of severance.  “It is indiscreet,” he said, “at any period, but especially at my time of life, to provoke enemies, or give my friends occasion to desert me.  Yet if my firm and steady adherence to the British Constitution place me in such a dilemma, I am ready to risk it, and with, my last words to exclaim, ‘Fly from the French Constitution.’” Fox at this point eagerly called to him that there was no loss of friends.  “Yes, yes,” cried Burke, “there is a loss of friends.  I know the price of my conduct.  I have done my duty at the price of my friend.  Our friendship is at an end.”

The members who sat on the same side were aghast at proceedings which went beyond their worst apprehensions.  Even the ministerialists were shocked.  Pitt agreed much more with Fox than with Burke, but he would have been more than human if he had not watched with complacency his two most formidable adversaries turning their swords against one another.  Wilberforce, who was more disinterested, lamented the spectacle as shameful.  In the galleries there was hardly a dry eye.  Fox, as might have been expected from his warm and generous nature, was deeply moved, and is described as weeping even to sobbing.  He repeated his former acknowledgment of his debt to Burke, and he repeated his former expression of faith in the blessings which the abolition of royal despotism would bring to France.  With unabated vehemence Burke again rose to denounce the French Constitution—­“a building composed of untempered mortar—­the work of Goths and Vandals, where everything was disjointed and inverted.”  After a short rejoinder from Fox the scene came to a close, and the once friendly intercourse between the two heroes was at an end.  When they met in the Managers’ box in Westminster Hall on the business of Hastings’s trial, they met with the formalities of strangers.  There is a story that when Burke left the House on the night of the quarrel it was raining, and Mr. Curwen, a member of the Opposition, took him home in his carriage.  Burke at once began to declaim against the French.  Curwen dropped some remark on the other side.  “What!” Burke cried out, grasping the check-string, “are you one of these people!  Set me down!” It needed all Curwen’s force to keep him where he was; and when they reached his house Burke stepped out without saying a single word.

We may agree that all this did not indicate the perfect sobriety and self-control proper to a statesman, in what was a serious crisis both to his party and to Europe.  It was about this time that Burke said to Addington, who was then Speaker of the House of Commons, that he was not well.  “I eat too much, Speaker,” he said, “I drink too much, and I sleep too little.”  It is even said that he felt the final breach with Fox as a relief from unendurable suspense; and he quoted the lines about Aeneas, after he had finally resolved to quit Dido and the Carthaginian shore, at last being able to snatch slumber in his ship’s tall stern.