A detail of these, as they may be found in many other publications, it is not necessary to give here; they comprised nearly all that argument, wit, constitutional knowledge, and sarcastic ridicule, could urge, and were zealously continued in almost every debate on the subject for about two months. He contended for the exclusive right of the Prince of Wales to the Regency, in opposition to Mr. Pitt, who maintained that any other person, ap¬ proved by Parliament, had an equal right to it; he strenuously resisted the two resolutions, that it was the express duty of the two Houses to provide a Regency, in case of interruption to the royal authority-and that they alone should determine on the means to give the royal assent to the bill constituting such a Regency.

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The bill itself, with so many restrictions, he stigmatized as derogatory, injurious, suspicious, and insulting to the Prince, who was left to exercise all the invidious duties of government without any power to reward; he debated it, clause by clause, with unabated spirit till toward the end of February, when the happy recovery of the Sove. reign put an end to further contention. The dili gence with which Mr. Burke sought for information on all topics of interest may be conceived from what took place on the present occasion; that, besides ransacking our history for precedents or points of coincidence, he examined all the medical books treating of the disease, and visited several receptacles for persons so afflicted in order more thoroughly to trace its general progress and results,

in addition to the examinations of the physicians. Nor was his pen less exercised upon this occasion than his other powers; one product of which is universally considered to be the celebrated answer of the Prince to the letter of Mr. Pitt, specifying the restrictions to be imposed upon the Regent, which, for dignity, and force of sentiment and of diction, has perhaps not many equals among state papers. Several minor pieces, such as the ques tions to the Lord Mayor, some speeches, letters, answers, and representations from exalted per sonages, are also attributed to him, a few of which breathe strong insinuations against the character and designs of Administration.

It has been said, in the general abuse poured upon him on this as on other great public questions, that he displayed a kind of triumph or at least indelicacy to the unhappy condition of His Majesty; a charge which his general humanity, and a fair interpretation of his expressions, such as every extempore debater needs and commonly solicits from his hearers, sufficiently refute.

It is well known indeed that he felt warmly; that he gave vent to his feelings too freely; that he committed upon this, as upon some other occasions, the fault of being too unreserved with the public at large, which, as experience has frequently proved, treats those statesmen with the least consideration who exhibit towards it the greatest candour and confidence; so that concealment and art, though considered as the vices of a statesman, are almost necessary to him to enjoy the favour of

those whom he serves. In debate Mr. Burke's warmth was sufficiently punished on this question by unjust insinuations and by cries of order! which, being once pertinaciously urged in what he thought a frivolous or party spirit, drew from him the following observation in reply, having more than once expressed contempt at the use of this exclamation:"Order is an admirable thing, perfect in all its limbs, but unfortunately it squints, or can see only on that side which tells for itself. Delicacy also I have the utmost wish to preserve ; but delicacy, though a being of perfect symmetry, like the former, is only a subsidiary virtue, and ought always to give way to truth, where the case is such that the truth is of infinitely more importance than the delicacy."

Politicians militant commonly make the greatest excuses for each other; and there were many apologies for Mr. Burke in the admitted manoeuvring of Ministry so as to have jockeyed his friends; out of the useful exercise of that power they were on the point of acquiring, had they even gained it; in the artful concealment of the design till the middle of December when it was ripe for execution; in the means made use of to instil ungenerous suspicions of her children into the mind of the Queen; in the anomalous principle of an elective regency in an hereditary monarchy; in the fraud and fiction as he strongly termed it of making the Great Seal, a thing of wax and copper, a substitute for a King when a living, lawful, intelligent heir was at hand; in the number and

nature of the restrictions imposed; in the conflicting opinions of the physicians; and something in his own increasing irritability, the common offspring of increasing infirmity and age. No one understood the necessity for such allowances, or acted more fairly upon them, than Mr. Pitt; for though keenly sensitive to the sarcasms of his opponent, particularly when taunted with being a competitor for the Regency with the Prince, and to which he replied by an ungenerous accusation that Mr. Burke did not wish the King to recover, the occasion had no sooner ceased than it was for gotten on the part of both; both probably feeling that had their situations as to power been reversed, their conduct might not have been materially different.

The emergency to any Minister was new and difficult; but the characteristic dexterity of Mr. Pitt, and the democratical view which the preservation or speedy resumption of power rendered it expedient for him to take of it, tickled the popular feeling into a decided approval of what he did; it was of course but natural that he should wish to retain his power; and it is equally certain that had he thought there was the most distant hope of retaining it under the Regent, the restrictions upon the latter would not have been imposed. The justice of the restrictions was therefore, to say the least, questionable; they cast a suspicion where no suspicion ought to have fallen; and a deep manoeuvre to preserve a Ministry became the means not only of impeding the

useful exercise of the power of the Crown for a time, but perhaps to weaken public respect for it, which, at any other time, or under other circumstances, Mr. Pitt himself would have most loudly reprobated.

Whatever be the opinion of his public measures, or the purity of his motives, his private conduct was manly; too unceremonious perhaps, too lofty, too unbending toward an Illustrious Personage to be consistent with perfect duty, though he disclaimed the slightest intentional disrespect. The Chancellor displayed more art and pliancy. Rough and knotted only when his official existence was not in danger, he on this occasion exhibited more of the willow than the oak in his composition, oscillating between the contending interests with a degree of elasticity of which he was previously not thought capable, and which, in the eyes of near observers, did not tend to exalt his character. Mr. Burke, informed of this, assailed him with several sarcasms, particularly on hearing of a burst of the pathetic from him in the House of Lords in allusion to the afflicting condition of His Majesty:

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"The theatrical tears then shed, were not the tears of patriots for dying laws, but of Lords for their expiring places; the iron tears which flowed down Pluto's cheek rather resembled the dismal bubbling of the Styr than the gentle murmuring streams of Aganippe: in fact, they were tears for his Majesty's bread; and those who shed them would stick by the King's loaf as long as a single cut of it remained, while even a crust of it held