ulge. Burke, we have to remember, did not stand
alone before the world. Elliot describes a dinner-party at Lord
Fitzwilliam's, at which four of these half-discredited Irishmen were
present. "Burke has now got such a train after him as would sink
anybody but himself:--his son, who is quite _nauseated_ by all
mankind; his brother, who is liked better than his son, but is rather
offensive with animal spirits and with brogue; and his cousin, Will
Burke, who is just returned unexpectedly from India, as much ruined
as when he went many years ago, and who is a fresh charge on any
prospects of power that Burke may ever have." It was this train, and
the ideas of adventurership that clung to them, the inextinguishable
stories about papistry and Saint Omer's, the tenacious calumny about
the letters of Junius, the notorious circumstances of embarrassment
and neediness--it was all these things which combined with Burke's own
defects of temper and discretion, to give the Whig grandees as decent
a reason as they could have desired for keeping all the great posts of
state in their own hands.

It seems difficult to deny that the questions of the Regency had
caused the germs of a sort of dissatisfaction and strain in the
relations between Fox and Burke. Their feelings to one another have
been well compared to the mutual discontent between partners in
unsuccessful play, where each suspects that it is the mistakes of the
other that lost the game. Whether Burke felt conscious of the failures
in discretion and temper, which were the real or pretended excuse for
neglect, we cannot tell. There is one passage that reveals a chagrin
of this kind. A few days after the meeting between the Duke of
Portland and Elliot, for the purpose of settling his place in the new
ministry, Burke went down to Beaconsfield. In writing (January 24,
1789) to invite Windham and Pelham to come to stay a night, with
promise of a leg of mutton cooked by a dairymaid who was not a bad
hand at a pinch, he goes on to say that his health has received some
small benefit from his journey to the country. "But this view to
health, though far from unnecessary to me, was not the chief cause
of my present retreat. I began to find that I was grown rather
too anxious; and had begun to discover to myself and to others a
solicitude relative to the present state of affairs, which, though
their strange condition might well warrant it in others, is certainly
less suitable to my time of l