rary biography how Burke could think of
entering Parliament without any means that anybody can now trace of
earning a fitting livelihood. Yet at this time Burke, whom we saw not
long ago writing for the booksellers, had become affluent enough to
pay a yearly allowance to Barry, the painter, in order to enable him
to study the pictures in the great European galleries, and to make a
prolonged residence at Rome. A little later he took a step which
makes the riddle still more difficult, and which has given abundant
employment to wits who are _maximi in minimis_, and think that every
question which they can ask, yet to which history has thought it worth
while to leave no answer, is somehow a triumph of their own learning
and dialectic.

In 1769 Burke purchased a house and lands known as Gregories, in the
parishes of Penn and Beaconsfield, in the county of Bucks. It has
often been asked, and naturally enough, how a man who, hardly more
than a few months before, was still contented to earn an extra hundred
pounds a year by writing for Dodsley, should now have launched out as
the buyer of a fine house and estate, which cost upwards of twenty-two
thousand pounds, which could not be kept up on less than two thousand
five hundred a year, and of which the returns did not amount to
one-fifth of that sum. Whence did he procure the money, and what is
perhaps more difficult to answer, how came he first to entertain the
idea of a design so ill-proportioned to anything that we can now
discern in his means and prospects? The common answer from Burke's
enemies, and even from some neutral inquirers, gives to every lover
of this great man's high character an unpleasant shock. It is alleged
that he had plunged into furious gambling in East India stock. The
charge was current at the time, and it was speedily revived when
Burke's abandonment of his party, after the French Revolution, exposed
him to a thousand attacks of reckless and uncontrolled virulence. It
has been stirred by one or two pertinacious critics nearer our own
time, and none of the biographers have dealt with the perplexities
of the matter as they ought to have done. Nobody, indeed, has ever
pretended to find one jot or tittle of direct evidence that Burke
himself took a part in the gambling in India or other stocks. There is
evidence that he was a holder of the stock, and no more. But what is
undeniable is that Richard Burke, his brother, William Burke, his
intimate if not his