being taken into custody by the Serjeant-at-arms, for rushing down from the gallery into the Irish House of Commons, and attempting to make a speech in defence of a petition which he had drawn up, and which was being attacked by a member in his place.  Richard Burke went home, it is said, with two thousand guineas in his pocket, which the Catholics had cheerfully paid as the price of getting rid of him.  He returned shortly after, but only helped to plunge the business into further confusion, and finally left the scene covered with odium and discredit.  His father’s Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe (1792) remains an admirable monument of wise statesmanship, a singular interlude of calm and solid reasoning in the midst of a fiery whirlwind of intense passion.  Burke perhaps felt that the state of Ireland was passing away from the sphere of calm and solid reason, when he knew that Dumouriez’s victory over the allies at Valmy, which filled Beaconsfield with such gloom and dismay, was celebrated at Dublin by an illumination.

Burke, who was now in his sixty-fourth year, had for some time announced his intention of leaving the House of Commons as soon as he had brought to an end the prosecution of Hastings.  In 1794 the trial came to a close; the thanks of the House were formally voted to the managers of the impeachment; and when the scene was over Burke applied for the Chiltern Hundreds.  Lord Fitzwilliam nominated Richard Burke for the seat which his father had thus vacated at Malton.  Pitt was then making arrangements for the accession of the Portland Whigs to his Government, and it was natural, in connection with these arrangements, to confer some favour on the man who had done more than anybody else to promote the new alliance.  It was proposed to make Burke a peer under the style of Lord Beaconsfield,—­a title in a later age whimsically borrowed for himself by a man of genius with a delight in irony.  To the title it was proposed to attach a yearly income for two or more lives.  But the bolt of destiny was at this instant launched.  Richard Burke, the adored centre of all his father’s hopes and affections, was seized with illness and died (August 1794).  We cannot look without tragic emotion on the pathos of the scene, which left the remnant of the old man’s days desolate and void.  A Roman poet has described in touching words the woe of the aged Nestor, as he beheld the funeral pile of his son, too untimely slain—­

                               Oro parumper
  Attendas quantum de legibus ipse queratur
  Fatorum et nimio de stamine, quum videt acris
  Antilochi barbam ardentem:  quum quaerit ab omni
  Quisquis adest socius, cur haec in tempora duret,
  Quod facinus dignum tam longo admiserit aevo.

Burke’s grief finds a nobler expression.  “The storm has gone over me, and I lie like one of those old oaks which the late hurricane has scattered about me.  I am stripped of all my honours; I am torn up by the roots and lie prostrate on the earth....  I am alone.  I have none to meet my enemies in the gate....  I live in an inverted order.  They who ought to have succeeded me have gone before me.  They who should have been to me as posterity are in the place of ancestors.”