, as a charge on the four and a half
per cent fund for two or more lives. It seems as if Pitt were afraid
of challenging the opinion of Parliament; and the storm which the
pension raised out of doors, was a measure of the trouble which the
defence of it would have inflicted on the Government inside the House
of Commons. According to the rumour of the time, Burke sold two of his
pensions upon lives for L27,000, and there was left the third pension
of L1200. By and by, when the resentment of the Opposition was roused
to the highest pitch by the infamous Treason and Sedition Bills of
1795, the Duke of Bedford and Lord Lauderdale, seeking to accumulate
every possible complaint against the Government, assailed the grant
to Burke, as made without the consent of Parliament, and as a violent
contradiction to the whole policy of the plan for economic reform. The
attack, if not unjustifiable in itself, came from an unlucky quarter.
A chief of the house of Bedford was the most unfit person in the
world to protest against grants by favour of the Crown, Burke was too
practised a rhetorician not to see the opening, and his _Letter to a
Noble Lord_ is the most splendid repartee in the English language.

It is not surprising that Burke's defence should have provoked
rejoinder. A cloud of pamphlets followed the _Letter to a Noble
Lord_--some in doggerel verse, others in a magniloquent prose imitated
from his own, others mere poisonous scurrility. The nearest approach
to a just stroke that I can find, after turning over a pile of this
trash, is an expression of wonder that he, who was inconsolable for
the loss of a beloved son, should not have reflected how many tender
parents had been made childless in the profusion of blood, of which
he himself had been the most relentless champion. Our disgust at the
pages of insult which were here levelled at a great man, is perhaps
moderated by the thought that Burke himself, who of all people ought
to have known better, had held up to public scorn and obloquy men of
such virtue, attainments, and real service to mankind as Richard Price
and Joseph Priestley.

It was during these months that he composed the _Letters on a Regicide
Peace_, though the third and fourth of them were not published until
after his death. There have been those to whom these compositions
appeared to be Burke's masterpieces. In fact they are deplorable.
They contain passages of fine philosophy and of skilful and plausible
re