Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844Various
History
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844
Various
England -- Periodicals; Scotland -- Periodicals
However, it will be seen that Gerard Hamilton thought differently on
the subject. We break off this part of the correspondence, for the
purpose of introducing a fragment of that wisdom which formed so early
and so promising a portion of the mind of Burke. In writing of his
brother Richard to his Irish friend, he says--"Poor Dick sets off at
the beginning of next week for the Granadas, [in which he had obtained
a place under government.] He goes in good health and spirits, which
are all but little enough to battle with a bad climate and a bad
season. But it must be submitted to. Providence never intended, to
much the greater part, an entire life of ease and quiet. A peaceable,
honourable, and affluent decline of life must be purchased by a
laborious or hazardous youth; and every day, I think more and more
that it is well worth the purchase. Poverty and age suit very ill
together, and a course of struggling is miserable indeed, when
strength is decayed and hope gone. _Turpe senex miles!_"
Burke's quarrel with Hamilton ended in his resigning his pension. His
feelings appear to have been deeply hurt by Hamilton's superciliousness,
and his demand for the right to employ the whole time of his private
secretary. In a long explanatory letter to Hutchinson, a leading member
of the Irish parliament, and father of the late Lord Donoughmore, he
says, indignantly enough--"I flatter myself to let you see that I
deserved to be considered in another manner than as one of Mr Hamilton's
cattle, or as a piece of his household stuff. Six of the best years of
my life he took me from every pursuit of literary reputation, or of
improvement of my fortune. In that time he made his own fortune, a very
great one; and he has also taken to himself the very little one which I
had made. In all this time you may easily conceive how much I felt at
being left behind by almost all my contemporaries. There never was a
season more favourable for any man who chose to enter into the career
of public life; and I think I am not guilty of ostentation in supposing
my own moral character and my industry, my friends and connexions, when
Mr H. first sought my acquaintance, were not at all inferior to those of
several whose fortune is at this day upon a very different footing from
mine."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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