It seems difficult to deny that the questions of the Regency had caused the germs of a sort of dissatisfaction and strain in the relations between Fox and Burke.  Their feelings to one another have been well compared to the mutual discontent between partners in unsuccessful play, where each suspects that it is the mistakes of the other that lost the game.  Whether Burke felt conscious of the failures in discretion and temper, which were the real or pretended excuse for neglect, we cannot tell.  There is one passage that reveals a chagrin of this kind.  A few days after the meeting between the Duke of Portland and Elliot, for the purpose of settling his place in the new ministry, Burke went down to Beaconsfield.  In writing (January 24, 1789) to invite Windham and Pelham to come to stay a night, with promise of a leg of mutton cooked by a dairymaid who was not a bad hand at a pinch, he goes on to say that his health has received some small benefit from his journey to the country.  “But this view to health, though far from unnecessary to me, was not the chief cause of my present retreat.  I began to find that I was grown rather too anxious; and had begun to discover to myself and to others a solicitude relative to the present state of affairs, which, though their strange condition might well warrant it in others, is certainly less suitable to my time of life, in which all emotions are less allowed; and to which, most certainly, all human concerns ought in reason to become more indifferent than to those who have work to do, and a good deal of day and of inexhausted strength to do it in."[1]

[Footnote 1:  Correspondence, iii. 89.]

The king’s unexpected restoration to health two or three weeks later brought to nought all the hope and ambition of the Whigs, and confirmed Pitt in power for the rest of Burke’s lifetime.  But an event now came to pass in the world’s history, which transformed Burke in an instant from a man decried, persecuted, proscribed, into an object of exultant adoration all over Europe.

CHAPTER VIII

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

We have now come to the second of the two momentous changes in the world’s affairs, in which Burke played an imposing and historic part.  His attitude in the first of them, the struggle for American independence, commands almost without alloy the admiration and reverence of posterity.  His attitude in the second of them, the great revolution in France, has raised controversies which can only be compared in heat and duration to the master controversies of theology.  If the history of society were written as learned men write the history of the Christian faith and its churches, Burke would figure in the same strong prominence, whether deplorable or glorious, as Arius and Athanasius, Augustine and Sabellius, Luther and Ignatius.  If we ask how it is that now, nearly a century after the event, men are still discussing Burke’s