It was in the early summer of 1792 that Miss Burney again met Burke at Mrs. Crewe’s villa at Hampstead.  He entered into an animated conversation on Lord Macartney and the Chinese expedition, reviving all the old enthusiasm of his companion by his allusions and anecdotes, his brilliant fancies and wide information.  When politics were introduced, he spoke with an eagerness and a vehemence that instantly banished the graces, though it redoubled the energies of his discourse.  “How I wish,” Miss Burney writes, “that you could meet this wonderful man when he is easy, happy, and with people he cordially likes!  But politics, even on his own side, must always be excluded; his irritability is so terrible on that theme, that it gives immediately to his face the expression of a man who is going to defend himself from murderers.”

Burke still remained without a following, but the ranks of his old allies gradually began to show signs of wavering.  His panic about the Jacobins within the gates slowly spread.  His old faith, about which he had once talked so much, in the ancient rustic, manly, home-bred sense of the English people, he dismissed as if it had been some idle dream that had come to him through the ivory gate.  His fine comparison of the nation to a majestic herd, browsing in peace amid the importunate chirrupings of a thousand crickets, became so little appropriate, that he was now beside himself with apprehension that the crickets were about to rend the oxen in pieces.  Even then, the herd stood tranquilly in their pastures, only occasionally turning a dull eye, now to France, and now to Burke.  In the autumn of 1791 Burke dined with Pitt and Lord Grenville, and he found them resolute for an honest neutrality in the affairs of France, and “quite out of all apprehensions of any effect from the French Revolution in this kingdom, either at present or any time to come.”  Francis and Sheridan, it is true, spoke as if they almost wished for a domestic convulsion; and cool observers who saw him daily, even accused Sheridan of wishing to stir up the lower ranks of the people by the hope of plundering their betters.  But men who afterwards became alarmists, are found, so late as the spring of 1792, declaring in their most confidential correspondence that the party of confusion made no way with the country, and produced no effect.  Horne Tooke was its most conspicuous chief, and nobody pretended to fear the subversion of the realm by Horne Tooke.  Yet Burke, in letters where he admits that the democratic party is entirely discountenanced, and that the Jacobin faction in England is under a heavy cloud, was so possessed by the spectre of panic, as to declare that the Duke of Brunswick was as much fighting the battle of the crown of England, as the Duke of Cumberland fought that battle at Culloden.