We have spoken of the dislike of these excellent women for Sheridan and Fox.  In Sheridan’s case Burke did not much disagree with them.  Their characters were as unlike and as antipathetic as those of two men could be; and to antipathy of temperament was probably added a kind of rivalry, which may justly have affected one of them with an irritated humiliation.  Sheridan was twenty years younger than Burke, and did not come into Parliament until Burke had fought the prolonged battle of the American war, and had achieved the victory of Economic Reform.  Yet Sheridan was immediately taken up by the party, and became the intimate and counsellor of Charles Fox, its leader, and of the Prince of Wales, its patron.  That Burke never failed to do full justice to Sheridan’s brilliant genius, or to bestow generous and unaffected praise on his oratorical successes, there is ample evidence.  He was of far too high and veracious a nature to be capable of the disparaging tricks of a poor jealousy.  The humiliation lay in the fact that circumstances had placed Sheridan in a position, which made it natural for the world to measure them with one another.  Burke could no more like Sheridan than he could like the Beggar’s Opera.  Sheridan had a levity, a want of depth, a laxity and dispersion of feeling, to which no degree of intellectual brilliancy could reconcile a man of such profound moral energy and social conviction as Burke.

The thought will perhaps occur to the reader that Fox was not less lax than Sheridan, and yet for Fox Burke long had the sincerest friendship.  He was dissolute, indolent, irregular, and the most insensate gambler that ever squandered fortune after fortune over the faro-table.  It was his vices as much as his politics that made George III. hate Fox as an English Catiline.  How came Burke to accept a man of this character, first for his disciple, then for his friend, and next for his leader?  The answer is a simple one.  In spite of the disorders of his life, Fox, from the time when his acquaintance with Burke began, down to the time when it came to such disastrous end, and for long years afterwards, was to the bottom of his heart as passionate for freedom, justice, and beneficence as Burke ever was.  These great ends were as real, as constant, as overmastering in Fox as they were in Burke.  No man was ever more deeply imbued with the generous impulses of great statesmanship, with chivalrous courage, with the magnificent spirit of devotion to high imposing causes.  These qualities we may be sure, and not his power as a debater and as a declaimer, won for him in Burke’s heart the admiration which found such splendid expression in a passage that will remain as a stock piece of declamation for long generations after it was first poured out as a sincere tribute of reverence and affection.  Precisians, like Lafayette, might choose to see their patriotic hopes ruined rather than have them saved by Mirabeau, because Mirabeau was a debauchee.  Burke’s public morality was of stouter stuff, and he loved Fox because he knew that under the stains and blemishes that had been left by a deplorable education, was that sterling, inexhaustible ore in which noble sympathies are subtly compounded with resplendent powers.