Yet if the farm brought scantier profit than it ought to have brought, it was probably no weak solace in the background of a life of harassing interests and perpetual disappointments.  Burke was happier at Beaconsfield than anywhere else, and he was happiest there when his house was full of guests.  Nothing pleased him better than to drive a visitor over to Windsor, where he would expatiate with enthusiasm “on the proud Keep, rising in the majesty of proportion, and girt with the double belt of its kindred and coeval towers, overseeing and guarding the subjected land.”  He delighted to point out the house at Uxbridge where Charles I. had carried on the negotiations with the Parliamentary Commissioners; the beautiful grounds of Bulstrode, where Judge Jefferies had once lived; and the churchyard of Beaconsfield, where lay the remains of Edmund Waller, the poet.  He was fond of talking of great statesmen—­of Walpole, of Pulteney, and of Chatham.  Some one had said that Chatham knew nothing whatever except Spenser’s Faery Queen.  “No matter how that was said,” Burke replied to one of his visitors, “whoever relishes and reads Spenser as he ought to be read, will have a strong hold of the English language.”  The delight of the host must have been at least equalled by the delight of the guest in conversation which was thus ever taking new turns, branching into topical surprises, and at all turns and on every topic was luminous, high, edifying, full.

No guest was more welcome than the friend of his boyhood, and Richard Shackleton has told how the friendship, cordiality, and openness with which Burke embraced him was even more than might be expected from long love.  The simple Quaker was confused by the sight of what seemed to him so sumptuous and worldly a life, and he went to rest uneasily, doubting whether God’s blessing could go with it.  But when he awoke on the morrow of his first visit, he told his wife, in the language of his sect, how glad he was “to find no condemnation; but on the contrary, ability to put up fervent petitions with much tenderness on behalf of this great luminary.”  It is at his country home that we like best to think of Burke.  It is still a touching picture to the historic imagination to follow him from the heat and violence of the House, where tipsy squires derided the greatest genius of his time, down to the calm shades of Beaconsfield, where he would with his own hands give food to a starving beggar, or medicine to a peasant sick of the ague; where he would talk of the weather, the turnips, and the hay with the team-men and the farm-bailiff; and where, in the evening stillness, he would pace the walk under the trees, and reflect on the state of Europe and the distractions of his country.

CHAPTER VII

THE NEW MINISTRY—­WARREN HASTINGS—­BURKE’S PUBLIC POSITION