of
some, and full of anxiety for the fate of others, is apt to go to much
greater lengths in his preference of the objects of his immediate
solicitude than Mr. Burke has ever done. A man so circumstanced often
seems to undervalue, to vilify, almost to reprobate and disown, those
that are out of danger. This is the voice of Nature and truth, and not
of inconsistency and false pretence. The danger of anything very dear
to us removes, for the moment, every other affection from the mind. When
Priam had his whole thoughts employed on the body of his Hector, he
repels with indignation, and drives from him with a thousand reproaches,
his surviving sons, who with an officious piety crowded about him to
offer their assistance. A good critic (there is no better than Mr. Fox)
would say that this is a masterstroke, and marks a deep understanding of
Nature in the father of poetry. He would despise a Zoilus who would
conclude from this passage that Homer meant to represent this man of
affliction as hating or being indifferent and cold in his affections to
the poor relics of his house, or that he preferred a dead carcass to his
living children.

Mr. Burke does not stand in need of an allowance of this kind, which, if
he did, by candid critics ought to be granted to him. If the principles
of a mixed Constitution be admitted, he wants no more to justify to
consistency everything he has said and done during the course of a
political life just touching to its close. I believe that gentleman has
kept himself more clear of running into the fashion of wild, visionary
theories, or of seeking popularity through every means, than any man
perhaps ever did in the same situation.

He was the first man who, on the hustings, at a popular election,
rejected the authority of instructions from constituents,--or who, in
any place, has argued so fully against it. Perhaps the discredit into
which that doctrine of compulsive instructions under our Constitution is
since fallen may be due in a great degree to his opposing himself to it
in that manner and on that occasion.

The reforms in representation, and the bills for shortening the duration
of Parliaments, he uniformly and steadily opposed for many years
together, in contradiction to many of his best friends. These friends,
however, in his better days, when they had more to hope from his service
and more to fear from his loss than now they have, never chose to find
any inconsistency between his acts