some favour on the man who had done more than
anybody else to promote the new alliance. It was proposed to make
Burke a peer under the style of Lord Beaconsfield,--a title in a later
age whimsically borrowed for himself by a man of genius with a delight
in irony. To the title it was proposed to attach a yearly income
for two or more lives. But the bolt of destiny was at this instant
launched. Richard Burke, the adored centre of all his father's hopes
and affections, was seized with illness and died (August 1794). We
cannot look without tragic emotion on the pathos of the scene, which
left the remnant of the old man's days desolate and void. A Roman poet
has described in touching words the woe of the aged Nestor, as he
beheld the funeral pile of his son, too untimely slain--

Oro parumper
Attendas quantum de legibus ipse queratur
Fatorum et nimio de stamine, quum videt acris
Antilochi barbam ardentem: quum quaerit ab omni
Quisquis adest socius, cur haec in tempora duret,
Quod facinus dignum tam longo admiserit aevo.

Burke's grief finds a nobler expression. "The storm has gone over me,
and I lie like one of those old oaks which the late hurricane has
scattered about me. I am stripped of all my honours; I am torn up by
the roots and lie prostrate on the earth.... I am alone. I have none
to meet my enemies in the gate.... I live in an inverted order. They
who ought to have succeeded me have gone before me. They who should
have been to me as posterity are in the place of ancestors."

Burke only lived three years after this desolating blow. The
arrangements for a peerage, as a matter of course, came to an end. But
Pitt was well aware of the serious embarrassments by which Burke was
so pressed that he saw actual beggary very close at hand. The king,
too,--who had once, by the way, granted a pension to Burke's detested
Rousseau, though Rousseau was too proud to draw it--seems to have
been honourably interested in making a provision for Burke. What Pitt
offered was an immediate grant of L1200 a year from the Civil List for
Mrs. Burke's life, to be followed by a proposition to Parliament in a
message from the king, to confer an annuity of greater value upon a
statesman who had served the country to his own loss for thirty years.
As a matter of fact, the grant, L2500 a year in amount, much to
Burke's chagrin, was never brought before Parliament, but was
conferred directly by the Crown