, he
left instructions to his executors that all Burke's bonds should be
destroyed.

We may indeed wish from the bottom of our hearts that all this had
been otherwise. But those who press it as a reproach against Burke's
memory, may be justly reminded that when Pitt died, after drawing the
pay of a minister for twenty years, he left debts to the amount of
forty thousand pounds. Burke, as I have said elsewhere, had none of
the vices of profusion, but he had that quality which Aristotle places
high among the virtues--the noble mean of Magnificence, standing
midway between the two extremes of vulgar ostentation and narrow
pettiness. At least, every creditor was paid in good time, and nobody
suffered but himself. Those who think these disagreeable matters of
supreme importance, and allow such things to stand between them and
Brake's greatness, are like the people--slightly to alter a figure
from a philosopher of old--who, when they went to Olympia, could only
perceive that they were scorched by the sun, and pressed by the crowd,
and deprived of comfortable means of bathing, and wetted by the rain,
and that life was full of disagreeable and troublesome things, and so
they almost forgot the great colossus of ivory and gold, Phidias's
statue of Zeus, which they had come to see, and which stood in all its
glory and power before their perturbed and foolish vision.

There have been few men in history with whom personal objects counted
for so little as they counted with Burke. He really did what so many
public men only feign to do. He forgot that he had any interests of
his own to be promoted, apart from the interests of the party with
which he acted, and from those of the whole nation, for which he held
himself a trustee. What William Burke said of him in 1766 was true
throughout his life, "Ned is full of real business, intent upon doing
solid good to his country, as much as if he was to receive twenty
per cent from the Empire." Such men as the shrewd and impudent Bigby
atoned for a plebeian origin by the arts of dependence and a judicious
servility, and drew more of the public money from the pay-office in
half a dozen quarter-days than Burke received in all his life. It was
not by such arts that Burke rose. When we remember all the untold
bitterness of the struggle in which he was engaged, from the time when
the old Duke of Newcastle tried to make the Marquis of Rockingham
dismiss his new private secretary as an Irish Jesuit i