On the 2d of August, 1794, his favourite son died, and Burke received the blow with the feelings of one, who regarded the hand of destiny as uplifted against him. His excessive sensibility was agonized by an event melancholy in its nature to all, but which a wise man will regard as the will of the Great Disposer, and a religious man will believe to be a chastisement in mercy.
Burke was both wise and religious, but his feelings habitually bewildered him. All the images of desolation rushed across his creative mind. He was "an uprooted tree," a stream whose course was swallowed up by an earthquake, a wanderer in the wilderness of the world, a man struck down by a thunderbolt! From those fearful fantasies, however, the emergency of public affairs soon summoned him to the exercise of his noble powers; and he gave his country and the world, perhaps the most powerful, certainly the most superb and imaginative, of all his works, the fiery pamphlets on the "regicide peace."
On this unhappy occasion for the condolence of friendship, he received many tributes; but we cannot help quoting one from the celebrated Grattan, which, though characterized by the peculiarities of his style, seems to us a model of tenderness and beauty.
"August 26, 1794.
"My Dear Sir,
"May I be permitted to sympathize where I cannot presume to console.
"The misfortunes of your family are a public care. The late one is to me a personal loss. I have a double right to affliction, and to join my grief, and to express my deep and cordial concern at that hideous stroke which has deprived me of a friend, you of a son, and your country of a promise that would communicate to posterity the living blessings of your genius and your virtue. Your friends may now condole with you, that you should have now no other prospect of immortality than that which is common to Cicero and to Bacon; such as never can be interrupted while there exists the beauty of order, or the love of virtue, and can fear no death except what barbarity may impose on the globe.
"If the same strength of reason which could persuade any other man to bear any misfortune, can administer to the proprietor a few drops of comfort, we may hope that your condition admits of relief. The greatest possible calamity which can be imposed on man, we hope may be supported by the greatest human understanding. For comfort, your friends must refer you to the exercise of its faculties, and to the contemplation of its gigantic proportions—Dura solatia—of which nothing can deprive you while you live. And, though death should mow down every thing about you, and plunder you of your domestic existence, you would still be the owner of a conscious superiority in life, and immortality after it.—I am, my dear sir, with the highest respect and regard,
"Yours most truly,
"H. Grattan."
We must hastily conclude.