state of mind showed itself in small things as well as great.  Going with Windham to Carlton House, Burke attacked him in the coach for a difference of opinion about the affairs of a friend, and behaved with such unreasonable passion and such furious rudeness of manner, that his magnanimous admirer had some difficulty in obliterating the impression.  The public were less tolerant.  Windham has told us that at this time Burke was a man decried, persecuted, and proscribed, not being much valued even by his own party, and by half the nation considered as little better than an ingenious madman.[1] This is evidence beyond impeachment, for Windham loved and honoured Burke with the affection and reverence of a son; and he puts the popular sentiment on record with grief and amazement.  There is other testimony to the same effect.  The late Lord Lansdowne, who must have heard the subject abundantly discussed by those who were most concerned in it, was once asked by a very eminent man of our own time, why the Whigs kept Burke out of their cabinets.  “Burke!” he cried; “he was so violent, so overbearing, so arrogant, so intractable, that to have got on with him in a cabinet would have been utterly and absolutely impossible.”

[Footnote 1:  Windham’s Diary, p. 213.]

On the whole, it seems to be tolerably clear that the difficulties in the way of Burke’s promotion to high office were his notoriously straitened circumstances; his ungoverned excesses of party zeal and political passion; finally, what Sir Gilbert Elliot calls the unjust prejudice and clamour against him and his family, and what Burke himself once called the hunt of obloquy that pursued him all his life.  The first two of these causes can scarcely have operated in the arrangements that were made in the Rockingham and Coalition ministries.  But the third, we may be sure, was incessantly at work.  It would have needed social courage alike in 1782, 1783, and 1788 to give cabinet rank to a man round whose name there floated so many disparaging associations.  Social courage is exactly the virtue in which the constructors of a government will always think themselves least able to indulge.  Burke, we have to remember, did not stand alone before the world.  Elliot describes a dinner-party at Lord Fitzwilliam’s, at which four of these half-discredited Irishmen were present.  “Burke has now got such a train after him as would sink anybody but himself:—­his son, who is quite nauseated by all mankind; his brother, who is liked better than his son, but is rather offensive with animal spirits and with brogue; and his cousin, Will Burke, who is just returned unexpectedly from India, as much ruined as when he went many years ago, and who is a fresh charge on any prospects of power that Burke may ever have.”  It was this train, and the ideas of adventurership that clung to them, the inextinguishable stories about papistry and Saint Omer’s, the tenacious calumny about the letters of Junius, the notorious circumstances of embarrassment and neediness—­it was all these things which combined with Burke’s own defects of temper and discretion, to give the Whig grandees as decent a reason as they could have desired for keeping all the great posts of state in their own hands.