his pension. His
feelings appear to have been deeply hurt by Hamilton's superciliousness,
and his demand for the right to employ the whole time of his private
secretary. In a long explanatory letter to Hutchinson, a leading member
of the Irish parliament, and father of the late Lord Donoughmore, he
says, indignantly enough--"I flatter myself to let you see that I
deserved to be considered in another manner than as one of Mr Hamilton's
cattle, or as a piece of his household stuff. Six of the best years of
my life he took me from every pursuit of literary reputation, or of
improvement of my fortune. In that time he made his own fortune, a very
great one; and he has also taken to himself the very little one which I
had made. In all this time you may easily conceive how much I felt at
being left behind by almost all my contemporaries. There never was a
season more favourable for any man who chose to enter into the career
of public life; and I think I am not guilty of ostentation in supposing
my own moral character and my industry, my friends and connexions, when
Mr H. first sought my acquaintance, were not at all inferior to those of
several whose fortune is at this day upon a very different footing from
mine."

It is evident that Burke's mind was at this period turned to
authorship, and that his chief quarrel arose from the petty and
pragmatical demand of Hamilton, that he should abandon it altogether.
Burke soon had ample revenge, if it was to be found in the obscurity
into which Hamilton rapidly fell, and the burlesque which alone
revived his name from its obscurity. The contrast between the two must
have been a lesson to the vanity of the one, as pungent as was its
triumph. If ever the fate of Tantalus was realized to man, it was in
the perpetual thirst and perpetual disappointment of Hamilton for
public name. The cup never reached his lips but it was instantly dry;
while Burke was seen reveling in the full flow of public
renown--buoyant on the stream into which so many others plunged only
to sink, and steering his noble course with a full mastery of the
current. "Single-speech Hamilton" became a title of ridicule, while
Burke was pouring forth, night after night, speech after speech, rich
in the most sparkling and most solid opulence of the mind. He must
have been more or less than man, to have never cast a glance at the
decrepitude of the formal coxcomb whom he once acknowledged as his
leader, and compared his shrunk