CHAPTER XXVIII

EDMUND BURKE

As a master of English composition, Edmund Burke takes a very high position.

He had a great command of rhetoric, and his eloquence has its root more often in sagacity than in emotion. But when his emotion surged up and irresistibly inspired his utterance, none could surpass him.

His splendid declamation on the lost age of chivalry and on the tragic fate of Marie Antoinette cannot be omitted in any work on English prose:

"It is now (1791) sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the Queen of France, then the Dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in-glittering like the morning star, full of life, and splendour, and joy. Oh! what a revolution! and what a heart must I have, to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry has gone. That of sophisters, economists, and

calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever.

66

Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to sex and rank, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise is gone!

66

It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound; which inspired courage while it mitigated ferocity; which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness."

Johnson's letter to Lord Chesterfield has, I suppose, never been equalled as an expression of measured scorn; but Burke's letter to the Duke of Bedford, though conceived in a different vein, is of its kind an effort hardly to be surpassed.

Francis, fifth Duke of Bedford, descended from progenitors who derived their vast wealth from the favours showered on them by the crown, had the foolish temerity to attack Burke in the House of Lords for accepting a modest pension from the same source. Burke immediately wrote his Letter to a Noble Lord. Burke had but lately lost his only son, to whom he was passionately devoted, and had retired, a broken man, to his home at Beaconsfield, when this attack was made upon him, and the famous Letter was penned in a white heat of wrath, and remains a magnificent conflagration of invective that will last as long as the Dukedom of Bedford as an awful warning to arrogance and a salutary lesson to pride.

After reciting with merciless particularity all the ways by which the Duke's family were enriched by servile adulation of the King, he exclaims:

"Thus stands the account of the comparative merits of the crown grants which compose the Duke of Bedford's fortune as balanced against mine.

"In the name of common sense, why should the Duke of Bedford think that none but the House of Russell are entitled to the favour of the crown?

"Why should he imagine that no King of England has been capable of judging of merit but King Henry the Eighth ?

Indeed, he will pardon me; he is a little mistaken; all virtue did not end in the first Earl of Bedford.

"All discernment did not lose its vision when his creator closed his eyes.

"Let him remit his rigour on the disproportion between merit and reward in others, and they will make no enquiry into the origin of his fortune.

"It is little to be doubted that several of his forefathers in the long series have degenerated into honour and virtue."

For grim satire this phrase can hardly be surpassed! The letter is too long for entire reproduction here, but I will cite one other passage from it which displays Burke turning from burning invective to a calm and noble melancholy :

"In one thing I can excuse the Duke of Bedford for his attack upon me and my mortuary pension. He cannot readily 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 it, and before the heaviest of all calamities had for ever 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 of hurting any statesman or any party when the ministers so generously and so nobly carried into effect the spontaneous bounty of the Crown. My gratitude, I trust, is equal to the manner in which the benefit was conferred. It came to me, indeed, at a time of life and in a state of mind and body, in which no circumstance of fortune could afford me any real pleasure.

66

But there was no fault in the royal donor, or in his ministers, who were pleased, in acknowledging the merits of an invalid servant of the public, to assuage the sorrows of a desolate old man."

Francis, fifth Duke of Bedford, would long have been forgotten by the world, had he not in an unguarded moment drawn upon himself the indignant attention of a great master of the English language, and nothing now can save him from an immortality of humiliation.

Litera scripta manet!

CHAPTER XXIX

LORD CHESTERFIELD AND HORACE WALPOLE

NOTHING now can prevent Lord Chesterfield being known to posterity as the recipient of Dr Johnson's immortal letter; but really, according to his lights, which were those of the period in which he lived, he was a reputable and not altogether unlovely character. Although Dr Johnson once characterised Chesterfield's Letters to his Son as teaching "the morals of a courtesan and the manners of a dancing-master," the old lexicographer's passionate prejudices we know were enlisted against their writer.

The Letters cannot fairly be thus dismissed.

There would be something ridiculous, if not repellent, for the father of a son whose existence was the living evidence of that father's indifferent morals to preach to his son a standard not observed by himself.

And as to manners, Chesterfield believed that an unabashed polite carriage and good address were of the utmost importance in the world he lived in, and if backed with decent abilities would enable a man to succeed in it.

He honestly believed in what he recommended to his son; and even to-day there is much wisdom in such advice; and in the eighteenth century manners were even of more importance than they are now.

But though he was insistent upon what he called "The Graces," he did not think them all-important, for in one of his Letters he says:

A showish binding attracts the eyes, and engages the attention of everybody; but with this difference, that