knowledge, and dexterity in debate, took heart as they had never done under Lord North.  They now made deliberate attempts to silence the veteran by unmannerly and brutal interruptions, of which a mob of lower class might have been ashamed.  Then suddenly came a moment of such excitement as has not often been seen in the annals of party.  It became known one day in the autumn of 1788 that the king had gone out of his mind.

The news naturally caused the liveliest agitation among the Whigs.  When the severity of the attack forced the ministry to make preparations for a Regency, the friends of the Prince of Wales assumed that they would speedily return to power, and hastened to form their plans accordingly.  Fox was travelling in Italy with Mrs. Armstead, and he had been two months away without hearing a word from England.  The Duke of Portland sent a messenger in search of him, and after a journey of ten days the messenger found him at Bologna.  Fox instantly set off in all haste for London, which he reached in nine days.  The three months that followed were a time of unsurpassed activity and bitterness, and Burke was at least as active and as bitter as the rest of them.  He was the writer of the Prince of Wales’s letter to Pitt, sometimes set down to Sheridan, and sometimes to Gilbert Elliot.  It makes us feel how naturally the style of ideal kingship, its dignity, calm, and high self-consciousness all came to Burke.  Although we read of his thus drawing up manifestoes and protests, and deciding minor questions for Fox, which Fox was too irresolute to decide for himself, yet we have it on Burke’s own authority that some time elapsed after the return to England before he even saw Fox; that he was not consulted as to the course to be pursued in the grave and difficult questions connected with the Regency; and that he knew as little of the inside of Carlton House, where the Prince of Wales lived, as of Buckingham House, where the king lived.  “I mean to continue here,” he says to Charles Fox, “until you call upon me; and I find myself perfectly easy, from the implicit confidence that I have in you and the Duke, and the certainty that I am in that you two will do the best for the general advantage of the cause.  In that state of mind I feel no desire whatsoever of interfering.”  Yet the letter itself, and others which follow, testify to the vehemence of Burke’s interest in the matter, and to the persistency with which he would have had them follow his judgment, if they would have listened.  It is as clear that they did not listen.

Apart from the fierce struggle against Pitt’s Regency Bill, Burke’s friends were intently occupied with the reconstruction of the Portland cabinet, which the king had so unexpectedly dismissed five years before.  This was a sphere in which Burke’s gifts were neither required nor sought.  We are rather in distress, Sir Gilbert Elliot writes, for a proper man for the office of Chancellor of the Exchequer.