not know that as bad may not be found in the new. This democracy begins very ill; and I feel no security that what has been rapacious and bloody, in its commencement, will be mild and protecting in its final settlement. They cannot, indeed, in future, rob so much, because they have left little that can be taken. I go to the full length of my principle. I should think the government of the deposed king of France, or of the late king of Prussia, or the present emperor, or the present czarina, none of them, perhaps, perfectly good people, to be far better than the government of twenty-four millions of men, all as good as you, and I do not know any body better; supposing that those twenty-four millions would be subject, as infallibly they would, to the same unrestrained, though virtuous, impulses; because it is plain that their majority would think every thing justified by their warm good intentions— they would heat one another by their common zeal-counsel and advice would be lost on them -they would not listen to temperate individuals, and they would be less capable, infinitely, of moderation, than the most heady of those princes.

What have I to do with France, but as the common interest of humanity, and its example to this country, engages me? I know France, by observation and inquiry, pretty tolerably for a stranger; and I am not a man to fall in love with the faults or follies of the old or new government. You reason as if I were running a parallel between its former abusive government and the present tyranny. What had all this to do with the opinions I delivered in parliament,

which ran a parallel between the liberty they might have had, and this frantic delusion. This is the way by which you blind and deceive yourself, and beat the air in your argument with me. Why do you instruct me on a state of the case which has no existence ? You know how to reason very well. What most of the newspapers make me say, I know not, nor do I much care. I don't think, however, they have thus stated me. There is a very fair abstract of my speech printed in a little pamphlet, which I would send you if it were worth putting you to the expense.

To discuss the affairs of France and its revolution would require a volume, perhaps many volumes. Your general reflections about revolutions may be right or wrong: they conclude nothing. I don't find myself disposed to controvert them, for I do not think they apply to the present affairs; nay, I am sure they do not. I conceive you have got very imperfect accounts of these transactions. I believe I am much more exactly informed of them.

I am sorry, indeed, to find that our opinions do differ essentially, fundamentally, and are at the utmost possible distance from each other, if I understand you or myself clearly on this subject. Your freedom is far from displeasing to me; I love it; for I always wish to know the full of what is in the mind of the friend I converse with. I give you mine as freely; and I hope I shall offend you as little as you do me. I shall have no objection to your showing my letter to as many as you please. I have no secrets with regard to the public. I have never shrunk from

obloquy; and I have never courted popular applause. If I have met with any share of it, 66 non recepi sed rapui." No difference of opinion, however, shall hinder me from cultivating your friendship, while you permit me to do so. I have not written this to discuss these matters in a prolonged controversy (I wish we may never say more about them), but to comply with your commands, which ever shall have due weight with me. I am most respectfully and most affectionately yours,

EDMUND BURKE.

EDMUND BURKE TO ARTHUR MURPHY, ESQ. Duke Street, Sunday, May 6, 1793.

MY DEAR SIR, I WAS in the country when your most valuable and most acceptable present was left at my house. Since my return, really and literally an instant of time has not been my own: except the hours in which I have sought in vain for sleep, I have passed almost every hour in Westminster Hall and its purlieus. From nine o'clock yesterday morning until past six in the evening, I did not stir from thence. Let this disagreeable employment be my excuse, for not having till now discharged the pleasing duty of making my acknowledgments to you for the great honour you have been pleased to confer upon me, with a promptitude equal to the warmth and sincerity of my gratitude. To have my name united with yours and that of Tacitus, is a distinction to which I am and ever shall be truly sensible.

The value of the gift is to my feelings infinitely enhanced when it comes from a man of talents, virtue, and independent spirit, which seeks for what aspires to be congenial with it, and does not aim to connect itself with greatness, riches, or power.

I thank you for the partial light in which you regard my weak endeavours for the conservation of that ancient order of things in which we were born, and in which we have lived neither unhappily nor disgracefully, and (you at least) not unprofitably to your country. As to me, in truth I can claim nothing more than good intention in the part I have to act. Since I am publicly placed (however little suitably so to my abilities or inclination), I have struggled to the best of my power against two great public evils, growing out of the most sacred of all things, liberty and authority. In the writings which you are so indulgent to bear, I have struggled against the tyranny of freedom in this my longest and last struggle, I contend against the licentiousness of power. When I retire from this, successful or defeated, your work will either add to my satisfaction, or furnish me with comfort. Securiorem et uberiorem, materiam senatuti seposui. I quote the original, as I have not yet had time enough to turn to that part of your translation, where the same thought is certainly not less happily expressed.

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I am, with most sincere respect and affection, my dear sir, your most faithful, obliged, and obedient humble servant,

EDM. BURKE.

EDMUND BURKE TO ARTHUR MURPHY, ESQ.

Beaconsfield, Dec. 8, 1793.

MY DEAR SIR, I HAVE not been as early as, to all appearance, I ought to have been, in my acknowledgments for your present. I received it in due time; but my delay was not from a want of a due sense of the value of what you have sent, or of the honour you have done me in sending it. But I have had some visiters to whom I was obliged to attend; and I have had some business to do, which, though it is not worth your while to be troubled with it, occupied almost every hour of the time I could spare from my guests: until yesterday it was not in my power so much as to open your Tacitus.

I have read the first book through; besides dipping here and there into other parts. I am extremely delighted with it. You have done what hitherto, I think, has not been done in England: you have given us a translation of a Latin prose writer, which may be read with pleasure. It would be no compliment at all to prefer your translation to the last, which appeared with such a pomp of patronage. Gordon was an author fashionable in his time, but he never wrote any thing worthy of much notice, but that work; by which he has obtained a kind of eminence in bad writing: so that one cannot pass it by with mere neglect. It is clear to me that he did not understand the language from which he ventured to translate; and that he had formed a very whimsical idea of excellence with regard to