of over three thousand a year; above ten times the amount, as has been said, which, in Lord Rockingham’s own judgment, as expressed in the new Bill, ought henceforth to be granted to any one person whatever.  This shortcoming, however, does not detract from Burke’s merit.  He was not responsible for it.  The eloquence, ingenuity, diligence, above all, the sagacity and the justice of this great effort of 1780, are none the less worthy of our admiration and regard because, in 1782, his chiefs, partly perhaps out of a new-born deference for the feelings of their royal master, showed that the possession of office had sensibly cooled the ardent aspirations proper to Opposition.

The events of the twenty months between the resignation of Lord North (1782) and the accession of Pitt to the office of Prime Minister (December 1783) mark an important crisis in political history, and they mark an important crisis in Burke’s career and hopes.  Lord Rockingham had just been three months in office, when he died (July 1782).  This dissolved the bond that held the two sections of the ministry together, and let loose a flood of rival ambitions and sharp animosities.  Lord Shelburne believed himself to have an irresistible claim to the chief post in the administration; among other reasons, because he might have had it before Lord Rockingham three months earlier, if he had so chosen.  The king supported him, not from any partiality to his person, but because he dreaded and hated Charles Fox.  The character of Shelburne is one of the perplexities of the time.  His views on peace and free trade make him one of the precursors of the Manchester School.  No minister was so well informed as to the threads of policy in foreign countries.  He was the intimate or the patron of men who now stand out as among the first lights of that time—­of Morellet, of Priestley, of Bentham.  Yet a few months of power seem to have disclosed faults of character, which left him without a single political friend, and blighted him with irreparable discredit.  Fox, who was now the head of the Rockingham section of the Whigs, had, before the death of the late premier, been on the point of refusing to serve any longer with Lord Shelburne, and he now very promptly refused to serve under him.  When Parliament met after Rockingham’s death, gossips noticed that Fox and Burke continued, long after the Speaker had taken the chair, to walk backwards and forwards in the Court of Bequests, engaged in earnest conversation.  According to one story, Burke was very reluctant to abandon an office whose emoluments were as convenient to him as to his spendthrift colleague.  According to another and more probable legend, it was Burke who hurried the rupture, and stimulated Fox’s jealousy of Shelburne.  The Duke of Richmond disapproved of the secession, and remained in the Government.  Sheridan also disapproved, but he sacrificed his personal conviction to loyalty to Fox.