but pleads
the facts that demonstrate him to be so; but only whether I was such a
fool as to sell myself absolutely for a consideration which, so far
from being adequate, if any such could be adequate, is not even so
much as certain. Not to value myself as a gentleman, a free man, a
man of education, and one pretending to literature; is there any
situation in life so low, or even so criminal, that can subject a man
to the possibility of such an engagement? Would you dare attempt to
bind your footman to such terms? Will the law suffer a felon sent to
the plantations to bind himself for his life, and to renounce all
possibility either of elevation or quiet? And am I to defend myself
for not doing what no man is suffered to do, and what it would be
criminal in any man to submit to? You will excuse me for this heat.'

I not only excuse Burke for his heat, but love him for letting me warm my
hands at it after a lapse of a hundred and twenty years.

Burke was more fortunate in his second master, for in 1765 being then
thirty-six years of age, he became private secretary to the new Prime
Minister, the Marquis of Rockingham; was by the interest of Lord Verney
returned to Parliament for Wendover, in Bucks; and on January 27th, 1766,
his voice was first heard in the House of Commons.

The Rockingham Ministry deserves well of the historian, and on the whole
has received its deserts. Lord Rockingham, the Duke of Richmond, Lord
John Cavendish, Mr. Dowdeswell, and the rest of them, were good men and
true, judged by an ordinary standard; and when contrasted with most of
their political competitors, they almost approach the ranks of saints and
angels. However, after a year and twenty days, his Majesty King George
the Third managed to get rid of them, and to keep them at bay for fifteen
years. But their first term of office, though short, lasted long enough
to establish a friendship of no ordinary powers of endurance between the
chief members of the party and the Prime Minister's private secretary,
who was at first, so ran the report, supposed to be a wild Irishman,
whose real name was O'Bourke, and whose brogue seemed to require the
allegation that its owner was a popish emissary. It is satisfactory to
notice how from the very first Burke's intellectual pre-eminence,
character, and aims were clearly admitted and most cheerfully recognised
by his political and social superiors; and in the l