philosophical criticism, extorting the highest praises from Dugald
Stewart and the Abbé Raynal, and attracting so much attention that it
speedily became a text-book in the universities. Fortunately he was able
to pursue literature, with the aid of a small patrimony (about £300 a
year), without being doomed to the hard privations of Johnson, or the
humiliating shifts of Goldsmith. He lived independently of patronage
from the great,--the bitterest trial of the literati of the eighteenth
century, which drove Cowper mad, and sent Rousseau to attics and
solitudes,--so that, in his humble but pleasant home, with his young
wife, with whom he lived amicably, he could see his friends, the great
men of the age, and bestow an unostentatious charity, and maintain his
literary rank and social respectability.

I have sometimes wondered why Burke did not pursue this quiet and
beautiful life,--free from the turmoils of public contest, with leisure,
and friends, and Nature, and truth,--and prepare treatises which would
have been immortal, for he was equal to anything he attempted. But such
was not to be. He was needed in the House of Commons, then composed
chiefly of fox-hunting squires and younger sons of nobles (a body as
ignorant as it was aristocratic),--the representatives not of the people
but of the landed proprietors, intent on aggrandizing their families at
the expense of the nation,--and of fortunate merchants, manufacturers,
and capitalists, in love with monopolies. Such an assembly needed at
that day a schoolmaster, a teacher in the principles of political
economy and political wisdom; a leader in reforming disgraceful abuses;
a lecturer on public duties and public wrongs; a patriot who had other
views than spoils and place; a man who saw the right, and was determined
to uphold it whatever the number or power of his opponents. So Edmund
Burke was sent among them,--ambitious doubtless, stern, intellectually
proud, incorruptible, independent, not disdainful of honors and