dered the Russian ambassador to send her a bust of Fox in
white marble, to be placed in her colonnade between Demosthenes and
Cicero. We may take it for granted that after the Revolution rose to
its full height the bust of Fox accompanied that of Voltaire down to
the cellar of the Hermitage.

While the affair of the Russian armament was still occupying the
minister, an event of signal importance happened in the ranks of his
political adversaries. The alliance which had lasted between Burke
and Fox for five and twenty years came to a sudden end, and this rift
gradually widened into a destructive breach throughout the party.
There is no parallel in our parliamentary history to the fatal scene.
In Ireland, indeed, only eight years before, Flood and Grattan, after
fighting side by side for many years, had all at once sprung upon one
another in the Parliament House with the fury of vultures: Flood had
screamed to Grattan that he was a mendicant patriot, and Grattan had
called Flood an ill-omened bird of night, with a sepulchral note, a
cadaverous aspect, and a broken beak. The Irish, like the French,
have the art of making things dramatic, and Burke was the greatest of
Irishmen. On the opening of the session of 1791, the Government had
introduced a bill for the better government of Canada. It introduced
questions about church establishments and hereditary legislators. In
discussing these Fox made some references to France. It was impossible
to refer to France without touching the _Reflections on the French
Revolution_. Burke was not present, but he heard what Fox had said,
and before long Fox again introduced French affairs in a debate on the
Russian armament. Burke rose in violent heat of mind to reply, but the
House would not hear him. He resolved to speak when the time came for
the Canada Bill to be recommitted. Meanwhile some of his friends did
all that they could to dissuade him from pressing the matter farther.
Even the Prince of Wales is said to have written him a letter. There
were many signs of the rupture that was so soon to come in the Whig
ranks. Men so equally devoted to the common cause as Windham
and Elliot nearly came to a quarrel at a dinner-party at Lord
Malmesbury's, on the subject of Burke's design to speak; and Windham,
who for the present sided with Fox, enters in his diary that he was
glad to escape from the room without speaking to the man whom, since
the death of Dr. Johnson, he revered before all ot