ave the following
account of what he had done:--"I have made a push," he says, "with all
I could collect of my own, and the aid of my friends, to cast a little
root in this country. I have purchased a house, with an estate of
about six hundred acres of land, in Buckinghamshire, twenty-four miles
from London. It is a place exceedingly pleasant; and I propose, God
willing, to become a farmer in good earnest. You, who are classical,
will not be displeased to know that it was formerly the seat of
Waller, the poet, whose house, or part of it, makes at present the
farmhouse within an hundred yards of me." The details of the actual
purchase of Beaconsfield have been made tolerably clear. The price was
twenty-two thousand pounds, more or less. Fourteen thousand were left
on mortgage, which remained outstanding until the sale of the property
by Mrs. Burke in 1812. Garret Burke, the elder brother, had shortly
before the purchase made Edmund his residuary legatee, and it is
guessed that of this bequest two thousand pounds were in cash. The
balance of six thousand was advanced by Lord Rockingham on Burke's
bond.

The purchase after all was the smallest part of the matter, and it
still remains a puzzle not only how Burke was able to maintain so
handsome an establishment, but how he could ever suppose it likely
that he would be able to maintain it. He counted, no doubt, on making
some sort of income by farming. The Irish estate, which he had
inherited from his brother, brought in five hundred a year (Arthur
Young's _Ireland_, ii. 193). For a short time he received a salary of
seven hundred pounds a year as agent for New York. We may perhaps
take for granted that he made as much more out of his acres. He
received something from Dodsley for his work on the _Annual Register_
down to 1788. But when all these resources have been counted up, we
cannot but see the gulf of a great yearly deficit. The unhappy truth
is that from the middle of 1769, when we find him applying to Garrick
for the loan of a thousand pounds, down to 1794, when the king gave
him a pension, Burke was never free from the harassing strain of debts
and want of money. It has been stated with good show of authority,
that his obligations to Lord Rockingham amounted to not less than
thirty thousand pounds. When that nobleman died (1782), with a
generosity which is not the less honourable to him for having been so
richly earned by the faithful friend who was the object of it