Burke only lived three years after this desolating blow.  The arrangements for a peerage, as a matter of course, came to an end.  But Pitt was well aware of the serious embarrassments by which Burke was so pressed that he saw actual beggary very close at hand.  The king, too,—­who had once, by the way, granted a pension to Burke’s detested Rousseau, though Rousseau was too proud to draw it—­seems to have been honourably interested in making a provision for Burke.  What Pitt offered was an immediate grant of L1200 a year from the Civil List for Mrs. Burke’s life, to be followed by a proposition to Parliament in a message from the king, to confer an annuity of greater value upon a statesman who had served the country to his own loss for thirty years.  As a matter of fact, the grant, L2500 a year in amount, much to Burke’s chagrin, was never brought before Parliament, but was conferred directly by the Crown, as a charge on the four and a half per cent fund for two or more lives.  It seems as if Pitt were afraid of challenging the opinion of Parliament; and the storm which the pension raised out of doors, was a measure of the trouble which the defence of it would have inflicted on the Government inside the House of Commons.  According to the rumour of the time, Burke sold two of his pensions upon lives for L27,000, and there was left the third pension of L1200.  By and by, when the resentment of the Opposition was roused to the highest pitch by the infamous Treason and Sedition Bills of 1795, the Duke of Bedford and Lord Lauderdale, seeking to accumulate every possible complaint against the Government, assailed the grant to Burke, as made without the consent of Parliament, and as a violent contradiction to the whole policy of the plan for economic reform.  The attack, if not unjustifiable in itself, came from an unlucky quarter.  A chief of the house of Bedford was the most unfit person in the world to protest against grants by favour of the Crown, Burke was too practised a rhetorician not to see the opening, and his Letter to a Noble Lord is the most splendid repartee in the English language.

It is not surprising that Burke’s defence should have provoked rejoinder.  A cloud of pamphlets followed the Letter to a Noble Lord—­some in doggerel verse, others in a magniloquent prose imitated from his own, others mere poisonous scurrility.  The nearest approach to a just stroke that I can find, after turning over a pile of this trash, is an expression of wonder that he, who was inconsolable for the loss of a beloved son, should not have reflected how many tender parents had been made childless in the profusion of blood, of which he himself had been the most relentless champion.  Our disgust at the pages of insult which were here levelled at a great man, is perhaps moderated by the thought that Burke himself, who of all people ought to have known better, had held up to public scorn and obloquy men of such virtue, attainments, and real service to mankind as Richard Price and Joseph Priestley.