sit down. Lord Sheffield now rose and moved, "That dissertations
on the French constitution, and to read a narrative of transactions in
France, are not regular or orderly on the question before the house."
Fox seconded this motion, and this gave rise to the utter disruption
of the friendship which had subsisted between him and Burke:--there had
been heart-burnings before, arising from a difference of opinion on
the subject of the French revolution, but now their political union was
brought to a close. After Pitt had defended Burke, and declared that he
should give his negative to the motion, Fox rose to defend his former
sentiments respecting the French revolution, and repeated that he
thought it, upon the whole, one of the most glorious events in the
history of mankind. As for the Rights of Man, which his right honourable
friend had ridiculed as visionary, he contended that they were the basis
and foundation of every rational constitution. The rights of the people,
he said, were recognized in our statute-book, and no prescription could
supersede, no accident could remove or obliterate them. This at one time
had been the doctrine of his friend, who had said, with great energy and
emphasis, that he could not draw a bill of indictment against a whole
people. He was sorry to find, however, that his right honourable friend
had learned to draw such a bill of indictment, and moreover to crowd it
with all the technical epithets which disgraced our statute-book: such
as false, malicious, wicked, by the instigation of the devil, and the
like. He added, that having been taught by his right honourable friend
that no revolt of a nation was caused without provocation, he could
not help rejoicing at the success of a revolution resting upon the same
basis with our own--the Rights of Man: no book his friend could write,
no words he could utter, could ever induce him to change or abandon his
opinion; he must differ with his friend upon that subject _toto
colo_. Throughout the whole of his speech Fox alternately rebuked
and complimented Burke, and while he vindicated his own opinion he
questioned the consistency of his friend. Fox even ventured to speak
contemptuously of Burke's book on the subject of the French revolution,
and to assert that he had written it in haste, and without due
information. His whole speech, in fact was ungenerous in the highest
degree, whence it is no wonder that when Burke rose to reply it was
under the influence