The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 05 (of 12)Burke, Edmund
History
The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 05 (of 12)
Burke, Edmund
Great Britain -- Politics and government -- 1760-1820; Political science -- Early works to 1800
No man lives too long who lives to do with spirit and suffer with
resignation what Providence pleases to command or inflict; but, indeed,
they are sharp incommodities which beset old age. It was but the other
day, that, on putting in order some things which had been brought here,
on my taking leave of London forever, I looked over a number of fine
portraits, most of them of persons now dead, but whose society, in my
better days, made this a proud and happy place. Amongst those was the
picture of Lord Keppel. It was painted by an artist worthy of the
subject, the excellent friend of that excellent man from their earliest
youth, and a common friend of us both, with whom we lived for many years
without a moment of coldness, of peevishness, of jealousy, or of jar, to
the day of our final separation.
I ever looked on Lord Keppel as one of the greatest and best men of his
age, and I loved and cultivated him accordingly. He was much in my
heart, and I believe I was in his to the very last beat. It was after
his trial at Portsmouth that he gave me this picture. With what zeal and
anxious affection I attended him through that his agony of glory,--what
part my son, in the early flush and enthusiasm of his virtue, and the
pious passion with which he attached himself to all my
connections,--with what prodigality we both squandered ourselves in
courting almost every sort of enmity for his sake, I believe he felt,
just as I should have felt such friendship on such an occasion. I
partook, indeed, of this honor with several of the first and best and
ablest in the kingdom, but I was behindhand with none of them; and I am
sure, that, if, to the eternal disgrace of this nation, and to the total
annihilation of every trace of honor and virtue in it, things had taken
a different turn from what they did. I should have attended him to the
quarter-deck with no less good-will and more pride, though with far
other feelings, than I partook of the general flow of national joy that
attended the justice that was done to his virtue.
Pardon, my Lord, the feeble garrulity of age, which loves to diffuse
itself in discourse of the departed great. At my years we live in
retrospect alone; and, wholly unfitted for the society of vigorous life,
we enjoy, the best balm to all wounds, the consolation of friendship, in
those only whom we have lost forever. Feeling the loss of Lord Keppel at
all times, at no time did I feel it so much as on the first day when I
was attacked in the House of Lords.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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