sonified, but
shaking his cap and bells under the laurel of genius. He finished his
wild speech in a manner next to madness." Moore believes that Burke's
indiscretions in these trying and prolonged transactions sowed the
seeds of the alienation between him and Fox two years afterwards.
Burke's excited state of mind showed itself in small things as well as
great. Going with Windham to Carlton House, Burke attacked him in the
coach for a difference of opinion about the affairs of a friend, and
behaved with such unreasonable passion and such furious rudeness
of manner, that his magnanimous admirer had some difficulty in
obliterating the impression. The public were less tolerant. Windham
has told us that at this time Burke was a man decried, persecuted, and
proscribed, not being much valued even by his own party, and by half
the nation considered as little better than an ingenious madman.[1]
This is evidence beyond impeachment, for Windham loved and honoured
Burke with the affection and reverence of a son; and he puts the
popular sentiment on record with grief and amazement. There is other
testimony to the same effect. The late Lord Lansdowne, who must
have heard the subject abundantly discussed by those who were most
concerned in it, was once asked by a very eminent man of our own time,
why the Whigs kept Burke out of their cabinets. "Burke!" he cried; "he
was so violent, so overbearing, so arrogant, so intractable, that
to have got on with him in a cabinet would have been utterly and
absolutely impossible."

[Footnote 1: Windham's _Diary_, p. 213.]

On the whole, it seems to be tolerably clear that the difficulties
in the way of Burke's promotion to high office were his notoriously
straitened circumstances; his ungoverned excesses of party zeal and
political passion; finally, what Sir Gilbert Elliot calls the unjust
prejudice and clamour against him and his family, and what Burke
himself once called the hunt of obloquy that pursued him all his
life. The first two of these causes can scarcely have operated in
the arrangements that were made in the Rockingham and Coalition
ministries. But the third, we may be sure, was incessantly at work. It
would have needed social courage alike in 1782, 1783, and 1788 to
give cabinet rank to a man round whose name there floated so many
disparaging associations. Social courage is exactly the virtue in
which the constructors of a government will always think themselves
least able to ind