many of the elections were already past; Burke himself had been returned for Malton on his way north, but the battle was still raging; in Westminster, where the Whig chief was himself fighting, it lasted a month longer, and in many other constituencies the event was as yet undecided.  As far as returns had been made, however, things had gone hard with the Whigs, and Burke was despondent.  He had been some twenty years in public life without his party being in power as many months, and since the party seemed now doomed, as indeed it was, to twenty years of opposition again, he turned to Lord Maitland and said, “Lord Maitland, if you want to be in office, if you have any ambition or wish to be successful in life, shake us off, give us up.”  But Smith intervened, and with singular hopefulness ventured to prophesy that in two years things would certainly come round again.  “Why,” replied Burke, “I have already been in a minority nineteen years, and your two years, Mr. Smith, will just make me twenty-one, and it will surely be high time for me to be then in my majority."[329]

Smith’s hearty remark implies his continued loyalty to the Rockinghams, and shows that just as he two years before approved of their separation from Lord Shelburne, which many Whig critics have censured, so he now equally approved of their coalition with their old adversary, Lord North, which Whig critics have censured more severely still.  But his sanguine forecast was far astray.  Burke never again returned to office, and the whole conversation reads strangely in the light of subsequent events.  Only a few years more and Burke had himself shaken off his friends—­from no view to power, it is true—­and the young nobleman to whom he gave the advice in jest was to take the lead in avenging the desertion, and to denounce the pension it was proposed to give him as the wages of apostasy.  The French Revolution, which drove Burke back to a more conservative position, carried Lord Maitland, who had drunk in Radicalism from Professor John Millar, forward into the republican camp.  He went over to Paris with Dugald Stewart and harangued the mob on the streets pour la liberte,[330] and he said one day to the Duchess of Gordon, “I hope, madame, ere long to have the pleasure of introducing Mrs. Maitland to Mrs. Gordon."[331]

On the present occasion at Hatton, however, they were all one in their lamentations over the temporary eclipse the cause of liberty had suffered.  On the following morning they all set out together for Glasgow, Stewart and Dalzel being able to accompany them because it was Good Friday, and Good Friday was then a holiday at Edinburgh University.  They supped that evening with Professor John Millar, Smith’s pupil and Lord Maitland’s master, and next day they assisted at the ceremony of installation.  The chief business was of course the Rector’s address, described in the Annual Register of the year as “a very polite and elegant speech suited to the occasion.”