shape with the vigorous and athletic
proportions of his own intellectual stature. Hamilton, too, must have
had many a pang. The wretched nervousness of character which at once
stimulated him to pine for distinction, and disqualified him from
obtaining it, must have made his life miserable. If the magnificent
conception of the poet's Prometheus could be lowered to any thing so
trivial as a disappointed politician of the eighteenth century, its
burlesque might be amply shown in a mind helplessly struggling against
a sense of its own inferiority, gnawed by envy at the success of
better men, and with only sufficient intellectual sensibility
remaining to have that gnawing constantly renewed.

Burke's letters to the chief Irishmen with whom his residence in
Dublin had brought him into intercourse, long continued indignant.
"Having presumed," said he, in one of those explanatory letters, "to
put a test to me, which no man _not born in Africa_ ever thought of
taking, on my refusal he broke off all connexion with me in the most
insolent manner. He, indeed, entered into two several negotiations
afterwards, but both poisoned in their first principles by the same
spirit of injustice with which he set out in his first dealings with
me. I, therefore, could never give way to his proposals. The whole
ended by his possessing himself of that small reward for my services
which, I since find, he had a very small share in procuring for me.
After, or, indeed, rather during his negotiations, he endeavoured to
stain my character and injure my future fortune, by every calumny his
malice could suggest. This is the case of my connexion with Mr
Hamilton."

If all this be true--and whoever impeached the veracity of Burke in
any thing?--the more effectually his enemy was trampled the better:
malice can be punished sufficiently only by extirpation.

A powerful letter to Henry Flood, then one of the leading members of
the Irish House of Commons, shows how deeply Burke felt the vexation
of Hamilton's conduct, and not less explicitly administers the moral,
of how much must be suffered by every man who enters into the
conflicts of public life. Flood, too, had his share of those
vexations; perhaps more of them than his correspondent. Henry Flood
was one of the most remarkable men whom Ireland had produced.
Commencing his career with a handsome fortune, he had plunged into the
dissipation which was almost demanded of men of family in his day; but
some