comprehension." Much of his time was now spent in retirement at Beaconsfield.

But Burke, as every one realized, was an authority on India. He had already been attacking the corruption in the government there; so when, in 1786, he worked up his charge against Warren Hastings, he found both Fox and Sheridan ready to support him. On May 10, 1787, he appeared at the bar of the House of Peers and solemnly impeached Hastings of "high crimes and misdemeanors." The trial began on February 13, 1788, in Westminster Hall, Burke spoke during four sittings. Investigations followed and the trial dragged through several years. In 1794 Burke made his famous nine days' speech in reply to the defense of Hastings and thus finished his work for the impeachment. Hastings was finally acquitted, but Burke's investigations were really what first prompted reform in the administration of India.

While the trial of Hastings was going on, Burke found time for his third great interest, France. He first touched the subject in a letter, October, 1789, to a Frenchman, M. Dupont. Not long afterwards, the open sympathy of many English for the uprising in France caused him to write his Reflections on the Revolution, published in November, 1790. In these reflections he was no longer the self-contained upholder of constitutional liberty; disgusted by the bloody spectacle of a king dragged through the streets, horrified by the irreverent subversion of ancient, respectable institutions, he came forth the defender of established order. He saw only chaos and crime in the Revolution; he missed its main significance. Sheridan and Fox, who saw great promise in the capture of the Bastile, opposed Burke, who they

thought was growing positively monarchical. But it must not be supposed that Burke took suddenly to shouting for George III. He had always resisted the tyranny of kings and would still have done so, no doubt, if he had not given his whole animosity to what he thought a much worse tyranny, that of mobs and atheists. Thus he became, by force of his own reasoning, over-conservative; he even went so far as to oppose Fox's bill (1790) for the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts. The King was naturally delighted with the Reflections, said it was "a good book, a very good book; every gentleman ought to read it." Its author had certainly lost his old cool judgment, but he was still eloquent and noble. As a result there was a strong reaction against the Revolution, and the Whig Party was almost demolished.

The most serious result for Burke himself was the final alienation from his old friend, Fox. The Whigs were indignant, and Burke, far from a Tory, was thus practically cut off from all party. Yet he was still an important figure: he was in correspondence with French royalists, and the Catholics of Ireland still looked to him for help. In 1792 he published his Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, and in the fall of the same year took his stand on the ministerial side. Such a position made it necessary for him to resign (in 1793) from the Whig Club.

In 1794 Burke's days of active service came to an end. The death of his son, who had just taken his seat for Malton, was a heavy blow; and the last three years of his life he passed in retirement at Beaconsfield. There his chief interests were managing his farm, looking after poor neighbors, caring for the education of the children

of French refugees, and writing indignant pamphlets. One of these, the Letter to a Noble Lord (1795), was a reply, in which he justified himself, to an attack on his acceptance of pensions. He had been offered a peerage, but since he had no son to inherit it, he preferred pensions amounting to £3700. Other important pamphlets during these last days were Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796), marked by his failing judgment and rising indignation. By this time he had begun to suffer from internal abscesses; he declined rapidly and died on July 9, 1797. He was buried, according to his wish, at Beaconsfield, in spite of Fox's generous suggestion of Westminster Abbey. "There is but one event," wrote Canning shortly after, "but that is an event for the world Burke is dead."

It can hardly escape notice that the chief schemes Burke advocated failed of adoption, or that he himself was never a cabinet minister. He was practically always in the minority. But the real cause of his failure, as well as of his greatness, lay in the fact that his nature was essentially poetic and philosophical. He scorned preferment at the compromise of his views or his ideals, and of course he failed, in the reign of George III, as a politician. The great strength of his political wisdom, feared but only half appreciated by most of his contemporaries, was that it was not "partial," "pinched," occasional," like Lord North's, but that it was fundamental, for all time. "A great empire and little minds go ill together;""whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither is in my opinion safe;"

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such sentences abound in Burke. "I have learnt more," said Fox, " from my right honorable friend than from all the men with whom I ever conversed."

THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM

THE period which extends roughly from 1780 to 1830 is usually called the Age of Romanticism. It was distinctly a time of reaction, a reassertion of the poetic nature always strong in the English people. Towards the end of the eighteenth century there came a general protest against the cold conformity to rule that had been the aim of writers under Anne and the early Georges. The result was that imagination got the upper hand and that the age became one of enthusiasm and poetry instead of one of sophistication and prose. Yet men had been taught a lesson by the school of Pope. The Elizabethans, as the Rev. Stopford Brooke points out, had followed chiefly the instincts of nature; the Augustans, on the other hand, had lost themselves in artificial devices. It remained for the Romanticists to combine the two- art and nature. This period, therefore, produced many great poets; it stands, in fact, next to the great age of Elizabeth in literary significance.

The beginnings of the Romantic reaction can be traced underground into the very strongholds of the Augustans. Faint signs of it begin in the hey-day of Pope's despotism; and though Dr. Johnson, still true to the Augustan traditions, made fun of the ballads which his friend Percy collected in 1765, and scourged Macpherson for forging in Ossian what Johnson held to be contemptible stuff, yet ballad and epic were alike trumpet-calls in the Romantic movement.

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The most general characteristics of this period are freedom from restraint and a love for the strange and the picturesque, what Walter Pater has called "strangeness added to beauty." For purposes of study, however, it will be found convenient to subdivide into five heads, though it must be remembered that no writers so defy glib classification as the Romantic writers and that the ticketing of poets with this or that characteristic is a fatal practice. (1) Men, wearying of the artificial fripperies of the Queen Anne age, began to seek natural beauty. At first they had resort only to quiet, rural, noon-day nature; but soon the interest deepened into a fondness for wild and awe-inspiring scenery, for the mountains and the storm-swept sea. (2) Another feature was the revival of the Middle Ages, a keen interest in ancient tales of mystery and romantic deeds, a love of the picturesqueness and pageantry of olden times. This is the widest characteristic of the time; it has, in fact, given the name Romantic to the period. (3) A phase in common with the French Revolution was a growing sympathy with the life of the poor, a sympathy felt more keenly by individual poets, such as Burns and Wordsworth, than by the people as a whole. (4) A very natural development, too, which resulted from greater freedom of thought and a more inquiring spirit, was a more genuine, fundamental philosophy. In many cases of morbid or highly emotional men this brought about over-wrought self-analysis, with the double result of great advance in thought and of frequent melancholia. Such Hamlet-moods may be found in nearly all the poets. (5) Finally, the verseform kept pace with the freedom of thought. Poets, emancipated from the tyranny of the heroic couplet,