of children, rolling about with them on the carpet, and pouring out in his gambols the sublimest images, mixed with the most wretched puns.  He said of Fox, with a deep sigh, “He is made to be loved.”  There was the irresistible outbreak against “that putrid carcase, that mother of all evil—­the French Revolution.”  It reminded him of the accursed things that crawled in and out of the mouth of the vile hag in Spenser’s Cave of Error; and he repeated the nauseous stanza.  Mackintosh was to be the faithful knight of the romance, the brightness of whose sword was to flash destruction on the filthy progeny.

It was on the 9th of July 1797 that, in the sixty-eighth year of his age, preserving his faculties to the last moment, he expired.  With magnanimous tenderness Fox proposed that he should be buried among the great dead in Westminster Abbey; but Burke had left strict injunctions that his funeral should be private, and he was laid in the little church at Beaconsfield.  It was a terrible moment in the history of England and of Europe.  An open mutiny had just been quelled in the fleet.  There had been signs of disaffection in the army.  In Ireland the spirit of revolt was smouldering, and in a few months broke out in the fierce flames of a great rebellion.  And it was the year of the political crime of Campo Formio, that sinister pacification in which violence and fraud once more asserted their unveiled ascendancy in Europe.  These sombre shadows were falling over the western world when a life went out which, notwithstanding some grave aberrations, had made great spaces in human destiny very luminous.

CHAPTER X

BURKE’S LITERARY CHARACTER

A story is told that in the time when Burke was still at peace with the Dissenters, he visited Priestley, and after seeing his library and his laboratory, and hearing how his host’s hours were given to experiment and meditation, he exclaimed that such a life must make him the happiest and most to be envied of men.  It must sometimes have occurred to Burke to wonder whether he had made the right choice when he locked away the fragments of his History, and plunged into the torment of party and Parliament.  But his interests and aptitudes were too strong and overmastering for him to have been right in doing otherwise.  Contact with affairs was an indispensable condition for the full use of his great faculties, in spite of their being less faculties of affairs than of speculation.  Public life was the actual field in which to test, and work out, and use with good effect the moral ideas which were Burke’s most sincere and genuine interests.  And he was able to bring these moral ideas into such effective use because he was so entirely unfettered by the narrowing spirit of formula.  No man, for instance, who thought in formulae would have written the curious passage that I have already referred to, in which he eulogises gin, because “under the