Curwen dropped some remark on the other side.

"What!" Burke cried out, grasping the check-string, "are you one of these people! Set me down!" It needed all Curwen's force to keep him where he was; and when they reached his house Burke stepped out without saying a single word.
We may agree that all this did not indicate the perfect sobriety and self-control proper to a statesman, in what was a serious crisis both to his party and to Europe.

It was about this time that Burke said to Addington, who was then Speaker of the House of Commons, that he was not well.

"I eat too much, Speaker," he said, "I drink too much, and I sleep too little." It is even said that he felt the final breach with Fox as a relief from unendurable suspense; and he quoted the lines about Aeneas, after he had finally resolved to quit Dido and the Carthaginian shore, at last being able to snatch slumber in his ship's tall stern.

There can be no doubt how severe had been the tension.
Yet the performance to which Burke now applied himself is one of the gravest and most reasonable of all his compositions.