The price was twenty-two thousand pounds, more or less.  Fourteen thousand were left on mortgage, which remained outstanding until the sale of the property by Mrs. Burke in 1812.  Garret Burke, the elder brother, had shortly before the purchase made Edmund his residuary legatee, and it is guessed that of this bequest two thousand pounds were in cash.  The balance of six thousand was advanced by Lord Rockingham on Burke’s bond.

The purchase after all was the smallest part of the matter, and it still remains a puzzle not only how Burke was able to maintain so handsome an establishment, but how he could ever suppose it likely that he would be able to maintain it.  He counted, no doubt, on making some sort of income by farming.  The Irish estate, which he had inherited from his brother, brought in five hundred a year (Arthur Young’s Ireland, ii. 193).  For a short time he received a salary of seven hundred pounds a year as agent for New York.  We may perhaps take for granted that he made as much more out of his acres.  He received something from Dodsley for his work on the Annual Register down to 1788.  But when all these resources have been counted up, we cannot but see the gulf of a great yearly deficit.  The unhappy truth is that from the middle of 1769, when we find him applying to Garrick for the loan of a thousand pounds, down to 1794, when the king gave him a pension, Burke was never free from the harassing strain of debts and want of money.  It has been stated with good show of authority, that his obligations to Lord Rockingham amounted to not less than thirty thousand pounds.  When that nobleman died (1782), with a generosity which is not the less honourable to him for having been so richly earned by the faithful friend who was the object of it, he left instructions to his executors that all Burke’s bonds should be destroyed.

We may indeed wish from the bottom of our hearts that all this had been otherwise.  But those who press it as a reproach against Burke’s memory, may be justly reminded that when Pitt died, after drawing the pay of a minister for twenty years, he left debts to the amount of forty thousand pounds.  Burke, as I have said elsewhere, had none of the vices of profusion, but he had that quality which Aristotle places high among the virtues—­the noble mean of Magnificence, standing midway between the two extremes of vulgar ostentation and narrow pettiness.  At least, every creditor was paid in good time, and nobody suffered but himself.  Those who think these disagreeable matters of supreme importance, and allow such things to stand between them and Brake’s greatness, are like the people—­slightly to alter a figure from a philosopher of old—­who, when they went to Olympia, could only perceive that they were scorched by the sun, and pressed by the crowd, and deprived of comfortable means of bathing, and wetted by the rain, and that life was full of disagreeable and troublesome things, and so they almost forgot the great colossus of ivory and gold, Phidias’s statue of Zeus, which they had come to see, and which stood in all its glory and power before their perturbed and foolish vision.