ong correspondence in
which he engaged with most of them there is not a trace to be found, on
one side or the other, of anything approaching to either patronage or
servility. Burke advises them, exhorts them, expostulates with them,
condemns their aristocratic languor, fans their feeble flames, drafts
their motions, dictates their protests, visits their houses, and
generally supplies them with facts, figures, poetry, and romance. To all
this they submit with much humility. The Duke of Richmond once indeed
ventured to hint to Burke, with exceeding delicacy, that he (the Duke)
had a small private estate to attend to as well as public affairs; but
the validity of the excuse was not admitted. The part Burke played for
the next fifteen years with relation to the Rockingham party reminds me
of the functions I have observed performed in lazy families by a soberly
clad and eminently respectable person who pays them domiciliary visits,
and, having admission everywhere, goes about mysteriously from room to
room, winding up all the clocks. This is what Burke did for the
Rockingham party--he kept it going.

But fortunately for us, Burke was not content with private adjuration, or
even public speech. His literary instincts, his dominating desire to
persuade everybody that he, Edmund Burke, was absolutely in the right,
and every one of his opponents hopelessly wrong, made him turn to the
pamphlet as a propaganda, and in his hands

'The thing became a trumpet, whence he blew
Soul-animating strains.'

So accustomed are we to regard Burke's pamphlets as specimens of our
noblest literature, and to see them printed in comfortable volumes, that
we are apt to forget that in their origin they were but the children of
the pavement, the publications of the hour. If, however, you ever visit
any old public library, and grope about a little, you are likely enough
to find a shelf holding some twenty-five or thirty musty, ugly little
books, usually lettered 'Burke,' and on opening any of them you will come
across one of Burke's pamphlets as originally issued, bound up with the
replies and counter-pamphlets it occasioned. I have frequently tried,
but always in vain, to read these replies, which are pretentious
enough--usually the works of deans, members of Parliament, and other
dignitaries of the class Carlyle used compendiously to describe as
'shovel-hatted'--and each of whom was as much entitled to publish
pamphlets as Burke himse