mismanagement of the provisions of that act hopelessly embroiled the minister with the king. Then came the clash and confusion of the parties into which the once predominant old Whig party had been lately rent asunder, and which the present strange and sullen seclusion of Pitt made it hopeless to think of reuniting. In vain he was appealed to; in vain the poor king made piteous submissions to induce him to return to power. Fortunate in legacies, a Somersetshire baronet whom he had never seen had just left him three thousand a year; and it began to be whispered about that he would not take office again. The opposition lost ground, and the ministry did not gain it; the coercion laid upon the king became notorious; the city was shaken with riots, which in the general disorganization of affairs rose almost to rebellion; and while on the one hand a new administration seemed impossible without the help of Pitt, on the other it was plain that Grenville and the Bedfords were tottering to their final fall. The king was intensely grateful to them for their invasion of the public liberties; had joyfully cooperated with them in the taxation of America; but hated them because they hated Bute (who had placed them in power), because they had insulted his mother the Princess Dowager (whose intrigues had sustained them in power), and because they suffered Buckingham Gardens to be overlooked rather than vote him a somewhat paltry grant (which would have secured to the crown what is now Belgravia). It was his own chosen system of government to govern without party, and solely by the favour of the crown; and here were its four years' fruits. His ministers had become his tyrants, and statesmen held themselves aloof from his service. When his uncle Cumberland came back from Hayes with Pitt's formal refusal, he thought in his despair of even the old Duke of Newcastle; began to make atonement for recent insults to the house of Devonshire; and threw out baits for those old pure Whigs who had been to this time the objects of his most concentrated hatred. Doubts and distrust shook Leicester House, in which Nugent of course shared largely; and expectation stood on tip-toe in Gerrardstreet, where the Club could hardly avoid taking interest in what affected the fortunes of Edmund Burke. For Burke, not unreasonably, looked to obtain employment in the scramble. Hawkins said he had always meant to offer himself to the highest bidder; but the calumny is hardly worth refuting. He had honourably disengaged himself from Hamilton, and scornfully given back his pension; nor were his friends kept in ignorance that he had since attached himself to the party of Whigs the most pure and least powerful in the state. Lord Rockingham was at their head: a young nobleman of princely fortune and fascinating manners, who made up for powers of oratory, in which he was wholly deficient, by an inestimable art of attracting and securing friends; whose character was unstained by any of the intrigues of the past ten years; and who had selected for his associates men like himself, less noted for their brilliant talents than for their excellent sense and spotless honour. The manly independence as well as great landed influence of the old Yorkshire family of Savile, was worthily represented in their ranks by the present member for the county, Sir George and with him were associated the shrewd clear honesty and financial ability of Dowdeswell, a country gentleman of Worcestershire; and the many rare virtues of the Duke of Devonshire's youngest uncle, Lord John Cavendish, who, not more remarkable for his fair little clownish person than for his princely soul, carried out in politics the principles of private honour with what Walpole sneeringly calls the tyranny of a moral philosopher.' With the extremer Temple opinions, these men had little in common. Though staunch against general warrants and invasions of liberties and franchises, they were as far from being Wilkite as the reckless demagogue himself; and they had obtained the general repute of a kind of middle constitutional party. Little compatible with present popu, larity, Burke knew; but he saw beyond the ignorant present. To the last he hoped that Pitt might be moved; and late in the May of this year so expressed himself to his friend Flood, in a letter which is curious evidence of his possession of the political secrets of the day but though believing that without the splendid talents and boundless popularity of the Great Commoner, 'an admir'able and lasting system' could not then be formed, he also believed that the only substitute for Pitt's genius was Rockingham's sense and good faith, and that on this plain foundation might be gradually raised a party that should revive Whig purity and honour, and last when Pitt should be no more. Somewhat thus, too, the honest and brave Duke of Cumberland may have reasoned; when to his hapless nephew, again crying out to him in utter despair, and imploring him, with or without Pitt, to save him from George Grenville and the Duke of Bedford, he gave his final counsel. Lord Rockingham was summoned; consented, with his party, to take office; and was sworn in First Lord on the 8th of July. Lord Shelburne would not join without Pitt: but a young Whig duke (Grafton), of whom much was at that time expected, gave in his adhesion; and General Conway, Cumberland's personal friend, a braver soldier than politician, but a persuasive speaker, and an honourable as well as most popular man, gave his help as Secretary of State: William Burke, Edmund's distant relative and dear friend, being appointed his Under-Secretary. Upon this the old meddling Duke of Newcastle went and warned Conway's chief against these Burkes. Edmund's real name, he said, was O'Bourke; and he was not only an Irish adventurer, a Jacobite, and a Papist, but he had shrewd reasons for believing him a concealed Jesuit to boot. Nevertheless, seven days after the administration was formed, the Jesuit and Jacobite, introduced by their common friend Fitzherbert (who had been named to the board of trade), was appointed private secretary to the Marquis of Rockingham; and Burke's great political life began. His first letter, written from Queen Anne Street the day after his appointment, was to David Garrick; and it will roperly restore to us, after this slight and not unneedful digi sion, the society of wits and men of letters to which this narve belongs. Burke pleasantly invokes his friend as his 'little Horace his 'lepidissime homuncio,' to call and see his 'Mæcenas at is,' and 'praise this adminis'tration of Cavendishes and Rockinghams in ode, and 'abuse their enemies in epigram.' Garrick had arrived in England, from his foreign tour, three months before; his old weaknesses coming back as he veged nearer and nearer home, and, for his last few days in Paris, disturbing him with visions of Powell. I'll answer for nothing and 'nobody in a playhouse,' he wrote to Colman; the 'devil has put his hoof into it, and he was a decer 'the beginning of the world. er from Tell me really what you think of Powell. I am told by several that he will bawl sent on for anonymous publication at the moment of his |