ves would have
been fit instruments to make slaves of the rest." "He spoke," said a
looker-on, "like a man inspired," and he ended by a demand for the
absolute, total, and immediate repeal of the Acts. It is from this
moment that the bitter hatred of George the Third to Pitt may be dated.
In an outburst of resentment the king called him a trumpet of sedition,
and openly wished for his death. But the general desire that he should
return to office was quickened by the sense of power which spoke in his
words, and now that the first bitterness of finding himself alone had
passed away, Pitt was willing to join the Whigs. Negotiations were
opened for this purpose; but they at once broke down. Weak as they felt
themselves, Rockingham and his colleagues now shrank from Pitt, as on
the formation of their ministry Pitt had shrunk from them. Personal
feeling no doubt played its part; for in any united administration Pitt
must necessarily take the lead, and Rockingham was in no mood to give up
his supremacy. But graver political reasons, as we have seen,
co-operated with this jealousy and distrust; and the blind sense which
the Whigs had long had of a radical difference between their policy and
that of Pitt was now defined for them by the keenest political thinker
of the day.

[Sidenote: Edmund Burke.]

At this moment Rockingham was in great measure guided by the counsels of
his secretary, Edmund Burke. Burke had come to London in 1750 as a poor
and unknown Irish adventurer. But the learning which at once won him the
friendship of Johnson, and the imaginative power which enabled him to
give his learning a living shape, soon promised him a philosophical and
literary career. Instinct however drew Burke not to literature but to
politics. He became secretary to Lord Rockingham, and in 1765 entered
Parliament under his patronage. His speech on the repeal of the Stamp
Acts at once lifted him into fame. The heavy Quaker-like figure, the
scratch wig, the round spectacles, the cumbrous roll of paper which
loaded Burke's pocket, gave little promise of a great orator and less of
the characteristics of his oratory--its passionate ardour, its poetic
fancy, its amazing prodigality of resources; the dazzling succession in
which irony, pathos, invective, tenderness, the most brilliant
word-pictures, the coolest argument followed each other. It was an
eloquence indeed of a wholly new order in English experience. Walpole's
clearness of statement,