Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 5.djvu/160

 THE WORLD'S FAMOUS ORATIONS

many good men — much more than it ever did Edmund Burke. But how did he get the money ? After an Irish fashion — by not getting it at all-

Two-thirds of the purchase-money remained on mortgage, and the balance he borrowed; or, as he puts it, "With all I could collect of my own, and by the aid of my friends, I have established a root in the country." That is how Burke bought Beaconsfield, where he lived till his end came; whither he always hastened when his sensitive mind was tortured by the thought of how badly men governed the world; where he entertained all sorts and conditions of men — Quakers, Brahmins (for whose ancient rites he provided suitable accommodation in a green- house), nobles and abbes flying from revolution- ary France, poets, painters, and peers, no one of whom ever long remained a stranger t6 his charm.

Farming, if it is to pay, is a pursuit of small economies; and Burke was far too Asiatic, trop- ical, and splendid to have anything to do with small economies. His expenditure, like his rhet- oric, was in the "grand style." He belongs to Charles Lamb's great race, "the men who bor- row." But indeed it was not so much that Burke borrowed as that men lent.

Right-feeling men did not wait to be asked. Doctor Brocklesby, that good physician, whose name breathes like a benediction through the pages of the biographies of the best men of his time, who soothed Doctor Johnson's last melan- 136

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