1783, which were written by Mr. Burke ; and the latter part of the same volume, and the whole of the twelfth, are occupied by the articles of charge against Mr. Hastings *. The present volumes are to be followed by two more on East-India affairs; and these, together with another volume (or perhaps two) containing an account of the author's life, are intended to complete the collection. The posthumous materials, we are told, have been selected by the surviving editor, Dr. King, Bishop of Rochester, and the late Dr. Lawrence; and, having undergone the revisal of his Lordship, they now make their appearance under his superintendance. In an introductory letter, addressed to the Right Hon. William Elliot, the Bishop gives a detailed account of the pieces of which they are composed, and of the labours bestowed on them, as weil by himself individually as jointly with his late colleague, to whose memory he pays a warm tribute. The following communication, which is here made, will be learned by the public with great satisfaction:

The eighth (referring to the quarto edition) and last volume, will contain a narrative of the life of Mr. Burke, which will be accompanied with such parts of his familiar correspondence, and other occasional productions, as shall be thought fit for publication. The materials relating to the early years of his life, alluded to in the advertisement to the fourth volume, have been lately recovered; and the communication of such as may still remain in the possession of any private individuals, is again most earnestly requested.

Unequal as I feel myself to the task, I shall, my dear friend, lose no time, nor spare any pains, in discharging the arduous duty, that has devolved upon me.'

In executing the arduous and difficult task which they had undertaken, the late learned civilian and the R. R. Prelate have acquitted themselves fairly towards the public, and discreetly with respect to the memory of their departed friend; and to their care, we may be assured, it is in a great degree owing that, in his posthumous pages, Mr. Burke will be found as much himself as in those which were given to the world under his own eye. The productions which we now announce are of various dates, so that we have here exhibited to us the Mr. Burke of more early as well as of later times, the Mr. Burke of the American placed by the side of the Mr. Burke of the French Revolution. If thus exhibited he does not appear to advantage, if thus seen we are not satisfied with him, the blame most certainly does not lie at the door of his editors.

See Rev, Vol. Ixxii. p. 379.; Vol. lxxiv. p. 388.; and Vol. Ixxvi. p. 523. &c.

They

They have done only that which in fairness they were bound to do, in giving as it were his portrait at full length, and presenting him such as he really was: a mode of proceeding which renders easy the solution of a problem of no ordinary interest, namely, whether Mr. Burke was the same person in all the several periods of his life. At the head of the posthumous tracts, stands an additional letter on a Regicide Peace; or rather a fragment of one, for such it is. Like the letters which preceded it on the same subject, it is addressed to those advocates for peace who had originally been partizans of the war; and it was only with persons of this description that Mr.B. deigned to enter into controversy. In such a warfare, to a combatant far less able and experienced than he was, victory would be easy; and accordingly we never saw a conflict carried on more pleasantly. Though, however, the champion appears as if engaged only in some pastime, and seems as it were in play, his satire never was more poignant or his ridicule more happy; his spirits, indeed, overflow; and he is even unseasonably pleasant, since he laughs at calamities, makes a jest of crimes, and is jocular on the subversion of states, the overthrow of dignities, and the loss of fortune and of life. These things give only him delight, provided that they arise out of the French Revolution, and have been perpetrated by the Jacobins; and he seems to be at the summit of felicity, when he has it in his power to allege instances of the abuse of liberty, and of the prostitution of her sacred name, against the members of this formidable sect.

The fragment now before us, however, is more particularly levelled against a pamphlet intitled "Some Remarks on the apparent Circumstances of the War in the fourth Week of October 1795," of which the late Lord Auckland was understood to be the author. His Lordship was not only in the predicament which we have mentioned, of having approved the war at its commencement, but the first philippic against the Revolution on the part of England proceeded from his pen while he was ambassador at the Hague: a state-paper, in which it was thought that he had gone much out of his way in order to declaim against that event. Of these circumstances, his formidable antagonist does not neglect to avail himself; and he is not sparing of the argumentum ad hominem, which he contrives to enforce with great felicity. In order fully to enjoy this exquisite controversial piece, we must recall the circumstances of the time, and the object of the tract which Mr. Burke opposed. The nation had grown tired of the war; and the cry for peace was become so loud and urgent, that, to satisfy the public, it was judged necessary to set on foot a nego

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ciation

ciation with France, although she was still a republic: but how were the ministers who had envied their neighbours the slightest acquisition of liberty, who had stigmatized every encroachment on the old government as the most heinous of crimes, who had insisted on coercing the French people and eradicating jacobinical principles by forcible means, and who had represented the revolutionists as persons incapable of the relations of peace,—how were such men to make overtures to these very revolutionists? It required not the abilities of Mr. Burke to demonstrate that to take such a step was to ratify the republican authorities, to establish jacobinism, and to seal the doom of the royalists: or to shew that not one of the causes for which the war had been commenced had been attained, and that the dangers which it was intended to avert had greatly increased. Still, however true all this might be, it had become expedient to enter into negociation: the public feeling required it; and to break this measure to the people, and to prepare them to see it conducted by ministers, was the object of the pamphlet in question. The author was not to allow that ministers were re-treading their steps, or that they were betaking themselves to those measures which, before the war commenced, they had most earnestly been urged to adopt by their political opponents, to whom they had so haughtily refused to listen; nor was he to admit that the present was a course prescribed by necessity, and only to be adopted because it was rendered indispensable by the turn which events had taken. He was to make it appear as a measure fairly arising out of the new circumstances of the parties, which was wise and reasonable in itself; and that, although the war, when declared, had been most proper, such changes had taken place in France as rendered it equally right to terminate the

contest.

When the author speaks of treating with our neighbours, he constantly makes use of the term France; and Mr. Burke, in alluding to this circumstance, says:

I beg leave to recall to your mind the observation I made early in our correspondence, and which ought to attend us quite through the discussion of this proposed peace, amity, or fraternity, or whatever you may call it; that is, the real quality and character of the party you have to deal with. This, I find, as a thing of no importance, has every where escaped the author of the October Remarks. That hostile power, to the period of the fourth week in that month, has been ever called and considered as an usurpation. In that week, for the first time, it changed its name of an usurped power, and took the simple name of France. The word France is slipped in Just as if the government stood exactly as before that Revolution, which has astonished, terrified, and almost overpowered Europe.

France,"

"France," says the author, "will do this ;"" it is the interest of France;" "the returning honour and generosity of France," &c. &c. always merely France; just as if we were in a common political war with an old recognized member of the commonwealth of Christian Europe; and as if our dispute had turned upon a mere matter of territorial or commercial controversy, which a peace might settle by the imposition or the taking off a duty, with the gain or the loss of a remote island, or a frontier town or two, on the one side or the other. This shifting of persons could not be done without the hocus-pocus of abstraction. We have been in a grievous errour; we thought that we had been at war with rebels against the lawful government, but that we were friends and allies of what is properly France; friends and allies to the legal body politick of France. But by slight of hand the Jacobins are clean vanished, and it is France we have got under our cup. Blessings on his soul, that first invented sleep, said Don Sancho Pancha the wise! All those blessings, and ten thousand times more, on him who found out abstraction, personification, and impersonals. In certain cases they are the first of all soporifics. Terribly alarmed we should be if things were proposed to us in the concrete; and if fraternity was held out to us with the individuals, who compose this France, by their proper names and descriptions: if we were told that it was very proper to enter into the closest bonds of amity and good correspondence with the devout, pacifick, and tender-hearted Syeyes, with the all-accomplished Rewbel, with the humane guillotinists of Bourdeaux, Tallien, and Isabeau; with the meek butcher Legendre, and with "the returned humanity and generosity" (that had been only on a visit abroad) of the virtuous regicide brewer Santerre. This would seem at the outset a very strange scheme of amity and concord; - nay, though we had held out to us, as an additional douceur, and assurance of the cordial fraternal embrace of our pious and patriotick countryman Thomas Paine. But plain truth would here be shocking and absurd; therefore comes in abstraction and personification. " "Make your peace with France.” That word France sounds quite as well as any other; and it conveys no idea but that of a very pleasant country, and very hospitable inhabitants. Nothing absurd and shocking in amity and good correspondence with France. Permit me to say that I am not yet well acquainted with this new-coined France, and without a careful assay I am not willing to receive it in currency in place of the old Louis d'or.'

The noble Lord reckons the new republican constitution as one of our securities; and here Mr. Burke observes, alluding to the state paper from the Hague, and quoting from it:

That strain I heard was of an higher mood." That declaration of our Sovereign was worthy of his throne. It is in a style, which neither the pen of the writer of October, nor such a poor crow-quill as mine can ever hope to equal. I am happy to enrich my letter with this fragment of nervous and manly eloquence, which, if it had not emanated from the awful authority of a throne, if it were not recorded amongst the most valuable monuments of history,

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and

and consecrated in the archives of states, would be worthy, as a private composition, to live for ever in the memory of men.'

Between the sentiments of the state-paper and those of the pamphlet, the noble author seems conscious of being in a dilemma; and, with the view of delivering himself from it, he expressly stipulates to be at liberty to return to his former principles, those which had been thundered out in the Hague manifesto. This Mr. Burke calls a new mode of teaching a lesson, which while the master forgets the scholar is getting.' In the opinion of the author of the pamphlet, also, the very conquests of the republic would administer to the security of this country, because they would work the ruin of the power by which they had been made.

If,' says Mr. Burke, observing on this curious notion, there are yet existing any people, like me, old fashioned enough to consider, that we have an important part of our very existence beyond our limits, and who therefore stretch their thoughts beyond the Pomorium of England, for them too he has a comfort, which will remove all their jealousies and alarms about the extent of the empire of Regicide. "These conquests eventually will be the cause of her destruction." So that they, who hate the cause of usurpation, and dread the power of France under any form, are to wish her to be a conqueror, in order to accelerate her ruin. A little more conquest I would be still better. Will he tell us what dose of dominion is to be the quantum sufficit for her destruction, for she seems very voracious of the food of her distemper? To be sure she is ready to perish with repletion; she has a Boulimia, and hardly has bolted down one state, than she calls for two or three more. There is a good deal of wit in all this; but it seems to me (with all respect to the author) to be carrying the joke a great deal too far. I cannot yet think, that the armies of the allies were of this way of thinking; and that, when they evacuated all these countries, it was a stratagem of war to decoy France into ruin or that, if in a treaty we should surrender them for ever into the hands of the usurpation, (the lease, the author supposes,) it is a master-stroke of policy to effect the destruction of a formidable rival, and to render her no longer an object of jealousy and alarm. This, I assure the author, will infinitely facilitate the treaty. The usurpers will catch at this bait, without minding the hook, which this crafty angler for the Jacobin gudgeons of the New Directory has so dexterously placed under it.

recovery.

Every symptom of the exacerbation of the publick malady is, with him, (as with the doctor in Moliere,) a happy prognostick of Flanders gone Tant Mieux. Holland subdued charming! Spain beaten, and all the hither Germany conquered. Bravo! Better and better still! But they will retain all their conquests on a treaty! Best of all! What a delightful thing it is to have a gay physician, who sees all things, as the French express it, Couleur de Rose! What an escape we have had, that we and our allies were not the conquerors! By these conquests, previous to her

utter