It is pleasing, as it is also a little touching, to see how his companions thus freely accorded to Burke the immunities and prerogatives of a prince amongst them. No one failed to perceive how large and imperial he was, alike in natural gifts and in the wonderful range of his varied acquirements. Sir James Mackintosh, though he very earnestly combated some of Burke’s views, intensely admired his greatness. He declared that Gibbon “might have been taken from a corner of Burke’s mind without ever being missed.” “A wit said, of Gibbon’s ‘Autobiography’ that he did not know the difference between himself and the Roman Empire. He has narrated his ‘progressions from London to Buriton and from Buriton to London’ in the same monotonous, majestic periods that he recorded the fall of states and empires.” And we certainly feel a sense of incongruity: the two subjects, we perceive, are hardly commensurable. Perhaps in Burke’s case we should have felt differently,--we _do_ feel differently. In that extraordinary “Letter to a Noble Lord,” in which he defends his pension so proudly against the animadversions of the Duke of Bedford, how magnificently he speaks of his services to the country; how proud and majestic a piece of autobiography it is! How insignificant does the ancient house of Bedford seem, with all its long generations, as compared with this single and now lonely man, without distinguished ancestry or hope of posterity! He speaks grandly about himself, as about everything; and yet I see no disparity between the subject and the manner! Outside the small circle of those who knew and loved him, his generation did not wholly perceive this. There seemed a touch of pretension in this proud tone taken by a man who had never held high office or exercised great power. He had made great speeches, indeed, no one denied that; he had written great party pamphlets,--that everybody knew; his had been the intellectual force within the group of Whigs that followed Lord Rockingham,--that, too, the world in general perceived and acknowledged; and when he died, England knew the man who had gone to be a great man. But, for all that, his tone must, in his generation, have seemed disproportioned to the part he had played. His great authority is over us rather than over the men of his own day.