unwonted figures with swords, lace, and hair-powder.  Sheridan was made an under-secretary of state, and to the younger Pitt was offered his choice of various minor posts, which he haughtily refused.  Burke, to whom on their own admission the party owed everything, was appointed Paymaster of the Forces, with a salary of four thousand pounds a year.  His brother, Richard Burke, was made Secretary of the Treasury.  His son Richard was named to be his father’s deputy at the Pay-Office, with a salary of five hundred pounds.

This singular exclusion from cabinet office of the most powerful genius of the party has naturally given rise to abundant criticism ever since.  It will be convenient to say what there is to be said on this subject, in connection with the events of 1788 (below, p. 200), because there happens to exist some useful information about the ministerial crisis of that year, which sheds a clearer light upon the arrangements of six years before.  Meanwhile it is enough to say that Burke himself had most reasonably looked to some higher post.  There is the distinct note of the humility of mortified pride in a letter written in reply to some one who had applied to him for a place.  “You have been misinformed,” he says; “I make no part of the ministerial arrangement.  Something in the official line may possibly be thought fit for my measure.”  Burke knew that his position in the country entitled him to something above the official line.  In a later year, when he felt himself called upon to defend his pension, he described what his position was in the momentous crisis from 1780 to 1782, and Burke’s habitual veraciousness forbids us to treat the description as in any way exaggerated.  “By what accident it matters not,” he says, “nor upon what desert, but just then, and in the midst of that hunt of obloquy which has ever pursued me with a full cry through life, I had obtained a very full degree of public confidence....  Nothing to prevent disorder was omitted; when it appeared, nothing to subdue it was left uncounselled nor unexecuted, as far as I could prevail.  At the time I speak of, and having a momentary lead, so aided and so encouraged, and as a feeble instrument in a mighty hand—­I do not say I saved my country—­I am sure I did my country important service.  There were few indeed that did not at that time acknowledge it—­and that time was thirteen years ago.  It was but one view, that no man in the kingdom better deserved an honourable provision should be made for him."[1]

[Footnote 1:  Letter to a Noble Lord.]

We have seen that Burke had fixed the paymaster’s salary at four thousand pounds, and had destroyed the extravagant perquisites.  The other economical reforms which were actually effected fell short by a long way of those which Burke had so industriously devised and so forcibly recommended.  In 1782, while Burke declined to spare his own office, the chief of the cabinet conferred upon Barre a pension