it ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative, to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinion high respect; their business unremitted attention. It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasures, his satisfaction, to theirs; and, above all, ever, and in all cases, to prefer their interests to his own. But, his unbiassed opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you; to any man, or to any set of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure; no, nor from the law and constitution. They are a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment ; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion. My worthy colleague says, his will ought to be subservient to yours. If that be all, the thing is innocent. If government were a matter of will upon any side, yours, without question, ought to be superior. But government and legislation are matters of reason and judgment, and not of inclination : and, what sort of reason is that, in which the determination precedes the discussion; in which one set of men deliberate, and another decide; and where those who form the conclusion are perhaps three hundred miles distant from those who hear the arguments?

"To deliver an opinion, is the right of all men; that of constituents is a weighty and respectable opinion,

which a representative ought always hear; and which he ought always mos consider. But authoritative instructio issued, which the member is bound bli plicitly to obey, to vote, and to argu contrary to the clearest conviction of and conscience: these are things utterly the laws of this land, and which arise f mental mistake of the whole order and constitution.

"Parliament is not a congress of amb different and hostile interests; which must maintain, as an agent and advocate, agents and advocates: but Parliament is assembly of one nation, with one interes whole; where, not local purposes; not lo ought to guide, but the general good, r the general reason of the whole. You ch ber indeed; but when you have chosen 1 Member of Bristol, but he is a Member of If the local constituent should have an should form a hasty opinion, evidently op real good of the rest of the community, for that place ought to be as far, as an any endeavour to give it effect."

Well! he had given them this notice of upon which he intended to act; but, as been expected, when he did act upon offended. He had injured their trade, t of Bristol thought, by his votes on the A

and by supporting an Act for relieving debtors from the cruel imprisonment to which they were then subjected, and by some important measures connected with Ireland. He had offended their prejudices in other ways, and he had been too busy in his parliamentary work to pay them as many visits as they had supposed were due from a representative. Upon some of these points he had already explained himself in the course of the Session of Parliament in a Letter addressed to a Gentleman in Bristol, and to the Sheriff of Bristol, -letters which you will find in his works, and which are full of instruction. But he made his completest defence in a speech delivered just before the election. That speech, I do think, was the bravest and the wisest ever addressed to an assembly of Englishmen. Would that our younger statesmen might read it again and again, till they have, in the true sense of the phrase, learnt it by heart! I must not indulge in extracts, for I should not know where to begin or where to end. I will read only these sentences: "I became unpopular in England for one of these acts,' in Ireland for the other. What, then! What obligation lay on me to be popular? I was bound to serve both kingdoms ; to be pleased with my service was their affair, not mine."

The

The citizens of Bristol were not pleased with this service; they dismissed him. He was returned, however, for another place to that Parliament. measures of his friends prevailed in it. Lord North abandoned the Administration, the Marquis of Rock

ingham was again Prime Minister. Mr. Burke became Paymaster-General of the Forces. In that office he would have accomplished the scheme of economical reform which he had proclaimed in a speech he had delivered two years before. But Lord Rockingham died, and Lord Shelburne succeeded him. Mr. Burke believed that the old scheme of ruling by Court influence was about to be resumed by the connivance of this Minister. To counteract it he urged on, if he did not propose, a coalition between Mr. Fox and Lord North. This was one of the occasions, to which I alluded, on which Burke disturbed those party relations which he deemed so important, and bore witness that they can at best be only means to an end. Whether he took the right way of accomplishing the end is another question; I said at the beginning of my lecture that I was far from thinking that he passed unhurt through the conflicts of factions. I hoped that we might learn from his biography what are the great and what are the little transactions in which public men are engaged; what are their own greatnesses and littlenesses. If we compare the events in which the Old and the New World are equally interested with these squabbles about Lord Shelburne, and Mr. Fox, and Lord North, how beggarly these last appear! If we compare Burke himself returning from Bristol in 1780, with Burke the organizer of a new party in 1783, how great he looks in the hour of defeat, how poor in the hour of success! It is no little satisfaction to remember that that hour of success did not last long.

The Fox and North Ministry was broken up. Mr. Pitt became Premier, and Burke continued out of office for the rest of his life.

One great occupation of these later years he entered upon while he was connected with the Ministry. He had given his mind to the relation of England with her Colonies in the West. When she was separated from them, he devoted himself as vigorously to her relations with that mighty empire in the East which had been won by her soldiers and was ruled by her merchants. This subject has become to us one of such deep and awful interest, that I have scarcely courage to speak of it merely as illustrating the life of an individual man. And one may rejoice that among the solemn and terrible associations which the name of India awakens in every one of us at this moment, we may quite forget all the bitter animosities and Court intrigues which gathered about the Bills of Mr. Fox and Mr. Pitt; all that was merely personal in the prosecution of Warren Hastings. We may rejoice still more, though not without trembling, to believe that some of the allegations which we read in Burke's speeches about the British rule in India-allegations, it is to be feared, derived from only too accurate knowledge-some of his comparisons of the older government which had supplanted it, would have been retracted if he had had the experience of another seventy or eighty years. But the substantial part of these speeches remains, after all these deductions, a study and warning for the English statesman and the Englishman, which now less than