213.] On the whole, it seems to be tolerably clear that the difficulties in the way of Burke's promotion to high office were his notoriously straitened circumstances; his ungoverned excesses of party zeal and political passion; finally, what Sir Gilbert Elliot calls the unjust prejudice and clamour against him and his family, and what Burke himself once called the hunt of obloquy that pursued him all his life.

The first two of these causes can scarcely have operated in the arrangements that were made in the Rockingham and Coalition ministries.

But the third, we may be sure, was incessantly at work.

It would have needed social courage alike in 1782, 1783, and 1788 to give cabinet rank to a man round whose name there floated so many disparaging associations.

Social courage is exactly the virtue in which the constructors of a government will always think themselves least able to indulge.