Burke, as I have said elsewhere, had none of the vices of profusion, but he had that quality which Aristotle places high among the virtues--the noble mean of Magnificence, standing midway between the two extremes of vulgar ostentation and narrow pettiness.

At least, every creditor was paid in good time, and nobody suffered but himself.

Those who think these disagreeable matters of supreme importance, and allow such things to stand between them and Brake's greatness, are like the people--slightly to alter a figure from a philosopher of old--who, when they went to Olympia, could only perceive that they were scorched by the sun, and pressed by the crowd, and deprived of comfortable means of bathing, and wetted by the rain, and that life was full of disagreeable and troublesome things, and so they almost forgot the great colossus of ivory and gold, Phidias's statue of Zeus, which they had come to see, and which stood in all its glory and power before their perturbed and foolish vision.
There have been few men in history with whom personal objects counted for so little as they counted with Burke.

He really did what so many public men only feign to do.

He forgot that he had any interests of his own to be promoted, apart from the interests of the party with which he acted, and from those of the whole nation, for which he held himself a trustee.