want of an audience, he started up, almost instinctively, exclaiming, "The Riot Act, the Riot Act! for what? does not my honourable friend see that he has dispersed the mob already ?"

His exertions on the American question naturally brought him into intercourse with the principal persons connected with the subject. He corresponded with General Lee, a man of some acquirements, but of remarkable eccentricity, if not nearly insane. Lee afterwards took service in the American army, where he soon quarrelled with his superiors as much as at home; and found as little to reconcile his weak and giddy understanding and worthless heart, in republicanism as in monarchy. Some intercourse with Franklin was the natural result of his position in the House. But Franklin at that time was not the revolter that he afterwards became. He called upon Burke the day be fore he took his final leave of London, in 1775, and had a long interview with him. On this occasion Franklin expressed great regret for the calamities which he viewed as the consequence of the ministerial determinations; professing, that nothing could give him more pain than the separation of the colonies from the mother-country; that America had enjoyed many happy days under her rule, and that he never expected to see such again! How much of this was sincere, the character of the speaker justifies suspicion. Cold, worldly, and jealous, Franklin hated England for her prosperity. And this feeling had broken out on the most accidental occasions. One day visiting the source of the Thames, he exclaimed, "And is it this narrow stream that is to have dominion over a country that contains the Hudson and the Ohio ?" On leaving the Privy-Council, where he had been examined and taken to task by Wedderburne the Attorney-General, he murmured in the bitterness of personal revenge, "For this I will make your King a little king." This was not the language of a peacemaker. His language to Burke was naturally the tale of a client to his counsel, anxious to leave a favourable impression behind him, giving the wrong the air of right, and facing

rebellion with the best colour. The Americans still panegyrise this man. His known skill makes the standing figure of those swelling and schoolboy productions, the fourth of July speeches, the annual elaborate abortion of Republican eloquence. But whatever they may do with his name, they should abjure his spirit. To Franklin and to his doctrine of money-getting, his substitution of the mere business of amassing for the generous and natural uses of wealth, his turning the American into a mere calculator of profit and loss, and America into a huge couuting house, is due a vast portion of every evil belonging to the character of her people, and every convulsion that so inevitably threatens her government. The sooner they lay his maxims and his memory in the grave together, the better for the national chance of honour. The spirit of a pedlar ought not to preside over the councils of a great people. The Americans may erect his statue in their Temple of Mammon, if they will; but they must close the temple, and embrace a loftier worship, before they can be worthy of the renown of their ancestors, or be fitting trustees of the virtues to their posterity.

We once more look to Burke for wisdom. At the moment when these pages are passing through the press, the affairs of Ireland are engrossing the public attention. Among others of those violent palliatives, which have in them all the nature of poisons, is an absentee-tax. The proposition is not new, for the spirit is not new that makes it. It is the characteristic of Ireland, that every succeeding age of her history is a counterpart of the preceding. Other nations advance, make progress, and, leaving their follies and their prejudices be hind them, push on in the great general highway of European know. ledge and prosperity. But to Ire land this progress is forbidden by an influence, that the wisest and boldest of her minds has never been able to overthrow. A fierce superstition has bound the chain upon her, and she now can but range the length of its links. Every salient step, every natural impulse of health and vigour, but acts as a new memento of the fetter that checks it instantly, and the first consciousness of freedom is

that contradicts a very great principle necessary for preserving the union of the various parts of the State; because it does, in effect, discountenance intermarriage and mutual inheritance; - things that bind countries more closely together than any laws or constitutions whatsoever. Is it right, that a woman who marries into Ireland, and perhaps well purchases her jointure or her dower there, should not, after her husband's death, have it in her choice to return to her country and her friends without being taxed for it? Or, if an Irish heiress should marry into an English family, and that great property in both countries should thereby come to be united in the common issue; shall the descendant of that marriage abandon his natural connexions, his family interests, his public and private duties, and be compelled to take up his residence in Ireland? Is there any sense or justice in it, unless you affirm that there should be no such intermarriage, and no such natural inheritance? Is there a shadow of reason, that, because a Lord Buckingham, a Duke of Devonshire, a Sir George Saville, possess property in Ireland, which has descended to them without any act of theirs, they should abandon their duty in Parliament, and spend their winters in Dublin? or, having spent the session in Westminster, must they abandon their seats, and all their family interests, in Yorkshire and Derbyshire, and pass the rest of the year in Wicklow, Cork, or Tyrone? But a man may have property in more parts of the Empire. He may have property in Jamaica, as well as in England and Ireland. I know some who have property in all of them. Suppose this poor distracted citizen of the whole Empire, providing (if the nature of the laws will admit of it,) a flying camp, and dividing his year, as well as he can, between England and Ireland, and at the charge of two town houses, and two country houses in both kingdoms. In this situation he receives an account that a law is transmitted from Jamaica to tax absentees from that province, which is impoverished by the European residence of the possessors of their lands. How is he to escape this ricochet of cross-firing of so ma

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To those powerful reasons might be added the obvious ones. That an absentee tax would be a virtual prohibition of all English money in the purchase of lands in Ireland; for, who would buy where he was to pay an additional tax for his purchase? Thus the value of every acre in Ireland would be instantly sunk. A still more striking reason against an absentee tax would be the almost total impossibility of raising it, in any instance where the landed owner was disinclined to assist the collection. Was the tax to be contingent on a six months absence from the country? Is there to be a register of the goings in and out of every man? Or is an army of spies to be employed to trace gentlemen to their dwellings? Or is every owner of property (for the law must comprehend every man capable of absenting himself, for whatever cause,) to be compelled to make a return of his presence every six months to Government? Or is residence to imply the abiding of the whole family in the country, or of a part, or of the head of the family alone? In the former instances, who is to ascertain whether the requisite number of the family constantly reside? Or if the residence of the head of the house be satisfactory, how is the country to be a gainer by the residence of a solitary and doubtless a highly discontented resident, who sends off his rental to support the expenditure or amusements of his family in Bath or London? Or, does not the whole conception imply a scandalous, vexatious, and expensive espionage? Or if not the land

holder but his rents are to be the object, what is to intercept the transmission of money to any part of the earth? This part of the conception would imply an impossibility. A few men of large fortunes, and constantly residing in England, a Marquis of Lansdowne, or a Duke of Devonshire, may be mulcted for the crimes of their ancestors in paying their money for Irish estates, and not being able to be in Ireland and England at the same time. But the great multitude against whom the act was especially levelled, would especially elude it. The crowd, whom in bitterness much more than impolicy the levelles would wish to fine for enjoying themselves for a year or two in any other portion of the earth than Ireland, and preferring Brighton and Cheltenham to a visit from Captain Rock, or an assassination at their own doors, would unquestionably evade the statute, and leave nothing for its advocates but fruitless declamation and expense thrown away. In 1773, though the measure had already received the sanction of Ministers, the embarrassments of its practical operation, and the probably interested and factious motives of its proposers, were so strongly suggested, that the project was suppressed.

We now draw to the close of one of the epochs of this great man's public career. He was still under the obligations of a party. The American question was fastened on him by the hands of others, and he dragged it on with a vigour that redeemed his pledge of fidelity. He persevered to the last moment, while there was a hope of reconciling the countries, and supported his repeated proposals with an enthusiasm of eloquence which held the House in perpetual astonishment. A speech in which he denounced the employment of the Indian savages, as an aggravation of the horrors of war, is said to have produced effects unequalled by any effort of modern times. Of this speech there is no record, further than its impression on the House. On its close, Colonel Barrè started up, and declared, that if it were but published, he would have it nailed up on every church-door in the kingdom, by the side of the proclamation for the General Fast. Sir George Saville pro

nounced in all quarters, that "he who had not been present on that night, had not witnessed the greatest triumph of eloquence within memory." Governor Johnstone solemnly averred, that "it was fortunate for the Noble Lords on the Treasury Bench, North and Germain, that there were no strangers present, (the gallery having been cleared,) as their indignation would have roused the people in the streets to tear them in pieces on their way home."

But an event altogether unconnected with the labours of the British Parliament, suddenly brought the contests of party to a close. America formed an alliance with France. The war suddenly became hazardous on the only side which ever threatens the British Empire with danger. From this period success evidently became too dear for the price that it might be politic in England to pay. Opposition was probably not less startled by this event than Ministers. If party ever feels, it felt then, and regretted the work of its own hands. The declaration of Colonial independence was received by the antagonists of Administration with unequivocal surprise, perhaps with bitter regret. "We must take it," was their language; "but it is not as a matter of choice, but of hard and overpowering necessity." Burke declared, that "it made him sick at heart, that it struck him to the soul, that he felt the claim to be essentially injurious to Great Britain, and one of which she could never get rid. No, never, never, never! It was not to be thought that he wished for the independence of America. Far from it. He felt it a circumstance exceedingly detrimental to the fame, and exceedingly detrimental to the inte rests of his country." Lord Chatham was equally full of eloquent remorse: He exclaimed, that "he could never bring himself to admit the independence of the Colonies; that the hand which signed the concession might as well rend the jewels from the British Crown at once; that the sun of England would go down, never to rise again." Such is the sincerity of party, and such sometimes its punishment. Those great men had laboured for years to pull down the supremacy which they loved, to raise up a revolt to the rank of a triumph,

and give the loose and desultory efforts of popular ambition the form and consistency of Empire. But while they contemplated nothing beyond the overthrow of the Minister, they found that their weapons had passed through his shield, and struck into the bosom of their country. Yet the whole question was destined to expose the short-sightedness, not less than the passions of party. The blows struck at the grandeur of England were quickly healed. The separation of the Colonies was found to be the separation of a branch from a monarch of the forest, which soon more than recovered the loss in its statelier strength and loftier luxuriance. In a few years the growth of the Colonies would have been a fatal appendage to England; the mere patronage of their offices must have made the Minister superior to the Constitution. The two countries might have still clung together, but it would be no longer an union of strength, but a common consent in corruption. But the arrear of evil must be paid at last, and the connexion would be severed, and the crime punished by some fatal violence, some fearful explosion, which might have left of both nothing but ruins.

But those were the errors of party, not of Burke; of his noviciate, not

of his head or his heart; of his allegiance to a political superior, not of his genius, acting on his ripened knowledge of the interests of the Empire.

It is remarkable that as he gradually extricated himself from the bonds of party, he became not merely a freer, but a more enlightened statesman. While he continued in the ranks of the Rockingham party, nothing but the extraordinary merits of his public speaking could rescue him from the general cloud which gathered on the fame of Opposition. Further, in the second stage of his political career, he steered side by side with Fox; his rank as a patriot was still partially obscured, and his public services were narrowed, wasted, and humiliated by the conjunction. But his time was to come. For sincerity there is always a triumph at last. It was when he hoisted his flag alone, when he steered aloof from party, when abandoning the creeks and shallows of personal policy, he boldly followed the impulse of his own great mind, and made the cause of England his guiding star, that his true character became visible, and he achieved the whole splendour of that fame, which, from his tomb, still lightens on his country.