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In the summer of 1794 Burke was struck to the ground by a blow to his
deepest affection in life, and he never recovered from it. His whole soul
was wrapped up in his only son, of whose abilities he had the most
extravagant estimate and hope. All the evidence goes to show that Richard
Burke was one of the most presumptuous and empty-headed of human beings.
"He is the most impudent and opiniative fellow I ever knew," said Wolfe
Tone. Gilbert Elliot, a very different man, gives the same account.
"Burke," he says, describing a dinner party at Lord Fitzwilliam's in 1793,
"has now got such a train after him as would sink anybody but himself: his
son, who is quite _nauseated_ by all mankind; his brother, who is liked
better than his son, but is rather oppressive with animal spirits and
brogue; and his cousin, William Burke, who is just returned unexpectedly
from India, as much ruined as when he went years ago, and who is a fresh
charge on any prospects of power Burke may ever have. Mrs Burke has in her
train Miss French [Burke's niece], the most perfect _She Paddy_ that ever
was caught. Notwithstanding these disadvantages Burke is in himself a sort
of power in the state. It is not too much to say that he is a sort of power
in Europe, though totally without any of those means or the smallest share
in them which give or maintain power in other men." Burke accepted the
position of a power in Europe seriously. Though no man was ever more free
from anything like the egoism of the intellectual coxcomb, yet he abounded
in that active self-confidence and self-assertion which is natural in men
who are conscious of great powers, and strenuous in promoting great causes.
In the summer of 1791 he despatched his son to Coblenz to give advice to
the royalist exiles, then under the direction of Calonne, and to report to
him at Beaconsfield their disposition and prospects. Richard Burke was
received with many compliments, but of course nothing came of his mission,
and the only impression that remains with the reader of his prolix story is
his tale of the two royal brothers, who afterwards became Louis XVIII. and
Charles X., meeting after some parting, and embracing one another with many
tears on board a boat in the middle of the Rhine, while some of the
courtiers raised a cry of "Long live the king"--the king who had a few
weeks before been carried back in triumph to his capital with Mayor Petion
in his coach. When we think of the pass to which things had come in Paris
by this time, and of the unappeasable ferment that boiled round the court,
there is a certain touch of the ludicrous in the notion of poor Richard
Burke writing to Louis XVI. a letter of wise advice how to comport himself.

At the end of the same year, with the approval of his father he started for
Ireland as the adviser of the Catholic Association. He made a wretched
emissary, and there was no limit to his arrogance, noisiness and
indiscretion. The Irish agitators were glad to give him two thousand
guineas and to send him home. The mission is associated with a more
important thing, his father's _Letters to Sir Hercules Langrishe_,
advocating the admission of the Irish Catholics to the franchise. This
short piece abounds richly in maxims of moral and political prudence. And
Burke exhibited considerable courage in writing it; for many of its maxims
seem to involve a contradiction, first, to the principles on which he
withstood the movement in France, and second, to his attitude upon the
subject of parliamentary reform. The contradiction is in fact only
superficial. Burke was not the man to fall unawares into a trap of this
kind. His defence of Catholic relief--and it had been the conviction of a
lifetime--was very properly founded on propositions which were true of
Ireland, and were true neither of France nor of the quality of
parliamentary representation in England. Yet Burke threw such breadth and
generality over all he wrote that even these propositions, relative as they
were, form a short manual of statesmanship.

At the close of the session of 1794 the impeachment of Hastings had come to
an end, and Burke bade farewell to parliament. Richard Burke was elected in
his father's place at Malton. The king was bent on making the champion of
the old order of Europe a peer. His title was to be Lord Beaconsfield, and
it was designed to annex to the title an income for three lives. The patent
was being made ready, when all was arrested by the sudden death of the son
who was to Burke more than life. The old man's grief was agonizing and
inconsolable. "The storm has gone over me," he wrote in words which are
well known, but which can hardly be repeated too often for any who have an
ear for the cadences of noble and pathetic speech,--"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 all my honours; I am torn up by the
roots and lie prostrate on the earth.... I am alone. I have none to meet my
enemies in the gate.... I live in an inverted 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."

A pension of L2500 was all that Burke could now be persuaded to accept. The
duke of Bedford and Lord Lauderdale made some remarks in parliament upon
this paltry reward to a man who, in conducting a great trial on the public
behalf, had worked harder for nearly ten years than any minister in any
cabinet of the reign. But it was not yet safe to kick up heels in face of
the dying lion. The vileness of such criticism was punished, as it deserved
to be, in the _Letter to a Noble Lord_ (1796), in which Burke showed the
usual art of all his compositions in shaking aside the insignificances of a
subject. He turned mere personal defence and retaliation into an occasion
for a lofty enforcement of constitutional principles, and this, too, with a
relevancy and pertinence of consummate skilfulness. There was to be one
more great effort before the end.

In the spring of 1796 Pitt's constant anxiety for peace had become more
earnest than ever. He had found out the instability of the coalition and
the power of France. Like the thrifty steward he was, he saw with growing
concern the waste of the national resources and the strain upon commerce,
with a public debt swollen to what then seemed the desperate sum of
L400,000,000. Burke at the notion of negotiation flamed out in the _Letters
on a Regicide Peace_, in some respects the most splendid of all his
compositions. They glow with passion, and yet with all their rapidity is
such steadfastness, the fervour of imagination is so skilfully tempered by
close and plausible reasoning, and the whole is wrought with such strength
and fire, that we hardly know where else to look either in Burke's own
writings or elsewhere for such an exhibition of the rhetorical resources of
our language. We cannot wonder that the whole nation was stirred to the
very depths, or that they strengthened the aversion of the king, of Windham
and other important personages in the government against the plans of Pitt.
The prudence of their drift must be settled by external considerations.
Those who think that the French were likely to show a moderation and
practical reasonableness in success, such as they had never shown in the
hour of imminent ruin, will find Burke's judgment full of error and
mischief. Those, on the contrary, who think that the nation which was on
the very eve of surrendering itself to the Napoleonic absolutism was not in
a hopeful humour for peace and the European order, will believe that
Burke's protests were as perspicacious as they were powerful, and that
anything which chilled the energy of the war was as fatal as he declared it
to be.

When the third and most impressive of these astonishing productions came
into the hands of the public, the writer was no more. Burke died on the 8th
of July 1797. Fox, who with all his faults was never wanting in a fine and
generous sensibility, proposed that there should be a public funeral, and
that the body should lie among the illustrious dead in Westminster Abbey.
Burke, however, had left strict injunctions that his burial should be
private; and he was laid in the little church at Beaconsfield. It was the
year of Campo Formio. So a black whirl and torment of rapine, violence and
fraud was encircling the Western world, as a life went out which,
notwithstanding some eccentricities [v.04 p.0835] and some aberrations, had
made great tides in human destiny very luminous.

(J. MO.)

AUTHORITIES.--Of the _Collected Works_, there are two main editions--the
quarto and the octavo. (1) Quarto, in eight volumes, begun in 1792, under
the editorship of Dr F. Lawrence; vols. i.-iii. were published in 1792;
vols. iv.-viii., edited by Dr Walter King, sometime bishop of Rochester,
were completed in 1827. (2) Octavo in sixteen volumes. This was begun at
Burke's death, also by Drs Lawrence and King; vols. i.-viii. were published
in 1803 and reissued in 1808, when Dr Lawrence died; vols. ix.-xii. were
published in 1813 and the remaining four vols. in 1827. A new edition of
vols. i.-viii. was published in 1823 and the contents of vols. i.-xii. in 2
vols. octavo in 1834. An edition in nine volumes was published in Boston,
Massachusetts, in 1839. This contains the whole of the English edition in
sixteen volumes, with a reprint of the _Account of the European Settlements
in America_ which is not in the English edition.

Among the numerous editions published later may be mentioned that in
_Bohn's British Classics_, published in 1853. This contains the fifth
edition of Sir James Prior's life; also an edition in twelve volumes,
octavo, published by J.C. Nimmo, 1898. There is an edition of the _Select
Works_ of Burke with introduction and notes by E.J. Payne in the Clarendon
Press series, new edition, 3 vols., 1897. _The Correspondence of Edmund
Burke_, edited by Earl Fitzwilliam and Sir R. Bourke, with appendix,
detached papers and notes for speeches, was published in 4 vols., 1844.
_The Speeches of Edmund Burke, in the House of Commons and Westminster
Hall_, were published in 4 vols., 1816. Other editions of the speeches are
those _On Irish Affairs_, collected and arranged by Matthew Arnold, with a
preface (1881), _On American Taxation, On Conciliation with America_,
together with the _Letter to the Sheriff of Bristol_, edited with
introduction and notes by F.G. Selby (1895).

The standard life of Burke is that by Sir James Prior, _Memoir of the Life
and Character of Edmund Burke with Specimens of his Poetry and Letters_
(1824). The lives by C. MacCormick (1798) by R. Bisset (1798, 1800) are of
little value. Other lives are those by the Rev. George Croly (2 vols.,
1847), and by T. MacKnight (3 vols., 1898). Of critical estimates of
Burke's life the _Edmund Burke_ of John Morley, "English Men of Letters"
series (1879), is an elaboration of the above article; see also his _Burke,
a Historical Study_ (1867); "Three Essays on Burke," by Sir James Fitzjames
Stephen in _Horae Sabbaticae_, series iii. (1892); and _Peptographia
Dublinensis, Memorial Discourses preached in the Chapel of Trinity College,
Dublin_, 1895-1902; _Edmund Burke_, by G. Chadwick, bishop of Derry (1902).

BURKE, SIR JOHN BERNARD (1814-1892), British genealogist, was born in
London, on the 5th of January 1814, and was educated in London and in
France. His father, John Burke (1787-1848), was also a genealogist, and in
1826 issued a _Genealogical and Heraldic Dictionary of the Peerage and
Baronetage of the United Kingdom_. This work, generally known as _Burke's
Peerage_, has been issued annually since 1847. While practising as a
barrister Bernard Burke assisted his father in his genealogical work, and
in 1848 took control of his publications. In 1853 he was appointed Ulster
king-at-arms; in 1854 he was knighted; and in 1855 he became keeper of the
state papers in Ireland. After having devoted his life to genealogical
studies he died in Dublin on the 12th of December 1892. In addition to
editing _Burke's Peerage_ from 1847 to his death, Burke brought out several
editions of a companion volume, _Burke's Landed Gentry_, which was first
published between 1833 and 1838. In 1866 and 1883 he published editions of
his father's _Dictionary of the Peerages of England, Scotland and Ireland,
extinct, dormant and in abeyance_ (earlier editions, 1831, 1840, 1846); in
1855 and 1876 editions of his _Royal Families of England, Scotland and
Wales_ (1st edition, 1847-1851); and in 1878 and 1883 enlarged editions of
his _Encyclopaedia of Heraldry, or General Armoury of England, Scotland and
Ireland_. Burke's own works include _The Roll of Battle Abbey_ (1848); _The
Romance of the Aristocracy_ (1855); _Vicissitudes of Families_ (1883 and
several earlier editions); and _The Rise of Great Families_ (1882). He was
succeeded as editor of _Burke's Peerage_ and _Landed Gentry_ by his fourth
son, Ashworth Peter Burke.

BURKE, ROBERT O'HARA (1820-1861), Australian explorer, was born at St
Cleram, Co. Galway, Ireland, in 1820. Descended from a branch of the family
of Clanricarde, he was educated in Belgium, and at twenty years of age
entered the Austrian army, in which he attained the rank of captain. In
1848 he left the Austrian service, and became a member of the Royal Irish
Constabulary. Five years later he emigrated to Tasmania, and shortly
afterwards crossed to Melbourne, where he became an inspector of police.
When the Crimean War broke out he went to England in the hope of securing a
commission in the army, but peace had meanwhile been signed, and he
returned to Victoria and resumed his police duties. At the end of 1857 the
Philosophical Institute of Victoria took up the question of the exploration
of the interior of the Australian continent, and appointed a committee to
inquire into and report upon the subject. In September 1858, when it became
known that John McDouall Stuart had succeeded in penetrating as far as the
centre of Australia, the sum of L1000 was anonymously offered for the
promotion of an expedition to cross the continent from south to north, on
condition that a further sum of L2000 should be subscribed within a
twelvemonth. The amount having been raised within the time specified, the
Victorian parliament supplemented it by a vote of L6000, and an expedition
was organized under the leadership of Burke, with W.J. Wills as surveyor
and astronomical observer. The story of this expedition, which left
Melbourne on the 21st of August 1860, furnishes perhaps the most painful
episode in Australian annals. Ten Europeans and three Sepoys accompanied
the expedition, which was soon torn by internal dissensions. Near Menindie
on the Darling, Landells, Burke's second in command, became insubordinate
and resigned, his example being followed by the doctor--a German. On the
11th of November Burke, with Wills and five assistants, fifteen horses and
sixteen camels, reached Cooper's Creek in Queensland, where a depot was
formed near good grass and abundance of water. Here Burke proposed waiting
the arrival of his third officer, Wright, whom he had sent back from
Torowoto to Menindie to fetch some camels and supplies. Wright, however,
delayed his departure until the 26th of January 1861. Meantime, weary of
waiting, Burke, with Wills, King and Gray as companions, determined on the
16th of December to push on across the continent, leaving an assistant
named Brahe to take care of the depot until Wright's arrival. On the 4th of
February 1861 Burke and his party, worn down by famine, reached the estuary
of the Flinders river, not far from the present site of Normantown on the
Gulf of Carpentaria. On the 26th of February began their return journey.
The party suffered greatly from famine and exposure, and but for the rainy
season, thirst would have speedily ended their miseries. In vain they
looked for the relief which Wright was to bring them. On the 16th of April
Gray died, and the emaciated survivors halted a day to bury his body. That
day's delay, as it turned out, cost Burke and Wills their lives; they
arrived at Cooper's Creek to find the depot deserted. But a few hours
before Brahe, unrelieved by Wright, and thinking that Burke had died or
changed his plans, had taken his departure for the Darling. With such
assistance as they could get from the natives, Burke, and his two
companions struggled on, until death overtook Burke and Wills at the end of
June. King sought the natives, who cared for him until his relief by a
search party in September. No one can deny the heroism of the men whose
lives were sacrificed in this ill-starred expedition. But it is admitted
that the leaders were not bushmen and had had no experience in exploration.
Disunion and disobedience to orders, from the highest to the lowest,
brought about the worst results, and all that now remains to tell the story
of the failure of this vast undertaking is a monument to the memory of the
foolhardy heroes, from the chisel of Charles Summers, erected on a
prominent site in Melbourne.

BURKE, WILLIAM (1792-1829), Irish criminal, was born in Ireland in 1792.
After trying his hand at a variety of trades there, he went to Scotland
about 1817 as a navvy, and in 1827 was living in a lodging-house in
Edinburgh kept by William Hare, another Irish labourer. Towards the end of
that year one of Hare's lodgers, an old army pensioner, died. This was the
period of the body-snatchers or Resurrectionists, and Hare and Burke, aware
that money could always be obtained for a corpse, sold the body to Dr
Robert Knox, a leading Edinburgh anatomist, for L7, 10s. The price obtained
and the simplicity of the transaction suggested to Hare an easy method of
making a [v.04 p.0836] profitable livelihood, and Burke at once fell in
with the plan. The two men inveigled obscure travellers to Hare's or some
other lodging-house, made them drunk and then suffocated them, taking care
to leave no marks of violence. The bodies were sold to Dr Knox for prices
averaging from L8 to L14. At least fifteen victims had been disposed of in
this way when the suspicions of the police were aroused, and Burke and Hare
were arrested. The latter turned king's evidence, and Burke was found
guilty and hanged at Edinburgh on the 28th of January 1829. Hare found it
impossible, in view of the strong popular feeling, to remain in Scotland.
He is believed to have died in England under an assumed name. From Burke's
method of killing his victims has come the verb "to burke," meaning to
suffocate, strangle or suppress secretly, or to kill with the object of
selling the body for the purposes of dissection.

See George Macgregor, _History of Burke and Hare and of the Resurrectionist
Times_ (Glasgow, 1884).

BURLAMAQUI, JEAN JACQUES (1694-1748), Swiss publicist, was born at Geneva
on the 24th of June 1694. At the age of twenty-five he was designated
honorary professor of ethics and the law of nature at the university of
Geneva. Before taking up the appointment he travelled through France and
England, and made the acquaintance of the most eminent writers of the
period. On his return he began his lectures, and soon gained a wide
reputation, from the simplicity of his style and the precision of his
views. He continued to lecture for fifteen years, when he was compelled on
account of ill-health to resign. His fellow-citizens at once elected him a
member of the council of state, and he gained as high a reputation for his
practical sagacity as he had for his theoretical knowledge. He died at
Geneva on the 3rd of April 1748. His works were _Principes du droit
naturel_ (1747), and _Principes du droit politique_ (1751). These have
passed through many editions, and were very extensively used as text-books.
Burlamaqui's style is simple and clear, and his arrangement of the material
good. His fundamental principle may be described as rational
utilitarianism, and in many ways it resembles that of Cumberland.

BURLESQUE (Ital. _burlesco_, from _burla_, a joke, fun, playful trick), a
form of the comic in art, consisting broadly in an imitation of a work of
art with the object of exciting laughter, by distortion or exaggeration, by
turning, for example, the highly rhetorical into bombast, the pathetic into
the mock-sentimental, and especially by a ludicrous contrast between the
subject and the style, making gods speak like common men and common men
like gods. While parody (_q.v._), also based on imitation, relies for its
effect more on the close following of the style of its counterpart,
burlesque depends on broader and coarser effects. Burlesque may be applied
to any form of art, and unconsciously, no doubt, may be found even in
architecture. In the graphic arts it takes the form better known as
"caricature" (_q.v._). Its particular sphere is, however, in literature,
and especially in drama. The _Batrachomachia_, or Battle of the Frogs and
Mice, is the earliest example in classical literature, being a travesty of
the Homeric epic. There are many true burlesque parts in the comedies of
Aristophanes, _e.g._ the appearance of Socrates in the _Clouds_. The
Italian word first appears in the _Opere Burlesche_ of Francesco Berni
(1497-1535). In France during part of the reign of Louis XIV., the
burlesque attained to great popularity; burlesque Aeneids, Iliads and
Odysseys were composed, and even the most sacred subjects were not left
untravestied. Of the numerous writers of these, P. Scarron is most
prominent, and his _Virgile Travesti_ (1648-1653) was followed by numerous
imitators. In English literature Chaucer's _Rime of Sir Thopas_ is a
burlesque of the long-winded medieval romances. Among the best-known true
burlesques in English dramatic literature may be mentioned the 2nd duke of
Buckingham's _The Rehearsal_, a burlesque of the heroic drama; Gay's
_Beggar's Opera_, of the Italian opera; and Sheridan's _The Critic_. In the
later 19th century the name "burlesque" was given to a form of musical
dramatic composition in which the true element of burlesque found little or
no place. These musical burlesques, with which the Gaiety theatre, London,
and the names of Edward Terry, Fred Leslie and Nellie Farren are
particularly connected, developed from the earlier extravaganzas of J.R.
Planche, written frequently round fairy tales. The Gaiety type of burlesque
has since given place to the "musical comedy," and its only survival is to
be found in the modern pantomime.

BURLINGAME, ANSON (1820-1870), American legislator and diplomat, was born
in New Berlin, Chenango county, New York, on the 14th of November 1820. In
1823 his parents took him to Ohio, and about ten years afterwards to
Michigan. In 1838-1841 he studied in one of the "branches" of the
university of Michigan, and in 1846 graduated at the Harvard law school. He
practised law in Boston, and won a wide reputation by his speeches for the
Free Soil party in 1848. He was a member of the Massachusetts
constitutional convention in 1853, of the state senate in 1853-1854, and of
the national House of Representatives from 1855 to 1861, being elected for
the first term as a "Know Nothing" and afterwards as a member of the new
Republican party, which he helped to organize in Massachusetts. He was an
effective debater in the House, and for his impassioned denunciation (June
21, 1856) of Preston S. Brooks (1819-1857), for his assault upon Senator
Charles Sumner, was challenged by Brooks. Burlingame accepted the challenge
and specified rifles as the weapons to be used; his second chose Navy
Island, above the Niagara Falls, and in Canada, as the place for the
meeting. Brooks, however, refused these conditions, saying that he could
not reach the place designated "without running the gauntlet of mobs and
assassins, prisons and penitentiaries, bailiffs and constables." To
Burlingame's appointment as minister to Austria (March 22, 1861) the
Austrian authorities objected because in Congress he had advocated the
recognition of Sardinia as a first-class power and had championed Hungarian
independence. President Lincoln thereupon appointed him (June 14, 1861)
minister to China. This office he held until November 1867, when he
resigned and was immediately appointed (November 26) envoy extraordinary
and minister plenipotentiary to head a Chinese diplomatic mission to the
United States and the principal European nations. The embassy, which
included two Chinese ministers, an English and a French secretary, six
students from the Tung-wan Kwang at Peking, and a considerable retinue,
arrived in the United States in March 1868, and concluded at Washington
(28th of July 1868) a series of articles, supplementary to the Reed Treaty
of 1858, and later known as "The Burlingame Treaty." Ratifications of the
treaty were not exchanged at Peking until November 23, 1869. The
"Burlingame Treaty" recognizes China's right of eminent domain over all her
territory, gives China the right to appoint at ports in the United States
consuls, "who shall enjoy the same privileges and immunities as those
enjoyed by the consuls of Great Britain and Russia"; provides that
"citizens of the United States in China of every religious persuasion and
Chinese subjects in the United States shall enjoy entire liberty of
conscience and shall be exempt from all disability or persecution on
account of their religious faith or worship in either country"; and grants
certain privileges to citizens of either country residing in the other, the
privilege of naturalization, however, being specifically withheld. After
leaving the United States, the embassy visited several continental
capitals, but made no definite treaties. Burlingame's speeches did much to
awaken interest in, and a more intelligent appreciation of, China's
attitude toward the outside world. He died suddenly at St Petersburg, on
the 23rd of February 1870.

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