there was no corruption in
Burke's outlay. When the Pitt administration was formed in 1766, he might
have had office, and Lord Rockingham wished him to accept it, but he
honourably took his fate with the party. He may have spent L3000 a year,
where he would have been more prudent to spend only L2000. But nobody was
wronged; his creditors were all paid in time, and his hands were at least
clean of traffic in reversions, clerkships, tellerships and all the rest of
the rich sinecures which it was thought no shame in those days for the
aristocracy of the land and the robe to wrangle for, and gorge themselves
upon, with the fierce voracity of famishing wolves. The most we can say is
that Burke, like Pitt, was too deeply absorbed in beneficent service in the
affairs of his country, to have for his own affairs the solicitude that
would have been prudent.

In the midst of intense political preoccupations, Burke always found time
to keep up his intimacy with the brilliant group of his earlier friends. He
was one of the commanding figures at the club at the Turk's Head, with
Reynolds and Garrick, Goldsmith and Johnson. The old sage who held that the
first Whig was the Devil, was yet compelled to forgive Burke's politics for
the sake of his magnificent gifts. "I would not talk to him of the
Rockingham party," he used to say, "but I love his knowledge, his genius,
his diffusion and affluence of conversation." And everybody knows Johnson's
vivid account of him: "Burke, Sir, is such a man that if you met him for
the first time in the street, where you were stopped by a drove of oxen,
and you and he stepped aside to take shelter but for five minutes, he'd
talk [v.04 p.0828] to you in such a manner that when you parted you would
say, 'This is an extraordinary man.'" They all grieved that public business
should draw to party what was meant for mankind. They deplored that the
nice and difficult test of answering Berkeley had not been undertaken, as
was once intended, by Burke, and sighed to think what an admirable display
of subtlety and brilliance such a contention would have afforded them, had
not politics "turned him from active philosophy aside." There was no
jealousy in this. They did not grudge Burke being the first man in the
House of Commons, for they admitted that he would have been the first man
anywhere.

With all his hatred for the book-man in politics, Burke owed much of his
own distinction to that generous richness and bre