This pamphlet was written specially to justify the bounty of the Crown towards Burke, by adducing his claims and services, which he most ingeniously places parallel with those of the Duke of Bedford's ancestor, who had profited so largely by similar means. "I was not," he writes, "like his Grace of Bedford, swaddled, and rocked, and dandled into a legislator. Nitor in adversum is the motto for a man like me. I know not how it has happened, but it really seems that, whilst his Grace was meditating his wellconsidered censure upon me, he fell into a sort of sleep. Homer nods, and the Duke of Bedford may dream; and as dreams (even his golden dreams) are apt to be ill-pieced and incongruously put together, his Grace preserved his idea of reproach to me, but took the subject-matter from the Crown grants to his own family. This is the stuff. of which his dreams are made.' In that way of putting things together his Grace is perfectly right. The grants to the house of Russell were so enormous, as not only to outrage economy, but even to stagger credibility. The Duke of Bedford is the leviathan among all the creatures of the Crown. He tumbles about his unwieldy bulk; he plays and frolics in the ocean of the royal bounty. Huge as he is, and whilst 'he lies floating many a rood,' he is still a creature. His ribs, his fins, his whalebone, his blubber, the very spiracles through which he spouts a torrent of brine against his origin, and covers me all over with the spray-everything from him and about him is from the throne.

"Is it for him to question the dispensation of the royal favour?

"I really am at a loss to draw any sort of parallel between the public merits of his grace, by which he justifies the grants he holds, and these services of mine, on the favourable construction of which I have obtained what his Grace so much disapproves. In private life I have not at all the honour of acquaintance with the noble duke. But I ought to presume, and it costs me nothing to do so, that he abundantly deserves the esteem and love of all who live

with him. But as to public service, why, truly, it would not be more ridiculous for me to compare myself in rank, in fortune, in splendid descent, in youth, strength, or figure, with the Duke of Bedford, than to make a parallel between his services and my attempts to be useful to my country. It would not be gross adulation, but uncivil irony, to say that he has any public merit of his own to keep alive the idea of the services by which his vast landed pensions were obtained. My merits, whatever they are, are original and personal; his are derivative. It is his ancestor, the original pensioner, that has laid up this inexhaustible fund of merit, which makes his Grace so very delicate and exceptious about the merit of all other grantees of the Crown. Had he permitted me to remain in quiet, I should have said, ""Tis his estate; that's enough. It is his by law what have I to do with it or its history ?' He would naturally have said on his side, ''Tis this man's fortune. He is as good now as my ancestor was two hundred and fifty years ago. I am a young man with very old pensions; he is an old man with very young pensions-that's all.'

"I have strained every nerve to keep the Duke of Bedford in that situation which alone makes him my superior. Why will his Grace, by attacking me, force me reluctantly to compare my little merit with that which obtained from the Crown those prodigies of profuse donations by which he tramples on the mediocrity of humble and laborious individuals? Is it not a singular phenomenon, that whilst the sans-culottes carcass-butchers, the philosophers of the shambles, are pricking their dotted lines upon his (the Duke's) side, and like the print of the poor ox we see at the shop windows at Charing Cross, alive as he is and thinking no harm in the world, he is divided into rumps, and sirloins, and briskets, and into all sorts of pieces for roasting, boiling, and stewing-that all the time they are measuring him, his Grace is measuring me; is invidiously comparing the bounty of the Crown with the deserts of the defender of his order, and in the same moment fawning on those who have the knife half out of the sheathpoor innocent,

Pleas'd to the last, he crops the flowery food,
And licks the hand just rais'd to shed his blood.

Let us turn our eyes to history, in which great men have always a pleasure in contemplating the heroic origin of their house.

"The first peer of the name, the first purchaser of the grants, was a Mr. Russel, a person of an ancient gentleman's family, raised by being a minion of Henry VIII. As there generally is some resemblance of character to create those relations, the favourite was, in all likelihood, much such another as his master. The first of these immoderate grants was not taken from the ancient demesne of the Crown, but from the recent confiscation of the ancient nobility of the land. The lion having sucked the blood of his prey, threw the offal carcass to the jackal in waiting. Having tasted once the food of confiscation, the favourite became fierce and This worthy favourite's first grant was from the lay nobility. The second, infinitely improving on the enormity of the first, was from the plunder of the Church. In truth, his Grace is somewhat excusable for his dislike to a grant like mine, not only in its quantity, but in its kind so different from his own.

ravenous.

"Mine was from a mild and benevolent sovereign; his from Henry VIII. Mine had not its fund from the murder of any innocent person of illustrious rank, or in the pillage of any body of unoffending men; his grants were made from the aggregate and consolidated funds of judgments iniquitously legal, and from possessions voluntarily surrendered by the lawful proprietors with the gibbet at their door."

After powerfully contrasting the merit of the grantee with his own claims, Burke continues:

"This founder's merits were by arts in which he served his master and made his fortune, to bring poverty, wretchedness, and degradation on his country. Mine were under a benevolent prince, in promoting the commerce, manufactures, and agriculture of his kingdom; in which his Majesty shows an

eminent example, who even in his amusements is a patriot, and in hours of leisure an improver of his native soil."

BURKE'S FARMING.

Burke wrote practically upon farming. In his Thoughts and Details on Scarcity, 1795, he expounded some of the doctrines of political economists bearing upon agriculture as a trade; exposing the absurdity of such schemes as settling a maximum of prices, regulating the wages of labour between farmer and servant by authority; and establishing public granaries in towns by Government, in order to supply the wants of the people at fixed prices. His knowledge of farming, and of stock, live and dead, led his neighbours frequently to apply to him for advice upon such matters; and he once surprised a distinguished politician who was visiting him, by entering into a history of rural affairs, of the rents, taxes, and variations in the poor's-rates of fifty parishes in the country, during several consecutive years; as well as improvements in tillage and grazing. Early in the summer of 1795, from the appearance of the young wheat, he predicted an insufficient harvest; and being discredited, he carried a large quantity of green ears in his carriage to exhibit to incredulous friends. Harvest-home was always celebrated with great festivity at Butler's Court, the family mingling with the humbler guests in its gaiety and sports..

"LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD."-LETTERS ON A

REGICIDE, PEACE...

The first of these Letters, which appeared in 1796, has already been noticed. It became more popular than any thing else Burke ever wrote, with the exception of the Reflections on the French Revolution. Mr. Prior tells us that he read this Letter over twice, (many parts half a dozen times,) without intermission, affected with no ordinary wonder at the mingled irony, indignant remonstrance, pointed rebuke, and imagery in those bold figures, which not merely impress

the mind of the reader at the moment by their force, but are seldom afterwards forgotten. "I perceive in it," says the author of the Pursuits of Literature, "genius, ability, dignity, imagination, and sights more than youthful poets when they dreamed, and sometimes the philosophy of Plato, and the wit of Lucian."

The author was unfortunate in the publisher of this pamphlet, one Owen, of 188, Piccadilly, who had been recommended by Mr. Windham. He would give no account of the profits, and had the hardihood to assert that Mr. Burke had given him the MS.; and rather than go to law with him, the author allowed him to keep what he had got. Before this, however, Owen had obtained the MS. of two letters on a Regicide Peace, which he refused to deliver up, and actually published in defiance of the author, with an Advertisement in defence of his conduct. Meanwhile, the work had been transferred by the author to Messrs. Rivington, of St. Paul's Churchyard, and was brought out by them in a correct form.

The second of these Letters is remarkable for the observations it contains on the manner in which the war had till then been, and long afterwards continued to be, conducted; and for the confident tone in which it is announced, that no success could be hoped for until that plan should be changed. The allies, it is observed, had adopted "a plan of war, against the success of which there was something little short of mathematical demonstration. They refused to take any step which might strike at the heart of affairs. They seemed unwilling to wound the enemy in any vital part. They always kept on the circumference; and the wider and remoter the circle was, the more eagerly they chose it as their sphere of action in this centrifugal war." A third of the Regicide Peace Letters was in the press when Mr. Burke died; and a fourth, left unfinished, was published after his death.

The circumstances attending the publication of these Letters, and the law proceedings against the publisher, proved great annoyances to Mr. Burke.