If he was warmly attached to his political friends, Burke, at least before the Revolution, was usually on fair terms in private life with his political opponents.  There were few men whose policy he disliked more than he disliked the policy of George Grenville.  And we have seen that he criticised Grenville in a pamphlet which did not spare him.  Yet Grenville and he did not refuse one another’s hospitality, and were on the best terms to the very end.  Wilberforce, again, was one of the staunchest friends of Pitt, and fought one of the greatest electioneering battles on Pitt’s side in the struggle of 1784; but it made no difference in Burke’s relations with him.  In 1787 a coldness arose between them.  Burke had delivered a strong invective against the French Treaty.  Wilberforce said, “We can make allowance for the honourable gentleman, because we remember him in better days.”  The retort greatly nettled Burke, but the feeling soon passed away, and they both found a special satisfaction in the dinner to which Wilberforce invited Burke every session.  “He was a great man,” says Wilberforce.  “I could never understand how at one time he grew to be so entirely neglected.”

Outside of both political and literary circles, among Burke’s correspondents was that wise and honest traveller whose name is as inseparably bound up with the preparation of the French Revolution, as Burke’s is bound up with its sanguinary climax and fulfilment.  Arthur Young, by his Farmer’s Letters, and Farmer’s Calendar, and his account of his travels in the southern counties of England and elsewhere—­the story of the more famous travels in France was not published until 1792—­had won a reputation as the best informed agriculturist of his day.  Within a year of his settlement at Beaconsfield, we find Burke writing to consult Young on the mysteries of his new occupation.  The reader may smile as he recognises the ardour, the earnestness, the fervid gravity of the political speeches, in letters which discuss the merits of carrots in fattening porkers, and the precise degree to which they should be boiled.  Burke throws himself just as eagerly into white peas and Indian corn, into cabbages that grow into head and cabbages that shoot into leaves, into experiments with pumpkin seed and wild parsnip, as if they had been details of the Stamp Act, or justice to Ireland.  When he complains that it is scarcely possible for him, with his numerous avocations, to get his servants to enter fully into his views as to the right treatment of his crops, we can easily understand that his farming did not help him to make money.  It is impossible that he should have had time or attention to spare for the effectual direction of even a small farm.