they were unable to pay their differences; and that in the year when Edmund Burke bought Gregories, the other three were utterly ruined, two of them beyond retrieval.  Again it is clear that, after this, Richard Burke was engaged in land-jobbing in the West Indies; that his claims were disputed by the Government as questionable and dishonest; and that he lost his case.  Edmund Burke was said, in the gossip of the day, to be deeply interested in land at Saint Vincent’s.  But there is no evidence.  What cannot be denied is that an unpleasant taint of speculation and financial adventurership hung at one time about the whole connection, and that the adventures invariably came to an unlucky end.

Whether Edmund Burke and William Burke were relations or not, and if so, in what degree they were relations, neither of them ever knew; they believed that their fathers sometimes called one another cousins, and that was all that they had to say on the subject.  But they were as intimate as brothers, and when William Burke went to mend his broken fortunes in India, Edmund Burke commended him to Philip Francis—­then fighting his deadly duel of five years with Warren Hastings at Calcutta—­as one whom he had tenderly loved, highly valued, and continually lived with in an union not to be expressed, quite since their boyish years.  “Looking back to the course of my life,” he wrote in 1771, “I remember no one considerable benefit in the whole of it which I did not, mediately or immediately, derive from William Burke.”  There is nothing intrinsically incredible, therefore, considering this intimacy and the community of purse and home which subsisted among the three Burkes, in the theory that when Edmund Burke bought his property in Buckinghamshire, he looked for help from the speculations of Richard and William.  However this may have been, from them no help came.  Many years afterwards (1783) Lord Verney filed a bill in Chancery claiming from Edmund Burke a sum of L6000, which he alleged that he had lent at the instigation of William Burke, to assist in completing the purchase of Beaconsfield.  Burke’s sworn answer denied all knowledge of the transaction, and the plaintiff did not get the relief for which he had prayed.

In a letter to Shackleton (May 1, 1768), Burke gave the following account of what he had done:—­“I have made a push,” he says, “with all I could collect of my own, and the aid of my friends, to cast a little root in this country.  I have purchased a house, with an estate of about six hundred acres of land, in Buckinghamshire, twenty-four miles from London.  It is a place exceedingly pleasant; and I propose, God willing, to become a farmer in good earnest.  You, who are classical, will not be displeased to know that it was formerly the seat of Waller, the poet, whose house, or part of it, makes at present the farmhouse within an hundred yards of me.”  The details of the actual purchase of Beaconsfield have been made tolerably clear.