angel?—­of a woman.”  Burke himself courageously walked to and fro amid the raging crowds with firm composure, though the experiment was full of peril.  He describes the mob as being made up, as London mobs generally are, rather of the unruly and dissolute than of fanatical malignants, and he vehemently opposed any concessions by Parliament to the spirit of intolerance which had first kindled the blaze.  All the letters of the time show that the outrages and alarms of those days and nights, in which the capital seemed to be at the mercy of a furious rabble, made a deeper impression on the minds of contemporaries than they ought to have done.  Burke was not likely to be less excited than others by the sight of such insensate disorder; and it is no idle fancy that he had the mobs of 1780 still in his memory, when ten years later he poured out the vials of his wrath on the bloodier mob which carried the King and Queen of France in wild triumph from Versailles to Paris.

In the previous February (1780) Burke had achieved one of the greatest of all his parliamentary and oratorical successes.  Though the matter of this particular enterprise is no longer alive, yet it illustrates his many strong qualities in so remarkable a way that it is right to give some account of it.  We have already seen that Burke steadily set his face against parliamentary reform; he habitually declared that the machine was well enough to answer any good purpose, provided the materials were sound.  The statesman who resists all projects for the reform of the constitution, and yet eagerly proclaims how deplorably imperfect are the practical results of its working, binds himself to vigorous exertions for the amendment of administration.  Burke devoted himself to this duty with a fervid assiduity that has not often been exampled, and has never been surpassed.  He went to work with the zeal of a religious enthusiast, intent on purging his Church and his faith of the corruptions which lowered it in the eyes of men.  There was no part or order of government so obscure, so remote, or so complex, as to escape his acute and persevering observation.

Burke’s object, in his schemes for Economical Reform, was less to husband the public resources and relieve the tax-payer—­though this aim could not have been absent from his mind, overburdened as England then was with the charges of the American war—­than to cut off the channels which supplied the corruption of the House of Commons.  The full title of the first project which he presented to the legislature (February 1780), was, A Plan for the Better Security of the Independence of Parliament, and the Economical Reformation of the Civil and other Establishments.  It was to the former that he deemed the latter to be the most direct road.  The strength of the administration in the House was due to the gifts which the Minister had in his hands to dispense.  Men voted with the side which could reward their fidelity.  It was the number of sinecure