ies, our Empire in
India, our relations with Ireland both in respect to her trade and her
prevalent religion; and then, blurring the picture, as some may
think--certainly rendering it Titanesque and gloomy--we have the
spectacle of Burke in his old age, like another Laocoon, writhing and
wrestling with the French Revolution; and it may serve to give us some
dim notion of how great a man Burke was, of how affluent a mind, of how
potent an imagination, of how resistless an energy, that even when his
sole unassisted name is pitted against the outcome of centuries, and we
say Burke and the French Revolution, we are not overwhelmed by any sense
of obvious absurdity or incongruity.

What I propose to do is merely to consider a little Burke's life prior to
his obtaining a seat in Parliament, and then to refer to any
circumstances which may help us to account for the fact that this truly
extraordinary man, whose intellectual resources beggar the imagination,
and who devoted himself to politics with all the forces of his nature,
never so much as attained to a seat in the Cabinet--a feat one has known
to be accomplished by persons of no proved intellectual agility. Having
done this, I shall then, bearing in mind the aphorism of Lord
Beaconsfield, that it is always better to be impudent than servile, essay
an analysis of the essential elements of Burke's character.

The first great fact to remember is that the Edmund Burke we are all
agreed in regarding as one of the proudest memories of the House of
Commons was an Irishman. When we are in our next fit of political
depression about that island, and are about piously to wish, as the poet
Spenser tells us men were wishing even in his time, that it were not
adjacent, let us do a little national stocktaking, and calculate profits
as well as losses. Burke was not only an Irishman, but a typical one--of
the very kind many Englishmen, and even possibly some Scotchmen, make a
point of disliking. I do not say he was an aboriginal Irishman, but his
ancestors are said to have settled in the county of Galway, under
Strongbow, in King Henry the Second's time, when Ireland was first
conquered and our troubles began. This, at all events, is a better Irish
pedigree than Mr. Parnell's.

Skipping six centuries, we find Burke's father an attorney in
Dublin--which somehow sounds a very Irish thing to be--who in 1725
married a Miss Nagle, and had fifteen children. The marriage of Burke's
pare