was to be Lord Beaconsfield, and
it was designed to annex to the title an income for three lives. The patent
was being made ready, when all was arrested by the sudden death of the son
who was to Burke more than life. The old man's grief was agonizing and
inconsolable. "The storm has gone over me," he wrote in words which are
well known, but which can hardly be repeated too often for any who have an
ear for the cadences of noble and pathetic speech,--"The storm has gone
over me, and I lie like one of those old oaks which the late hurricane has
scattered about me. I am stripped of all my honours; I am torn up by the
roots and lie prostrate on the earth.... I am alone. I have none to meet my
enemies in the gate.... I live in an inverted order. They who ought to have
succeeded me have gone before me. They who should have been to me as
posterity are in the place of ancestors."

A pension of L2500 was all that Burke could now be persuaded to accept. The
duke of Bedford and Lord Lauderdale made some remarks in parliament upon
this paltry reward to a man who, in conducting a great trial on the public
behalf, had worked harder for nearly ten years than any minister in any
cabinet of the reign. But it was not yet safe to kick up heels in face of
the dying lion. The vileness of such criticism was punished, as it deserved
to be, in the _Letter to a Noble Lord_ (1796), in which Burke showed the
usual art of all his compositions in shaking aside the insignificances of a
subject. He turned mere personal defence and retaliation into an occasion
for a lofty enforcement of constitutional principles, and this, too, with a
relevancy and pertinence of consummate skilfulness. There was to be one
more great effort before the end.

In the spring of 1796 Pitt's constant anxiety for peace had become more
earnest than ever. He had found out the instability of the coalition and
the power of France. Like the thrifty steward he was, he saw with growing
concern the waste of the national resources and the strain upon commerce,
with a public debt swollen to what then seemed the desperate sum of
L400,000,000. Burke at the notion of negotiation flamed out in the _Letters
on a Regicide Peace_, in some respects the most splendid of all his
compositions. They glow with passion, and yet with all their rapidity is
such steadfastness, the fervour of imagination is so skilfully tempered by
close and plausible reasoning, and the whole is wrought with such strengt