OBAP. XL] GOLDSMITH IN PRACTICE AND BURKE IX OFFICE.
but a persuasive speaker, and on honourable as well as most ,-«
A t O»/.
popular man, gave his help as secretary of state : William ^li?
Burke, Edmund's distant relative and dear friend, being
appointed his under-secretary. Upon this the old meddling
"fizzling"* Duke of Newcastle went and warned Conway's
chief against these Burkes. Edmund's real name, he said,
was O'Bourke; and he was not only an Irish adventurer,
a Jacobite, and a papist, but he had shrewd reasons for
believing Mm. a concealed Jesuit to boot. Nevertheless,
seven days after the administration was formed, the Jesuit
and Jacobite, introduced by their common friend Fitzherbert
(who had been named to the Board of Trade), was appointed
private secretary to the Marquis of Boekingham; and Burke's
great political life began.
The first letter of the newly appointed secretary to the
' you know I am soon appeased. Indeed, Horry, if one did not love you
' better than anybody, and you did not write better than other people, one
' could never forgive you ; but I forgot, those are the very reasons why I
' should be the most angry with you. So, know that nothing but a vehement
' long letter can ever make it up betwixt us .... So you cannot bear Mrs.
' Woffington ? yet all the town is in love with her. To say the truth, I am
' glad to find somebody to keep me in countenance, for I think she is an
' impudent, Irish-faced girl.... Poor Sir Robert is to lose his head immediately
' as they say, about which he seems to trouble his head very little; but I must
' tell you a good thing of Lady Thanet's before I go any farther. Lord Bateman
' told her at the Bath that he had Sir Robert's head in his pocket. ' Are you
' ' sure of it,' says she.—'Nothing surer.'—'Why then,' says she, 'you cannot
' ' possibly do so well as to put it on your shoulders.'" I close with a pleasant
passage of banter on a love affair of Horace Walpole's, from a letter of two years'
later date, written from Ghent. " Dear Horry, I delight in your disowning your
" amourette twelve miles out of London. Do you forget all that passed in Chelsea
' summer-house on that head, and in Chelsea parlour too ?.... Yes, twelve
' miles out of London, Horry; and yet you are in the right to commend London
' too. I know your beauty was little out of it at that time, gone to shine
' and do mischief in some country village : but its satellites accompanied it too,
' for I remember you made frequent excursions about that time, spite of all the
' dust and heat in the world. I am not simple ; I know that people like London,
' as Dr. Bentley said of apple-pie; but nobody loves London for London's sake,
1 but green girls and quadrille matrons." Rockingham Memoirs, i. 373—384.
* The epithet is Gray's, who never cares to conceal his contempt for " Old Fobus,"