than brass in the Reflections on the French Revolution, and
the Letters on a Regicide Peace. He worshipped the British
Constitution with the unquestioning fervour of a devotee, and he had
been attacked by the new Whigs in Parliament as the recipient of a
pension from the king. The old Whigs, his Whigs, had coalesced with
Pitt, and the chief fault he found with the Government was that it
did not carry on the French war with sufficient vigour. That Burke
should have retained his calmness of mind in writing of Ireland when he
lost it in writing of all other subjects is a curious circumstance, But it
is a circumstance which entitles him to peculiar attention from the
Irish historian. Burke was no oracle of Irish revolutionists. Their
hero was his critic, Tom Paine. Yet Froude says that when Burke
"took up the Irish cause at last in earnest, it was with a brain
which the French Revolution had deranged, and his interference
became infinitely mischievous."* As a matter of fact, his
interference after 1789 had no result at all. So far as the French
Revolution modified his ideas, it made them more Conservative than
ever, and his object in preaching the conciliation of Catholics was
to deter them from Revolutionary methods.

--
* English in Ireland, ii. 214, 215.
--

But Burke, like Grattan, was an Irishman, and therefore not to be
trusted. If he had been an Englishman, or if he had gloried in the
name of Protestant, Froude's eyes would have been opened, and he
would have seen Burke's incomparable superiority to Lord Clare as a
just interpreter of events. Froude looked at the rebellion and the
Union from an Orange Lodge, and his book is really an Orange
manifesto. Such works have their purpose, and Froude's is an
unusually eloquent specimen of its class; but they are not history,
any more than the speech of Lord Clare on the Union, or the Diary of
Wolfe Tone. Froude does not explain, nor seem to understand, what
the supporters of the Irish Legislature meant. Speaker Foster said
that the whole unbribed intellect of Ireland was against the Union.
Foster was the last Speaker in the Irish House of Commons. He had
been elected in 1790 against the "patriot" Ponsonby, and was opposed
to the Catholic franchise in 1793. He was a man of unblemished
character, and in a position where he could not afford to talk
nonsense. Yet, if Froude were right, nonsense he must have talked.
Cornwallis, an Englishman, corroborates Foster; Cornwallis