Precisians, like Lafayette, might choose to see their patriotic hopes ruined rather than have them saved by Mirabeau, because Mirabeau was a debauchee.
Burke's public morality was of stouter stuff, and he loved Fox because he knew that under the stains and blemishes that had been left by a deplorable education, was that sterling, inexhaustible ore in which noble sympathies are subtly compounded with resplendent powers.
If he was warmly attached to his political friends, Burke, at least before the Revolution, was usually on fair terms in private life with his political opponents.

There were few men whose policy he disliked more than he disliked the policy of George Grenville.

And we have seen that he criticised Grenville in a pamphlet which did not spare him.
Yet Grenville and he did not refuse one another's hospitality, and were on the best terms to the very end.

Wilberforce, again, was one of the staunchest friends of Pitt, and fought one of the greatest electioneering battles on Pitt's side in the struggle of 1784; but it made no difference in Burke's relations with him.

In 1787 a coldness arose between them.