EDMUND BURKE TO DR. F. LAURENCE.

[Bath, April, 1797.]

MY DEAR SIR, THE very first relaxation of my complaint, which gave me leisure and disposition to attend to what is going on, has filled my mind with many uneasy sensations and many unpleasant reflections. The few of us who have protracted life, to the extreme limits of our short period, have been condemned to see extraordinary things-new systems of policy--new opinions-new principles-and not only new men, but what might appear a new species of men. I believe that they who lived forty years ago (if the intermediate space of time were expunged from their memory) could hardly credit their senses, when they heard from the highest authority, that an army of two hundred thousand men was kept up in this island: that in the neighbouring island there were at least fourscore thousand more: but, when he should hear of this army, which has not its parallel, what must be his astonishment to hear, that it was kept up for the purpose of an inert and passive defence; that, in its far greater part, it was disabled, by its constitution and very essence, from defending us against an enemy by any one preventive stroke, or any operation of active hostility! What must his reflections be, on hearing that a fleet of five hundred men of war, the best appointed, and to the full as ably commanded, as this country ever had upon the sea, was for the greater part employed in acting upon the same system of unenterprising defence? What must

his sentiments be, who remembers the former energy of England, when he is given to understand that these two islands, with their extensive and every where vulnerable seacoast, should be considered as a garrison sea town? What would he think if the garrison of so strange a fortress should be such as never to make a sally; and that, contrary to all that has been hitherto seen in war, an infinitely inferior army may with safety besiege this garrison, and, without hazarding the life of a man, ruin the garrison and the place, merely by the menaces and false appearances of an attack? What must his surprise be on finding, that with the increases of trade, and balances unknown before, and with less outgoing than at any former time, the public credit should labour, even to the edge of a bankruptcy; and that the confidence of the people in the security of their property should lessen in proportion as all apparent means of their safety are augmented? The last part of this dreadful paradox is to be solved but by one way; and that is by an obscure undefined sense which the people entertain that the apparent means of their safety are not real nor well understood, and that they confide in their government more from their opinion that some sort of government should be supported, than from a conviction that the measures taken by the existing government for the public safety are rational or well adapted to their end. Had it pleased God to continue to me even the late weak remains of my strength, I purposed to make this the subject of a letter, which I intended to address to a brother member of yours, upon the

present state of affairs; but as I may never be able to finish it, I regard this matter of defence as so much the most important of all considerations at this moment, that it supersedes all concern of my bodily and mental weakness, and urges me, by an impulse I cannot resist, to spend at least my last breath in laying before you some part of the anxious thoughts with which I have been oppressed, and which, more than any bodily distemper, have sunk me to the condition in which you know I am. I have no hand to write, but I am able to dictate from the bed on which I pass my nights and days*.

What I say may have no weight; but it is possible that it may tend to put other men of more ability, and who are in a situation where their abilities may be more useful, into a train of thinking. What I dictate may not be pleasing either to the great or to the multitude; but looking back on my past public life, though not without many faults and errors, I have never made many sacrifices to the favour of the great, or to the humour of the people. I never remember more than two instances in which I have given way to popularity; and those two are the things of which, in the whole course of my life, now at the end of it, I have the most reason to repent. Such has been the habit of my public life, even when individual favour and popular countenance might be plausibly presented to me as the means of doing my duty the more effectually.

* This unfinished letter, which was dictated from his deathbed by Mr. Burke, was one of the last, if not the very last, that he ever wrote.

But now, alas! of what value to me are all those helps or all those impediments? When the damp chill sweat of death already begins to glaze our visage, of what moment is it to us whether the vain breath of man blows hot or cold upon it? But our duties to men are not extinguished with our regard to their opinions. A country which has been dear to us from our birth ought to be dear to us, as from our entrance, so to our final exit from the stage upon which we have been appointed to act; and in the career of the duties which must in part be enjoyments of our new existence, how can we better start, and from what more proper post, than the performance of those duties which have made the occupations of the first part of the course allotted to us? *****

MR. CURRAN TO THE REV. HENRY WESTON, NEWMARKET, COUNTY CORK.

London, 31, Chandos Street, July 10, 1773. I WOULD have taken a last farewell of my dear Harry from Dublin, if I had not written so shortly before I left it, and, indeed, I was not sorry for being exempt from a task for which a thousand causes conspired to make me at that juncture unqualified. It was not without regret that I could leave a country, which my birth, education, and connexions had rendered dear to me, and venture alone, almost a child of fortune, into a land of strangers. In such moments of despondence, when fancy plays the self- tormentor, she

commonly acquits herself to a miracle, and will not fail to collect in a single group the most hideous forms of anticipated misfortune. I considered myself, besides, as resigning for ever the little indulgences that youth and inexperience may claim for their errors, and passing to a period of life in which the best can scarce escape the rigid severity of censure; nor could the little trivial vanity of taking the reins of my own conduct alleviate the pain of so dear-bought a transition from dependance to liberty. Full of these reflections as I passed the gate, I could not but turn and take a last lingering look of poor Almamater; it was the scene of many a boyish folly, and of many a happy hour. I should have felt more confusion at part of the retrospect, had I not been relieved by a recollection of the valuable friendships I had formed there. Though I am far from thinking such a circumstance can justify a passed misconduct, yet I cannot call that time totally a blank, in which one has acquired the greatest blessing of humanity. It was with a melancholy kind of exultation I counted over the number of those I loved there, while my heart gave a sigh to each name in the catalogue ; nay, even the fellows, whom I never loved, I forgave at that moment; the parting tear blotted out every injury, and I gave them as hearty a benediction as if they had deserved it; as for my general acquaintance (for I could not but go the round), I packed their respective little sighs into one great sigh, as I turned round on my heel. My old friend and handmaid Betty, perceiving me in motion, got her hip under the strong-box,