English literature -- History and criticism; Historiography; Literature
This is magnificent, but it is not farming, and you will easily believe
that Burke's attempts to till the soil were more costly than productive.
Farming, if it is to pay, is a pursuit of small economies; and Burke was
far too Asiatic, tropical, and splendid to have anything to do with small
economies. His expenditure, like his rhetoric, was in the 'grand style.'
He belongs to Charles Lamb's great race, 'the men who borrow.' But
indeed it was not so much that Burke borrowed as that men lent. Right-
feeling men did not wait to be asked. Dr. Brocklesby, that good
physician, whose name breathes like a benediction through the pages of
the biographies of the best men of his time, who soothed Dr. Johnson's
last melancholy hours, and for whose supposed heterodoxy the dying man
displayed so tender a solicitude, wrote to Burke, in the strain of a
timid suitor proposing for the hand of a proud heiress, to know whether
Burke would be so good as to accept 1,000 pounds at once, instead of
waiting for the writer's death. Burke felt no hesitation in obliging so
old a friend. Garrick, who, though fond of money, was as
generous-hearted a fellow as ever brought down a house, lent Burke 1,000
pounds. Sir Joshua Reynolds, who has been reckoned stingy, by his will
left Burke 2,000 pounds, and forgave him another 2,000 pounds which he
had lent him. The Marquis of Rockingham by his will directed all Burke's
bonds held by him to be cancelled. They amounted to 30,000 pounds.
Burke's patrimonial estate was sold by him for 4,000 pounds; and I have
seen it stated that he had received altogether from family sources as
much as 20,000 pounds. And yet he was always poor, and was glad at the
last to accept pensions from the Crown in order that he might not leave
his wife a beggar. This good lady survived her illustrious husband
twelve years, and seemed as his widow to have had some success in paying
his bills, for at her death all remaining demands were found to be
discharged. For receiving this pension Burke was assailed by the Duke of
Bedford, a most pleasing act of ducal fatuity, since it enabled the
pensioner, not bankrupt of his wit, to write a pamphlet, now of course a
cherished classic, and introduce into it a few paragraphs about the House
of Russell and the cognate subject of grants from the Crown. But enough
of Burke's debts and difficulties, which I only mention because all
through his life they were cast up against him. Had Burke been a
moralist of the calibre of Charles James Fox, he might have amassed a
fortune large enough to keep up half a dozen Beaconsfields, by simply
doing what all his predecessors in the office he held, including Fox's
own father, the truly infamous first Lord Holland, had done--namely, by
retaining for his own use the interest on all balances of the public
money from time to time in his hands as Paymaster of the Forces. But
Burke carried his passion for good government into actual practice, and,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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