than any man in keeping us together.' And with that he was content. He kept them together. They became in time of greater importance to him than those pure principles, than that practically just and disinterested policy, with which his counsels had first helped to connect them; and which, carried now to their farther verge and just extent, might have freed both the party and the country from all the trammels that distressed them. He drew himself more and more within the Rockingham ranks; toiled more and more to keep the popular power within a certain magic circle; and, while his genius was at work for the age that was to come, in eloquence as rich and various as its intuition. seemed deep and universal, his temper was satisfied that the age in which he lived should be governed exclusively by the Richmonds and Rockinghams. You people of great 'families and hereditary trusts and fortunes, the great 'oaks that shade a country, and perpetuate your benefits from generation to generation, are not like such as I am, mere annual plants that perish with our season, and 'leave no sort of traces behind us.' And so around that perishable fancy he placed all the supports of his noble imagination; till that which he thought eternal melted from his grasp, and left what he believed its mere transitory graces to survive and endure alone. He lived to see the greatest event which the history of the world had witnessed, and lived even so to misjudge it. What was temporary in its sin and terror, he shrank from as eternal; what was eternal in its heroism and grandeur, he spat upon as the folly of a day. There was not an intellect then existing in Europe to which that sudden advent of Democracy should have appealed so strongly as to Burke: yet through the mist of blood that surrounded its uprising he saw nothing but a demon-dance of exaggerated horror; and the noble, the beautiful, the ornamental, he thought blotted out of France, because, in the hollow semblances of these things, demons that for centuries had indeed been torturing Frenchmen were strangled and overthrown. But his earlier and later days were in closer sympathy than either friends or enemies have thought. He was too honest as well as great to be a renegade, though not to avoid self-deception; or effectually to resist those influences which all English society sanctioned, which hung around and depressed him in every step of his progress, which only at times he was able to thrust thoroughly aside, and which at last almost wholly overshadowed him. If he had not made himself the sport of his fancy and mere plaything of his imagination, instead of sovereign ruler over both, he could never have ministered throughout life, as he did, to the aristocratic requirements of these Rockinghams and Richmonds. He consented to do this, and the end was but a part of the beginning. Already it was manifest, to one who could pierce through the overrefinings of his genius to its unavailing and unpractical issues. Was it strange that Goldsmith should have been that one? Was it strange that among all the men in familiar intercourse with him, or belonging to the society of which he was the leading ornament, he should first have heard the truth from that member of the circle whose opinions on such a theme perhaps all would have hailed with laughter ? Burke was only upon the threshold of his troubled though great career; he had yet to live twenty-seven years of successes in every means employed, and of failures in every object sought; when Goldsmith conceived and wrote his imaginary epitaph. But its truth was prophetic. Through the exquisite levity of its tone appeared a weight and seriousness of thought, which was found applicable to every after movement in Burke's subsequent life; and now confirms as by the judgment of his time, the unsparing verdicts of history. But as yet it was Goldsmith's alone. What hitherto had fallen from Johnson showed no such perception as this; and it may be doubtful if the rest knew much more of the likeness than that the statesman's long speeches did detain him sadly from his dinner, and he too often arrived at table when his mutton was cold. It was not till he obtained the name of the dinner-bell. many years later Here lies our good Edmund, whose genius was such, |