It is evident that Burke's mind was at this period turned to authorship, and that his chief quarrel arose from the petty and pragmatical demand of Hamilton, that he should abandon it altogether. Burke soon had ample revenge, if it was to be found in the obscurity into which Hamilton rapidly fell, and the burlesque which alone revived his name from its obscurity. The contrast between the two must have been a lesson to the vanity of the one, as pungent as was its triumph. If ever the fate of Tantalus was realized to man, it was in the perpetual thirst and perpetual disappointment of Hamilton for public name. The cup never reached his lips but it was instantly dry; while Burke was seen reveling in the full flow of public renown--buoyant on the stream into which so many others plunged only to sink, and steering his noble course with a full mastery of the current. "Single-speech Hamilton" became a title of ridicule, while Burke was pouring forth, night after night, speech after speech, rich in the most sparkling and most solid opulence of the mind. He must have been more or less than man, to have never cast a glance at the decrepitude of the formal coxcomb whom he once acknowledged as his leader, and compared his shrunk shape with the vigorous and athletic proportions of his own intellectual stature. Hamilton, too, must have had many a pang. The wretched nervousness of character which at once stimulated him to pine for distinction, and disqualified him from obtaining it, must have made his life miserable. If the magnificent conception of the poet's Prometheus could be lowered to any thing so trivial as a disappointed politician of the eighteenth century, its burlesque might be amply shown in a mind helplessly struggling against a sense of its own inferiority, gnawed by envy at the success of better men, and with only sufficient intellectual sensibility remaining to have that gnawing constantly renewed. Burke's letters to the chief Irishmen with whom his residence in Dublin had brought him into intercourse, long continued indignant. "Having presumed," said he, in one of those explanatory letters, "to put a test to me, which no man _not born in Africa_ ever thought of taking, on my refusal he broke off all connexion with me in the most insolent manner. He, indeed, entered into two several negotiations afterwards, but both poisoned in their first principles by the same spirit of injustice with which he set out in his first dealings with me. I, therefore, could never give way to his proposals. The whole ended by his possessing himself of that small reward for my services which, I since find, he had a very small share in procuring for me. After, or, indeed, rather during his negotiations, he endeavoured to stain my character and injure my future fortune, by every calumny his malice could suggest. This is the case of my connexion with Mr Hamilton."