taste for good company.  Horace Walpole describes a dinner at his house in the summer of 1761.  “There were Garrick,” he says, “and a young Mr. Burke, who wrote a book in the style of Lord Bolingbroke, that is much admired.  He is a sensible man, but has not worn off his authorism yet, and thinks there is nothing so charming as writers, and to be one.  He will know better one of these days.”  The prophecy came true in time, but it was Burke’s passion for authorism that eventually led to a rupture with his first patron.  Hamilton was a man of ability, but selfish and unreasonable.  Dr. Leland afterwards described him compendiously as a sullen, vain, proud, selfish, canker-hearted, envious reptile.

In 1761 Hamilton went to Ireland as secretary to Lord Halifax, and Burke accompanied him in some indefinite capacity.  “The absenteeism of her men of genius,” an eminent historian has said, “was a worse wrong to Ireland than the absenteeism of her landlords.  If Edmund Burke had remained in the country where Providence had placed him, he might have changed the current of its history.” [1] It is at least to be said that Burke was never so absorbed in other affairs as to forget the peculiar interests of his native land.  We have his own word, and his career does not belie it, that in the elation with which he was filled on being elected a member of Parliament, what was first and uppermost in his thoughts was the hope of being somewhat useful to the place of his birth and education; and to the last he had in it “a dearness of instinct more than he could justify to reason.”  In fact the affairs of Ireland had a most important part in Burke’s life at one or two critical moments, and this is as convenient a place as we are likely to find for describing in a few words what were the issues.  The brief space can hardly be grudged in an account of a great political writer, for Ireland had furnished the chief ordeal, test, and standard of English statesmen.

[Footnote 1:  Fronde’s Ireland, ii. 214.]

Ireland in the middle of the eighteenth century was to England just what the American colonies would have been, if they had contained, besides the European settlers, more than twice their number of unenslaved negroes.  After the suppression of the great rebellion of Tyrconnel by William of Orange, nearly the whole of the land was confiscated, the peasants were made beggars and outlaws, the Penal Laws against the Catholics were enacted and enforced, and the grand reign of Protestant Ascendancy began in all its vileness and completeness.  The Protestants and landlords were supreme; the peasants and the Catholics were prostrate in despair.  The Revolution brought about in Ireland just the reverse of what it effected in England.  Here it delivered the body of the nation from the attempted supremacy of a small sect.  There it made a small sect supreme over the body of the nation.  “It was, to say the truth,” Burke wrote, “not a revolution but a conquest,” and the policy of conquest was treated as the just and normal system of government.  The last conquest of England was in the eleventh century.  The last conquest of Ireland was at the very end of the seventeenth.