then President of the Board of Trade, made him a member of the Board in 1756. But Hamilton still continued silent. In four years after, he was made Secretary for Ireland, on the appointment of his noble friend as Lord Lieutenant. In the Irish House, the necessities of his situation, as Prime Minister of the Viceroyalty, overcame his nervousness, and he spoke, on several occasions, with effect. But, on his return to the English Parliament, his powers were again shut up; and, by a strange pusillanimity, a tenderness of oratorical repute, unworthy of the member of an English public assembly; during the remainder of his life, his voice was never heard. Yet, probably no man led a more anxious and self-condemning life. During this period, public distinction, and distinction peculiarly by eloquence, seems to have never left his thoughts. He compiled, he wrote, he made commonplaces of rhetoric, he was perpetually preparing for the grand explosion, to which he was never to lay the train. He saw, and we may well suppose with what bitter stings to his vanity, the contemporaries whose talents he had scorned, hastening on in the path which he longed yet feared to tread, and snatching the laurels that had once hung down, soliciting his hand. He saw a new generation start up while he pondered, enter upon contests whose magnitude rendered all the past trivial, and display powers which threw the mere rhetorician hopelessly into the shade. Still he continued criticising, preparing for the great effort that was never to be made, and calculating on

the fame which he had already suffered finally to escape; until he sank out of the remembrance of society, and dwindled into the grave. Literary history has seldom afforded an example of self-opinion so completely its own punisher; his extravagant sense of the merit of a single effort, strangled every effort to come; he was stifled in his own fame; his vanity was suicidal.

With a superior of this order, jealous, anxious, and severe, it was impossible that Burke's open temperament, and gallant dependence on his own powers, should long cordially agree. At the end of two years, he suddenly abandoned the private secretaryship; to which he declared that Hamilton, in the spirit of tyranny, had annexed degrading conditions; and in 1763 returned indignantly to England, to take the chances of beginning the world again.

CHAPTER II.

Burke appointed Private Secretary to Rockingham-Member for Wendover-His first Speech-Chatham's Ministry-Picture of Party.

BUT the world on which he now fixed his eyes, wore a different aspect from the humble and cheerless scene which he had so long contemplated in his closet. His Irish Secretaryship had made him feel his faculties for public life; it had thrown him on those waves which might waft him on to the most brilliant fortune. It had invigorated every muscle of his mind by the practical labours of office. Those two years, toilsome as they were in the passing, and painful in the recollection, had made him a statesman! He was thenceforward marked with the stamp of public life. We hear no more day-dreams of melancholy independence in America. From this moment, he was committed to the cause in England. He buckled on his golden armour, and entered the lists for life, within the realm which no man more contributed to adorn and to save.

Within two years after his return from Ireland, he commenced this career. In 1765, the Marquis of

Rockingham was appointed Premier. Burke was recommended to him as private secretary, and the Minister gladly availed himself of the services of a man, already so distinguished for literary excellence and official conduct. This recommendation, equally fortunate on both sides, was chiefly due to Mr Fitzherbert, a man of birth and accomplishment, who had known Burke at Johnson's celebrated club. Of Fitzherbert himself, Johnson has left the following graphic sketch: There was no sparkle, no brilliancy in Fitzherbert; but I never knew a man who was so generally acceptable. He made every body perfectly easy, overpowered nobody by the superiority of his talents, made no man think the worse of himself by being his rival, seemed always to listen, did not oblige you to hear much from him, and did not oppose what you said." Can conversational praise go higher?

Burke's tardy progress to the position for which nature, genius, and acquirement had formed him, is another among the thousand proofs of the fallacy, that talents make their own fortune. We see, in his instance, a man of the highest abilities, with those abilities directed to the express labours of public life, associating with a round of leading persons in life and literature, blameless in his private conduct, undegraded by pecuniary difficulty, ardent in spirit, and giving evidence of admirable qualities for the service of the state; and yet this man of talent and diligence, of vigorous learning and public virtue, left to linger in obscurity for ten of the most vivid years of his being;

admired yet overlooked, applauded yet neglected, down to the point of abandoning England, and fixing himself a reluctant exile in the wilderness. We see him rescued from this fate by the mere accident of club companionship-indebted for the whole change in his prospects, for the interposition between eminence in England and banishment in America, to the casual civility of a fashionable man of conversation.

The evident truth is, that genius is not the quality for public fortune. It is too fine, too fastidious, too delicate in its sense of degradation, and too proud in its estimate of its own powers, to take the bitter and humiliating chances of the world alone. It has the talon, and the wing, and the eye that drinks in the congenial splendours of the sun. But those very attributes and organs are its disqualifications for the work that must be done by the mole-eyed and subterranean routine of public life. This is the character of all long established governments. Public employ, the object of the most generous of all ambitions, is surrounded with a system of artificial obstacles, a circumvallation of dependence, through which no man can make his way by his single strength. Patronage holds the key of the portal. Family influence, personal connexion, private obligation, all must sign the passport that admits the new man within the lines and ramparts of this singularly jealous and keenly guarded citadel. It is only in the great general changes of the state, in the midst of mighty revolutions, and sweeping overthrows of established authority, when the old bul