Few political events in English history are read with more interest than the separation of Burke and Fox.  They had been friends and allies; but the French Revolution, which separated so many persons in France, reached across the Channel to separate them.  They differed so radically with regard to this portentous, undeveloped movement, that their relations, both political and personal, were rudely severed.  Burke, in the House of Commons, openly announced this result.  He was most earnestly inveighing against France, when he said, “It may be indiscreet in me at my time of life to provoke enemies, and give occasion to friends to desert me.”  Fox whispered, “There is no loss of friends.”  Burke for a moment paused, and then exclaimed, “Yes, there is a loss of friends; I know the price of my conduct.  I have done my duty at the expense of my friend.  Our friendship is at an end.”  As he finished, Burke walked across the floor of the House, and squeezed himself between Pitt and Dundas on the Treasury Bench.  Fox rose to reply, while tears streamed down his face.  In the course of his remarks he intimated that Burke had heaped upon him the most ignominious terms.  Burke at once said that he did not recollect having used any; when Fox replied, “My right honorable friend does not recollect the epithets.  They are out of his mind.  Then they are completely and forever out of mine.  I cannot cherish a recollection so painful; and from this moment they are obliterated and forgotten.”

But the difference was too intense.  A few days later it broke forth again.  “I complain,” said Burke, “of being obliged to stand upon my defence by the right honorable gentleman, who, when a young man, was brought to me and evinced the most promising talents, which I used my best endeavors to cultivate; and this man, who has arrived at the maturity of being the most brilliant and powerful debater that ever existed, has described me as having deserted and abandoned every one of my principles!” Fox replied, but alluded to Burke no longer as “friend”, but as “the right honorable gentleman”, and said, in a taunting style, that “all he had to do was to repent, and his friends would be ready to receive him back and love him as they had previously done”.  Burke was indignant.  He said,—­“I have gone through my youth without encountering any party disgrace, and though in my age I have been so unfortunate as to meet it, I do not solicit the right honorable gentleman’s friendship, nor that of any other man, either on one side of the House or the other.” [A] This most important and historic friendship was at an end.

[Footnote A:_Parliamentary History_ Vol.  XXIX. p. 426.]

The larger part of the Whigs at that time sided with Fox.  But Burke turned away from Parliament and politicians in one of the most masterly productions of his pen, entitled, “An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs.”  One of the autograph-letters in the collection before us, addressed to the amanuensis, Swift, relates to the last corrections of this tract, and contains the title, arranged for the printer.  It is the letter of which a fac-simile is given by Mr. Macknight.