out of him, left his mind "swept and garnished," parched and dry, fevered with revenge, bloated with adulation; and made him as shameless and abandoned in sacrificing every feeling of attachment or obligation to the people, as he had before been bold and prodigal in heaping insult and contumely upon the throne. He denounced his former principles, in the true spirit of an apostate, with a fury equal to the petulant and dogmatical tone in which he had asserted them; and then proceeded to abuse all those who doubted the honesty or wisdom of this change of opinion. He, in short, looked upon every man as his enemy who did not think "his book fit for a gentleman to read;" and would willingly have committed every such presumptuous sceptic to the flames for not bowing down in servile adoration before this idol of his vanity and reputation. Hence the frantic philippics in his latter revolutionary speeches and writings, and the alteration from a severe and stately style of eloquence and reasoning in his earlier compositions to the most laboured paradoxes and wildest declamation. We do not mean to say that his latest works did not display the greatest genius. His native talents blazed out, undisguised and unconfined in them. Indignatio facit versus. Burke's best Muse was his vanity or spleen. He felt quite at home in giving vent to his personal spite and venal malice. He pleaded his own cause and the cause of the passions better and with more eloquence, than he ever pleaded the cause of truth and justice. He felt the one rankling in his heart with all their heat and fury; he only conceived the other with his understanding coldly and circuitously.—The "Letters of William Burke" give one, however, a low idea of Burke's honesty, even in a pecuniary point of view.—(See Barry's "Life.") He constantly tells Barry, as a source of consolation to his friend, and a compliment to his brother, "that though his party had not hitherto been successful, or had not considered him as they ought, matters were not so bad with him but that he could still afford to be honest, and not desert the cause." This is very suspicious. This querulous tone of disappointment, and cockering up of his boasted integrity, must
