eaconsfield their disposition and prospects. Richard Burke was
received with many compliments, but of course nothing came of his mission,
and the only impression that remains with the reader of his prolix story is
his tale of the two royal brothers, who afterwards became Louis XVIII. and
Charles X., meeting after some parting, and embracing one another with many
tears on board a boat in the middle of the Rhine, while some of the
courtiers raised a cry of "Long live the king"--the king who had a few
weeks before been carried back in triumph to his capital with Mayor Petion
in his coach. When we think of the pass to which things had come in Paris
by this time, and of the unappeasable ferment that boiled round the court,
there is a certain touch of the ludicrous in the notion of poor Richard
Burke writing to Louis XVI. a letter of wise advice how to comport himself.

At the end of the same year, with the approval of his father he started for
Ireland as the adviser of the Catholic Association. He made a wretched
emissary, and there was no limit to his arrogance, noisiness and
indiscretion. The Irish agitators were glad to give him two thousand
guineas and to send him home. The mission is associated with a more
important thing, his father's _Letters to Sir Hercules Langrishe_,
advocating the admission of the Irish Catholics to the franchise. This
short piece abounds richly in maxims of moral and political prudence. And
Burke exhibited considerable courage in writing it; for many of its maxims
seem to involve a contradiction, first, to the principles on which he
withstood the movement in France, and second, to his attitude upon the
subject of parliamentary reform. The contradiction is in fact only
superficial. Burke was not the man to fall unawares into a trap of this
kind. His defence of Catholic relief--and it had been the conviction of a
lifetime--was very properly founded on propositions which were true of
Ireland, and were true neither of France nor of the quality of
parliamentary representation in England. Yet Burke threw such breadth and
generality over all he wrote that even these propositions, relative as they
were, form a short manual of statesmanship.

At the close of the session of 1794 the impeachment of Hastings had come to
an end, and Burke bade farewell to parliament. Richard Burke was elected in
his father's place at Malton. The king was bent on making the champion of
the old order of Europe a peer. His title