15.33m FP Vignand 18-22-33 ADDRESS AT THE UNVEILING OF A TABLET IN BATH, IN MEMORY OF EDMUND BURKE. The occasion which you are honouring with your presence to-day is of a kind long since familiar to you. What a story of the great Georgian and Victorian times might in fact be reconstructed from the tablets in memory of former residents, which you have already set up in the streets of Bath! Your town has been a haunt of great men ; the very air is filled yet with the shadows of the mighty. Foremost in your civic record comes naturally your old member, the masterful Chatham, and hard after, his yet more masterful son. Then you have commemorated the stay among you of Britain's greatest sailor, Lord Nelson, and of British soldiers who won imperishable renown in two remote continents, Lord Clive in Asia, Gen. Wolfe in America. You have cherished, likewise, the memories of residents of gentler fame. Here, on this very North Parade, as your tablets show, dwelt Goldsmith, whom to this day all men love, and Wordsworth, whom all admire. On the South Parade is seen your tribute to the best novelist Britain had to that time produced, Sir Walter Scott, and there is place for another to one of the greatest men of letters she ever produced, Samuel Johnson. Your other novelists range from Henry Fielding and Jane Austin to Charles Dickens; and your poets from George Crabbe to Thomas Moore and Walter Savage Landor; while, with impartial hands, you have placed tablets also for Gainsborough, the artist, Quin, the actor, and Herschell, the astronomer. And yet, gentlemen of Bath, in all this brilliant galaxy you have left the greatest to the last. He was more nearly your own, too, than many of the others. It was here he found his devoted wife. Perhaps the most fruitful period of his great public career he spent as the representative in the House of Commons for your nearest neighbours, the people of Bristol. Here Here he came repeatedly for rest and enjoyment; and here he came too when he knew the shadow of death was upon him. In this very house he house he spent the last months in which any activity was left him, and he only quitted it for the serene and beautiful death-bed at Beaconsfield.* Did I go too far in rating him the greatest * The day before Mr. Burke left Bath, for the last time, May 23, 1797, he sent a letter to Mrs. Leadbeater, written by another hand, but with a tremulous signature from his own, saying: "I feel as I ought to do your constant hereditary kindness to me and mine. What you have heard of my illness is far from exaggerated. I am, thank God, alive, and that is all. Hastening to dissolution, I have to bless Providence that I do not suffer a great deal of pain . . . I have been at Bath these four months to no purpose, and am therefore to be removed to my own house at Beaconsfield to-morrow, to be nearer to an habitation more permanent, humbly and fearfully hoping that my better part may find a better mansion." The same day he sent a letter to Arthur Young, beginning as follows: "I am on the point of leaving Bath, having no further hope of benefit from these waters; and as soon as I get home, (if I should live to get home,) if I should find the papers transmitted me by your board, I shall send them faithfully to you, though, to say the truth, I do not think them of very great importance. My constant opinion was, and is, that all matters relative to labour ought to be left to the conventions of the parties; that the great danger is, in governments intermeddling too much." you have yet commemorated? far as Macaulay went. It is not so He said quite simply that Edmund Burke was "the greatest man then living." We may be sure the eminent historian and almost omniscient scholar and critic forgot neither of two other great men then living, William Pitt or Charles James Fox, when he deliberately chose that superlative. It is not so far as Grenville went, when he said that Burke is to politics what Shakespeare is to the moral world. In considering that eulogium, however, I must confess that, while recognizing the propriety of coupling the names, I have often been puzzled to know whether Grenville meant that politics had nothing to do with morals, or merely that Shakespeare had nothing to do with politics. It is not so far as Mackintosh went, who considered Burke 'without a parallel in any age or country, unless with Cicero and Lord Bacon;" or so far as Lord Morley went, who, seeking another standard of comparison, pronounced him your greatest man since Milton." 66 |