ke Lord Verney, his
political patron at Wendover. Perhaps again, his activity on behalf of
Indian princes, like the raja of Tanjore, was not disinterested and did not
go unrewarded. The answer to all these calumnious innuendoes is to be found
in documents and title-deeds of decisive authority, and is simple enough.
It is, in short, this. Burke inherited a small property from his elder
brother, which he realized. Lord Rockingham advanced him a certain sum
(L6000). The remainder, amounting to no less than two-thirds of the
purchase-money, was raised on mortgage, and was never paid off during
Burke's life. The rest of the story is equally simple, but more painful.
Burke made some sort of income out of his 600 acres; he was for a short
time agent for New York, with a salary of L700; he continued to work at the
_Annual Register_ down to 1788. But, when all is told, he never made as
much as he spent; and in spite of considerable assistance from Lord
Rockingham, amounting it is sometimes said to as much as L30,000, Burke,
like the younger Pitt, got every year deeper into debt. Pitt's debts were
the result of a wasteful indifference to his private affairs. Burke, on the
contrary, was assiduous and orderly, and had none of the vices of
profusion. But he had that quality which Aristotle places high among the
virtues--the noble mean of Magnificence, standing midway between the two
extremes of vulgar ostentation and narrow pettiness. He was indifferent to
luxury, and sought to make life, not commodious nor soft, but high and
dignified in a refined way. He loved art, filled his house with statues and
pictures, and extended a generous patronage to the painters. He was a
collector of books, and, as Crabbe and less conspicuous men discovered, a
helpful friend to their writers. Guests were ever welcome at his board; the
opulence of his mind and the fervid copiousness of his talk naturally made
the guests of such a man very numerous. _Non invideo equidem, miror magis_,
was Johnson's good-natured remark, when he was taken over his friend's fine
house and pleasant gardens. Johnson was of a very different type. There was
something in this external dignity which went with Burke's imperious
spirit, his spacious imagination, his turn for all things stately and
imposing. We may say, if we please, that Johnson had the far truer and
loftier dignity of the two; but we have to take such men as Burke with the
defects that belong to their qualities. And