of men than the noble Duke can be. I have lived long and variously in the world. Without any considerable pretensions to literature in myself, I have aspired to the love of letters. I have lived for a great many years in habitudes with those who professed them. I can form a tolerable estimate of what is likely to happen from a character chiefly dependant for fame and fortune on knowledge and talent, as well in its morbid and perverted state, as in that which is sound and natural. Naturally, men so formed and finished are the first gifts of Providence to the world. But when they have once thrown off the fear of God, which was in all ages too often the case, and the fear of man, which is now the case, and when in that state they come to understand one another and to act in corps, a more dreadful calamity cannot arise out of hell to scourge mankind.

*

"These philosophers consider men in their experiments, no more than they do mice in an air pump, or in a recipient of mephitic gas. Whatever his Grace may think of himself, they look upon him, and every thing that belongs to him, with no more regard than they do upon the whiskers of that little long-tailed animal, that has been long the game of the grave, demure, insidious, spring-nailed, velvet-pawed, green-eyed philosophers, whether going upon two legs or upon four.

"His Grace's landed possessions are irresistibly inviting to an agrarian experiment. They are a downright insult upon the rights of man. They are more extensive than the territory of many of the Grecian republics; and they are without comparison more fertile than most of them. There are now republics in Italy, in Germany, and in Switzerland, which do not possess any thing like so fair and ample a domain. There is a scope for seven philosophers to proceed in their analytical experiments, upon Harrington's seven different forms of republics, in the acres of this one Duke.

"Hitherto they have been wholly unproductive to speculation; fitted for nothing but to fatten bullocks, and to produce grain for beer, still more to stupify the dull English understanding. Abbé Sieyes however has whole nests of pigeon-holes full of constitutions, ready made, ticketed, sorted, and numbered; suited to every season and every fancy; some with the top of the pattern at the bottom, and some with the bottom at the top; some plain, some flowered; some distinguished for their simplicity; others for their complexity; some of blood colour; some of boue de Paris; some with directories, others without a direction; some with councils of elders and councils of youngsters; some without any council at all. Some where the electors choose the representatives; others where the representatives choose the electors. Some in long coats and some in short cloaks; some with pantaloons; some without breeches. Some with five shilling qualifications; some totally unqualified. So that no constitution-fancier may go

K K

unsuited from his shop, provided he loves a pattern of pillage, oppression, arbitrary imprisonment, confiscation, exile, revolutionary judgment, and legalized premeditated murder, in any shapes into which they can be put. What a pity it is that the progress of experimental philosophy should be checked by his Grace's monopoly !

"Is it not a singular phenomenon, that whilst the sans-culottes carcase butchers, and the philosophers of the shambles, are pricking their dotted lines upon his (the Duke's) hide, and like the print of the poor ox that we see at the shop windows at Charing Cross, alive as he is, and thinking no harm in the world, he is divided into rumps, and sirloins, and briskets, and into all sorts of pieces for roasting, boiling, and stewing-that all the time they are measuring him, his Grace is measuring me; is invidiously comparing the bounty of the crown with the deserts of the defender of his order, and in the same moment fawning on those who have the knife half out of the sheath-poor innocent,

"Pleas'd to the last he crops the flowery food,

And licks the hand just rais'd to shed his blood."

Report asserts that the account given in this work of the origin of the Russel possessions is erroneous, though it has been said that the information was supplied from the library of his late Majesty George III. at Buckingham House; be this as it may, no formal contradiction of the statement was made, and Mr. Burke is not likely to have risked mere conjecture where confutation was so easy. It was on his part rather a violent, but not an unfair retaliation; for against an invading and wanton enemy all arms may be used, and he must be a poor soldier who chooses the weaker in preference to the stronger weapon. The regret perhaps is, that he wielded his advantage rather imprudently than unjustly, by furnishing hints to the Agrarians or Jacobins of a future day, who may be inclined to make experiments in parcelling out those extensive and flourishing domains which he calls the "low, fat, Bedford level."

His other assailant on this occasion, the Earl of Lauderdale, still, to the delight of his friends, adorns that house of which he has long been so distinguished a member. Doubtless he has regretted the momentary injustice done to an old acquaintance and political leader with the same sincerity as he is also said to have read his recantation from the then prevailing partialities toward the French system of freedom of 1793, and to that other

*

* From many complimentary effusions of his Lordship to Mr. Burke, the following handsome one, applied to his Reform Bill in 1781, is selected-"“He (Mr. Burke) was the only man in the country whose powers were equal to the forming and accomplishing so systematic and able a plan of reform; not a mean, narrow, wretched scheme of retrenchment, breaking in upon the dignity of the crown, and the honour of the nation, but a great and beautiful arrangement of office, calculated not to degrade a government, but to exalt and to adorn it."

stock subject for patriotic oratory, Parliamentary Reform. While so many able men, however, were thus misled upon such subjects, it must impress us still more with a conviction of the sagacity of their great opponent, who distinguished at a glance what it cost others so much teaching and lecturing, and mental hammering and annealing, to learn, in the school of political mistake and failure.

CHAPTER XV.

Establishment of the Emigrant School at Penn.-Letters to W. H- and to J. Gahagan, Esq.-Letters on a Regicide Peace. His prophetic Spirit as opposed to that of Mr. Pitt.-Report concerning him.-Letter to Mrs. Leadbeater.-Letter on the Affairs of Ireland.-His Illness and Death.

IT should have been mentioned in a previous page, that in the year 1794, Mr. Burke, commiserating the destitute condition of many of the emigrant children whose fathers had perished either by the guillotine or the sword in the general convulsion of their country, and of others whose means were inadequate to the purposes of education, applied to government for assistance in order to form an establishment adapted to supply this want, which he volunteered to superintend. This request was very liberally complied with. The house appropriated for the purpose had been the residence of his old friend General Haviland, which Mr. Burke, in the year 1793, induced government to lease from the person to whom it had been sold by the devizees of the General, in order to fit it up for the reception of several of the unhappy French clergy who, houseless and penniless, were scattered through the country, subsisting on charity. From some unexpected difficulties which occurred, this humane design at the moment did not take effect. The house however continued in possession of the head of the barrack establishment, General de Lancey, in trust for his Majesty, by whom it was now given up, by order of the Lords of the Treasury, to the Duke of Portland, the Marquis of Buckingham, the Lord Chancellor, Mr. Windham, Mr. Burke, Dr. Walker King, and others, as trustees for the management of the school, and it was opened immediately afterwards. The Abbé Maraine presided over this establishment, and had for his coadjutor the learned and amiable Abbé Chevallier.

An antiquarian correspondent, who was connected with this institution as treasurer, after the death of the original founder, having kindly communicated to the author some memoranda con

cerning it, they cannot perhaps be better given than in his own words.

"Penn, in Buckinghamshire, a bold promontory, to which Mr. Burke frequently resorted, at one time as the friend of General Haviland, and latterly as the patron of the emigrant school there, is situated about three miles north-west of Beaconsfield. Many of the residents are distinguished for patriarchal longevity, not a few of them attaining a century of years. The family of Grove trace an uninterrupted descent from the conquest as proprietors of the same estate. The last possessor, Mr. Edmund Grove, died in June 1823, at the advanced age of ninety-four; and being well known in this part of the country as a fair representative of the ancient English yeoman, may be worth noticing. When young, he had been the play-fellow of the late Viscount Curzon, and of John Baker Holroyd, who died Earl of Sheffield, and was known to most of the surrounding nobility and gentry by the name of Yeoman Grove-a name now disused for the more assuming appellation of Esquire, but formerly applied to those who farmed their own estates. Yeoman Grove was likewise known to his late Majesty George III., who permitted him an unusual freedom. Whenever they met in the street at Windsor, which was not unfrequent on market-day, he would grasp the royal hand with fervour, and in a way peculiarly his own, inquire-How does your Majesty do?— How is the Queen?-How are all the children?' which commonly occasioned the Royal Personage a hearty good-humoured laugh.

"Tyler's Green House, the residence of General Haviland, was formerly the property and residence of the Bakers, ancestors of the Earl of Sheffield, of Sheffield Place, county of Sussex. is now no more; nought could reprieve the tottering mansion from its fall.' In 1822 it was sold by auction in lots, of course pulled down and carried away, so that scarcely a vestige now remains to mark the spot where senators were wont to converse, and wit, whim, and eloquence to flow in no ordinary current amid the social circle formed by the Burkes. Previous to the demolition, I had a correct drawing made of the front, which I have placed among my illustrations of the county of Bucks.

"To those who are acquainted with the country, the guides to the site of the mansion are two of the largest and most lofty firtrees in the kingdom. The General was accustomed to call them his two grenadiers; one was more lofty than the other, an unlucky monkey kept by Mrs. Haviland having ascended to the summit of the other, and cropped the leading branch. These trees may be distinctly seen from the terrace at Windsor-from Harrow-on-the-Hill-from St. Paul's Church-and from the rising ground near Reading: in the woody neighbourhood of Penn they occasionally serve as a guide to bewildered pedestrians. I saved them from the levelling axe in 1798, by my representation of their utility, and I am assured that the present noble proprietor,

Richard Earl Howe, will not suffer so grand a feature on his extensive domains in Buckinghamshire to be destroyed.

"However incredible it may appear, it is vouched for as a fact by persons of respectability in the neighbourhood, that the cannonading at the reduction of Valenciennes in 1793 was distinctly heard by the inhabitants of Penn. This no doubt will be laughed at by many as utterly beyond belief, but there are many authentic instances on record of the distance to which sound occasionally travels, depending no doubt on a peculiar state of the atmosphere at the time: it is understood, beyond question, that the cannonading on that occasion was heard at Dover. During the late war, the firing of cannon when ships were engaged at sea during the night has likewise been distinguished at Penn; the time has been frequently noted, and the fact shortly afterward ascertained from the public papers.

"In April, 1796,* the emigrant school was opened, and Mr. Burke, for the remainder of his life, watched over it with the solicitude, not merely of a friend, but of a father. His smiles might be said to have gladdened the hearts of the exiles; I have witnessed many interesting scenes there of that nature; they were doomed, alas, too soon to lose their kind protector. At the annual distribution of prizes, the senior scholar delivered a Latin oration in the presence of a large assembly of nobility and gentry in the great hall, in which Mr. Burke was always alluded to as their parent and friend.

"Mr. Burke assigned to these youths a blue uniform, wearing in their hats a white cockade inscribed 'Vive le Roi;' those who had lost their fathers had it placed on a bloody label, those who had lost uncles, on a black one. The Marquis of Buckingham made them a present of a small brass cannon, and a pair of colours, which were displayed on public days, and seemed a source of no little pride and gratification to those future defenders of loyalty.

"After the death of Mr. Burke I was appointed treasurer, and received from the Lords of the Treasury fifty pounds per month for the support of the establishment. Upon the restoration of legitimate monarchy in France in 1814, the money was remitted to me thence, until the dissolution of the institution on the 1st of August, 1820, when, on the departure of the superior and the pupils, the colours were presented to me as a token of remembrance, and I retain them with much satisfaction, from the interesting associations they recall to mind.

"Many of the youths educated in this college so humanely

This must be an error of my correspondent. The school at least existed previous to this time, but may have been removed at the time stated to the house in question, as in another communication he says he delivered up possession, on the part of government, to Mr. Burke, March 30, 1796.