56) shows
his singular fitness for the studies that Hutcheson had made the special
possession of the Scottish school. It was in Grub Street that he appears
to have attained that amazing amount of varied yet profound knowledge
which made him without equal in the House of Commons. His earliest
production was a _Vindication of Natural Society_ (1756), written in the
manner of Lord Bolingbroke, and successful enough in its imitative
satire not only to deceive its immediate public, but also to become the
basis of Godwin's _Political Justice_. After a vain attempt to serve in
Ireland with "Single-Speech" Hamilton, he became the private secretary
to Lord Rockingham, the leader of the one section of the Whig party to
which an honorable record still remained. That connection secured for
him a seat in Parliament at the comparatively late age of thirty-six;
and henceforward, until his death in 1797, he was among its leading
members. His intellectual pre-eminence, indeed, seems from the very
outset to have been recognized on all hands; though he was still, in the
eyes of the system, enough of an outsider to be given, in the short
months during which he held office, the minor office of
Paymaster-General, without a seat in the Cabinet. The man of whom all
England was the political pupil was denied without discussion a place at
the council board. Yet when Fox is little more than a memory of great
lovableness and Pitt a marvellous youth of apt quotations, Burke has
endured as the permanent manual of political wisdom without which
statesmen are as sailors on an uncharted sea.

For it has been the singular good fortune of Burke not merely to obtain
acceptance as the apostle of philosophic conservatism, but to give deep
comfort to men of liberal temper. He is, indeed, a singularly lovable
figure. "His stream of mind is perpetual," said Johnson; and Goldsmith
has told us how he wound his way into a subject like a serpent. Macaulay
thought him the greatest man since Milton, Lord Morley the "greatest
master of civil wisdom in our tongue." "No English writer," says Sir
Leslie Stephen, "has received or has deserved more splendid panegyrics."
Even when the last criticism has been made, detraction from these
estimates is impossible. It is easy to show how irritable and violent
was his temperament. There is evidence and to spare of the way in which
he allowed the spirit of party to cloud his judgment. His relations with
Lord Chatham give lamentab