"The misfortunes of your family are a public care. The late one is to me a personal loss. I have a double right to affliction, and to join my grief, and to express my deep and cordial concern at that hideous stroke which has deprived me of a friend, you of a son, and your country of a promise that would communicate to posterity the living blessings of your genius and your virtue. Your friends may now condole with you, that you should have now no other prospect of immortality than that which is common to Cicero and to Bacon; such as never can be interrupted while there exists the beauty of order, or the love of virtue, and can fear no death except what barbarity may impose on the globe. "If the same strength of reason which could persuade any other man to bear any misfortune, can administer to the proprietor a few drops of comfort, we may hope that your condition admits of relief. The greatest possible calamity which can be imposed on man, we hope may be supported by the greatest human understanding. For comfort, your friends must refer you to the exercise of its faculties, and to the contemplation of its gigantic proportions--_Dura solatia_--of which nothing can deprive you while you live. And, though death should mow down every thing about you, and plunder you of your domestic existence, you would still be the owner of a conscious superiority in life, and immortality after it.--I am, my dear sir, with the highest respect and regard, "Yours most truly, "H. Grattan." We must hastily conclude. The threatened ruin of Europe awakened Burke from this reverie at the tomb of his son. He required strong stimulants, and in the French Revolution, and the shock of nations, he found them. He now put the trumpet to his lips, and "Blew a blast so loud and dread, Were ne'er prophetic sounds so full of woe." His appeal pierced to the heart of the nation. England had never _succumbed_, but an indefatigable faction had played every art of quackery to set her faculties asleep, with the appearance of having her eyes more open than ever. Whiggism, by its tricks, was _mesmerising_ the common sense of the country. From this adventitious torpor Burke recalled her to her natural temperament, restored sight to her eyes, taught her to resume the sword, and sent her forth to commence that career of victory which was consummated in the Tuilleries.