and the Earl of
Lauderdale in connection with his pension. The attacks were made from
their places in the House of Lords.]

[Footnote 56: Burke's son was Richard Burke, who died on August 2,
1790. He was 32 years of age. The blow shattered Burke's ambition. He
himself died in 1797. One other son, Christopher, had been horn to
Burke, but he died in childhood. Burke's domestic life was otherwise
exceptionally happy. He was noted among his contemporaries for his
"orderly and amiable domestic habits."]

[Footnote 57: From the "Reflections on the Revolution in France."]

WILLIAM COWPER

Born in 1731, died in 1800; son of a clergyman; educated at
Westminster School; admitted to the bar in 1754, but
melancholia unfitted him for practise; temporarily confined
in an asylum in 1763; afterward lived in private families,
being subject to repeated attacks of mental disorder tending
to suicide, ending in permanent insanity; published "The
Task" in 1785, a translation of Homer in 1791.

I

OF KEEPING ONE'S SELF EMPLOYED[58]

I have neither long visits to pay nor to receive, nor ladies to spend
hours in telling me that which might be told in five minutes; yet
often find myself obliged to be an economist of time, and to make the
most of a short opportunity. Let our station be as retired as it may,
there is no want of playthings and avocations, nor much need to seek
them, in this world of ours. Business, or what presents itself to us
under that imposing character, will find us out even in the stillest
retreat, and plead its importance, however trivial in reality, as a
just demand upon our attention.

It is wonderful how by means of such real or seeming necessities my
time is stolen away. I have just time to observe that time is short,
and by the time I have made the observation time is gone.

I have wondered in former days at the patience of the antediluvian
world, that they could endure a life almost millenary, and with so
little variety as seems to have fallen to their share. It is probable
that they had much fewer employments than we. Their affairs lay in a
narrower compass; their libraries were indifferently furnished;
philosophical researches were carried on with much less industry and
acuteness of penetration, and fiddles perhaps were not even invented.
How then could seven or eight hundred years of life be supported? I
have asked this question formerly, and been at a los