What William Burke said of him in 1766 was true throughout his life, "Ned is full of real business, intent upon doing solid good to his country, as much as if he was to receive twenty per cent from the Empire." Such men as the shrewd and impudent Bigby atoned for a plebeian origin by the arts of dependence and a judicious servility, and drew more of the public money from the pay-office in half a dozen quarter-days than Burke received in all his life.

It was not by such arts that Burke rose.

When we remember all the untold bitterness of the struggle in which he was engaged, from the time when the old Duke of Newcastle tried to make the Marquis of Rockingham dismiss his new private secretary as an Irish Jesuit in disguise (1765), down to the time when the Duke of Bedford, himself battening "in grants to the house of Russell, so enormous as not only to outrage economy, but even to stagger credibility," assailed the Government for giving Burke a moderate pension, we may almost imagine that if Johnson had imitated the famous Tenth Satire a little later, he would have been tempted to apply the poet's cynical criticism of the career heroic to the greater Cicero of his own day.

"I was not," Burke said, in a passage of lofty dignity, "like his Grace of Bedford, swaddled and rocked and dandled into a legislator; _Nitor in adversum_ is the motto for a man like me.

I possessed not one of the qualities, nor cultivated one of the arts, that recommend men to the favour and protection of the great.