WILLIAM G. STEVENSON. 83 
stroyed. The ‘‘divine right of kings”’ was yet anarticle 
of common faith, and he saw their sorrow, but heard not 
the wail of anguish which ascended from the oppressed 
and starving people. Rage against the lawless Parisian 
mob filled him, and in his wrath he spoke as if en- 
venomed hate had made him mad; and he was so ad- 
judged, but only by those who differed from him. The 
inspiration of his genius gave him the tongue of truth, 
and the penalty was an assault upon his sanity. 
Then came the supreme sorrow of his life, the death of 
his son, and in his grief he wrote: ‘‘The storm has gone 
over me, and I lie like one of those old oaks which the 
late hurricane has scattered about me ; I am stripped of 
my honors ; | am torn up by the roots, and lie prostrate 
on the earth. Lam alone, I have none to meet my ene- 
mies in the gate; . . . [liveinaninverted order. They 
who ought to have succeeded me have gone before me; 
they who should have been to me as posterity are in the 
place of ancestors.”’ 
Because of the outward expressions of grief which 
were at times his, as when his son’s favorite horse came 
to him and put its head upon his bosom, which caused 
Burke to cry aloud in his sorrow—because of such mani- 
festations of grief, itis said Burke was mad. Edward 
Everett has well said: ‘‘ If I were called upon to desig- 
nate the event or the period in Burke’s life that would 
best sustain a charge of insanity, it would not be when, 
in a gush of the holiest and purest feeling that ever 
stirred the human heart, he wept aloud on the neck of 
his dead son’s favorite horse.’’ As proof that his in- 
tellect was not disordered, his Letters on a Regicide 
Peace, written in 1796, a year before his death, bear 
ample evidence, and are regarded, says John Morley, 
‘in some respects the most splendid of all his compo- 
sitions. . . . We hardly know where else to look 
either in Burke’s own writings or elsewhere for such an 
