Chapter XI: Part 11

The scene is famous in English parliamentary annals. The minister had introduced a measure for the division of the province of Canada and for the establishment of a local legislature in each division. Fox in the course of debate went out of his way to laud the Revolution, and to sneer at some of the most effective passages in the _Reflections_. Burke was not present, but he announced his determination to reply. On the day when the Quebec Bill was to come on again, Fox called upon Burke, and the pair walked together from Burke's house in Duke Street down to Westminster. The Quebec Bill was recommitted, and Burke at once rose and soon began to talk his usual language against the Revolution, the rights of man, and Jacobinism whether English or French. There was a call to order. Fox, who was as sharp and intolerant in the House as he was amiable out of it, interposed with some words of contemptuous irony. Pitt, Grey, Lord Sheffield, all plunged into confused and angry debate as to whether the French Revolution was a good thing, and whether the French Revolution, good or bad, had anything to do with the Quebec Bill. At length Fox, in seconding a motion for confining the debate to its proper subject, burst into the fatal question beyond the subject, taxing Burke with inconsistency, and taunting him with having forgotten that ever-admirable saying of his own about the insurgent colonists, that he did not know how to draw an indictment against a whole nation. Burke replied in tones of firm self-repression; complained of the attack that had been made upon him; reviewed Fox's charges of inconsistency; enumerated the points on which they had disagreed, and remarked that such disagreements had never broken their friendship. But whatever the risk of enmity, and however bitter the loss of friendship, he would never cease from the warning to flee from the French constitution. "But there is no loss of friends," said Fox in an eager undertone. "Yes," said Burke, "there _is_ a loss of friends. I know the penalty of toy conduct. I have done my duty at the price of my friend--our friendship is at an end." Fox rose, but was so overcome that for some moments he could not speak. At length, his eyes streaming with tears, and in a broken voice, he deplored the breach of a twenty years' friendship on a political question. Burke was inexorable. To him the political question was so vivid, so real, so intense, as to make all personal sentiment no more than dust in the balance. Burke confronted Jacobinism with the relentlessness of a Jacobin. The rupture was never healed, and Fox and he had no relations with one another henceforth beyond such formal interviews as took place in the manager's box in Westminster Hall in connexion with the impeachment.

A few months afterwards Burke published the _Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs_, a grave, calm and most cogent vindication of the perfect consistency of his criticisms upon the English Revolution of 1688 and upon the French Revolution of 1789, with the doctrines of the great Whigs who conducted and afterwards defended in Anne's reign the transfer of the crown from James to William and Mary. The _Appeal_ was justly accepted as a satisfactory performance for the purpose with which it was written. Events, however, were doing more than words could do, to confirm the public opinion of Burke's sagacity and foresight. He had always divined by the instinct of hatred that the French moderates must gradually be swept away by the Jacobins, and now it was all coming true. The humiliation of the king and queen after their capture at Varennes; the compulsory acceptance of the constitution; the plain incompetence of the new Legislative Assembly; the growing violence of the Parisian mob, and the ascendency of the Jacobins at the Common Hall; the fierce day of the 20th of June (1792), when the mob flooded the Tuileries, and the bloodier day of the 10th of August, when the Swiss guard was massacred and the royal family flung into prison; the murders in the prisons in September; the trial and execution of the king in January (1793); the proscription of the Girondins in June, the execution of the queen in October--if we realize the impression likely to be made upon the sober and homely English imagination by such a heightening of horror by horror, we may easily understand how people came to listen to Burke's voice as the voice of inspiration, and to look on his burning anger as the holy fervour of a prophet of the Lord.

Fox still held to his old opinions as stoutly as he could, and condemned and opposed the war which England had declared against the French republic. Burke, who was profoundly incapable of the meanness of letting personal estrangement blind his eyes to what was best for the commonwealth, kept hoping against hope that each new trait of excess in France would at length bring the great Whig leader to a better mind. He used to declaim by the hour in the conclaves at Burlington House upon the necessity of securing Fox; upon the strength which his genius would lend to the administration in its task of grappling with the sanguinary giant; upon the impossibility, at least, of doing either with him or without him. Fox's most important political friends who had long wavered, at length, to Burke's great satisfaction, went over to the side of the government. In July 1794 the duke of Portland, Lord Fitzwilliam, Windham and Grenville took office under Pitt. Fox was left with a minority which was satirically said not to have been more than enough to fill a hackney coach. "That is a calumny," said one of the party, "we should have filled two." The war was prosecuted with the aid of both the great parliamentary parties of the country, and with the approval of the great bulk of the nation. Perhaps the one man in England who in his heart approved of it less than any other was William Pitt. The difference between Pitt and Burke was nearly as great as that between Burke and Fox. Burke would be content with nothing short of a crusade against France, and war to the death with her rulers. "I cannot persuade myself," he said, "that this war bears any the least resemblance to any that has ever existed in the world. I cannot persuade myself that any examples or any reasonings drawn from other wars and other politics are at all applicable to it" (_Corr._ iv. 219). Pitt, on the other hand, as Lord Russell truly says, treated Robespierre and Carnot as he would have treated any other French rulers, whose ambition was to be resisted, and whose interference in the affairs of other nations was to be checked. And he entered upon the matter [v.04 p.0834] in the spirit of a man of business, by sending ships to seize some islands belonging to France in the West Indies, so as to make certain of repayment of the expenses of the war.

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 Pétion 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 £2500 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 £400,000,000. 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 £1000 was anonymously offered for the promotion of an expedition to cross the continent from south to north, on condition that a further sum of £2000 should be subscribed within a twelvemonth. The amount having been raised within the time specified, the Victorian parliament supplemented it by a vote of £6000, 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 £7, 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 £8 to £14. 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. Planché, 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.

His son Edward Livermore Burlingame (b. 1848) was educated at Harvard and at Heidelberg, was a member of the editorial staff of the New York _Tribune_ in 1871-1872 and of the _American Cyclopaedia_ in 1872-1876, and in 1886 became the editor of _Scribner's Magazine_.

BURLINGTON, a city and the county-seat of Des Moines county, Iowa, U.S.A., on the Mississippi river, in the S.E. part of the state. Pop. (1890) 22,565; (1900) 23,201; (1905, state census) 25,318 (4492 foreign-born); (1910) 24,324. It is served by the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy (which has extensive [v.04 p.0837] construction and repair shops here), the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific, and the Toledo, Peoria & Western (Pennsylvania system) railways; and has an extensive river commerce. The river is spanned here by the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy railway bridge. Many of the residences are on bluffs commanding beautiful views of river scenery; and good building material has been obtained from the Burlington limestone quarries. Crapo Park, of 100 acres, along the river, is one of the attractions of the city. Among the principal buildings are the county court house, the free public library, the Tama building, the German-American savings bank building and the post office. Burlington has three well-equipped hospitals. Among the city's manufactures are lumber, furniture, baskets, pearl buttons, cars, carriages and wagons, Corliss engines, waterworks pumps, metallic burial cases, desks, boxes, crackers, flour, pickles and beer. The factory product in 1905 was valued at $5,779,337, or 29.9% more than in 1900. The first white man to visit the site of Burlington seems to have been Lieutenant Zebulon M. Pike, who came in 1805 and recommended the erection of a fort. The American Fur Company established a post here in 1829 or earlier, but settlement really began in 1833, after the Black Hawk War, and the place had a population of 1200 in 1838. It was laid out as a town and named Flint Hills (a translation of the Indian name, _Shokokon_) in 1834; but the name was soon changed to Burlington, after the city of that name in Vermont. Burlington was incorporated as a town in 1837, and was chartered as a city in 1838 by the territory of Wisconsin, the city charter being amended by the territory of Iowa in 1839 and 1841. The territorial legislature of Wisconsin met here from 1836 to 1838 and that of Iowa from 1838 to 1840. In 1837 a newspaper, the _Wisconsin Territorial Gazette_, now the Burlington _Evening Gazette_, and in 1839 another, the Burlington _Hawk Eye_, were founded; the latter became widely known in the years immediately following 1872 from the humorous sketches contributed to it by Robert Jones Burdette (b. 1844), an associate editor, known as the "Burlington Hawk Eye Man," who in 1903 entered the Baptist ministry and became pastor of the Temple Baptist church in Los Angeles, California, and among whose publications are _Hawkeyetems_ (1877), _Hawkeyes_ (1879), and _Smiles Yoked with Sighs_ (1900).

BURLINGTON, a city of Burlington county, New Jersey, U.S.A., on the E. bank of the Delaware river, 18 m. N.E. of Philadelphia. Pop. (1890) 7264; (1900) 7392, of whom 636 were foreign-born and 590 were of negro descent; (1905) 8038; (1910) 8336. It is served by the Pennsylvania railway, and by passenger and freight steamboat lines on the Delaware river, connecting with river and Atlantic coast ports. Burlington is a pleasant residential city with a number of interesting old mansions long antedating the War of Independence, some of them the summer homes of old Philadelphia families. The Burlington Society library, established in 1757 and still conducted under its original charter granted by George II., is one of the oldest public libraries in America. At Burlington are St Mary's Hall (1837; Protestant Episcopal), founded by Bishop G.W. Doane, one of the first schools for girls to be established in the country, Van Rensselaer Seminary and the New Jersey State Masonic home. In the old St Mary's church (Protestant Episcopal), which was built in 1703 and has been called St Anne's as well as St Mary's, Daniel Coxe (1674-1739), first provincial grand master of the lodge of Masons in America, was buried; a commemorative bronze tablet was erected in 1907. Burlington College, founded by Bishop Doane in 1864, was closed as a college in 1877, but continued as a church school until 1900; the buildings subsequently passed into the hands of an iron manufacturer. Burlington's principal industries are the manufacture of shoes and cast-iron water and gas pipes. Burlington was settled in 1677 by a colony of English Quakers. The settlement was first known as New Beverly, but was soon renamed after Bridlington (Burlington), the Yorkshire home of many of the settlers. In 1682 the assembly of West Jersey gave to Burlington "Matinicunk Island," above the town, "for the maintaining of a school for the education of youth"; revenues from a part of the island are still used for the support of the public schools, and the trust fund is one of the oldest for educational purposes in the United States. Burlington was incorporated as a town in 1693 (re-incorporated, 1733), and became the seat of government of West Jersey. On the union of East and West Jersey in 1702, it became one of the two seats of government of the new royal province, the meetings of the legislature generally alternating between Burlington and Perth Amboy, under both the colonial and the state government, until 1790. In 1777 the _New Jersey Gazette_, the first newspaper in New Jersey, was established here; it was published (here and later in Trenton) until 1786, and was an influential paper, especially during the War of Independence. Burlington was chartered as a city in 1784.

See Henry Armitt Brown, _The Settlement of Burlington_ (Burlington, 1878); George M. Hills, _History of the Church in Burlington_ (Trenton, 1885); and Mrs A.M. Gummère, _Friends in Burlington_ (Philadelphia, 1884).

BURLINGTON, a city, port of entry and the county-seat of Chittenden county, Vermont, U.S.A., on the E. shore of Lake Champlain, in the N.W. part of the state, 90 m. S.E. of Montreal, and 300 m. N. of New York. It is the largest city in the state. Pop. (1880) 11,365; (1890) 14,590; (1900) 18,640, of whom 3726 were foreign-born; (1910, census) 20,468. It is served by the Central Vermont and the Rutland railways, and by lines of passenger and freight steamboats on Lake Champlain. The city is attractively situated on an arm of Lake Champlain, being built on a strip of land extending about 6 m. south from the mouth of the Winooski river along the lake shore and gradually rising from the water's edge to a height of 275 ft.; its situation and its cool and equable summer climate have given it a wide reputation as a summer resort, and it is a centre for yachting, canoeing and other aquatic sports. During the winter months it has ice-boat regattas. Burlington is the seat of the university of Vermont (1791; non-sectarian and co-educational), whose official title in 1865 became "The University of Vermont and State Agricultural College." The university is finely situated on a hill (280 ft. above the lake) commanding a charming view of the city, lake, the Adirondacks and the Green Mountains. It has departments of arts, sciences and medicine, and a library of 74,800 volumes and 32,936 pamphlets housed in the Billings Library, designed by H.H. Richardson. The university received the Federal grants under the Morrill acts of 1862 and 1890, and in connexion with it the Vermont agricultural experiment station is maintained. At Burlington are also the Mt St Mary's academy (1889, Roman Catholic), conducted by the Sisters of Mercy; and two business colleges. Among the principal buildings are the city hall, the Chittenden county court house, the Federal and the Y.M.C.A. buildings, the Masonic temple, the Roman Catholic cathedral and the Edmunds high school. Burlington's charitable institutions include the Mary Fletcher hospital, the Adams mission home, the Lousia Howard mission, the Providence orphan asylum, and homes for aged women, friendless women and destitute children. The Fletcher free public library (47,000 volumes in 1908) is housed in a Carnegie building. In the city are two sanitariums. The city has two parks (one, Ethan Allen Park, is on a bluff in the north-west part of the city, and commands a fine view) and four cemeteries; in Green Mount Cemetery, which overlooks the Winooski valley, is a monument over the grave of Ethan Allen, who lived in Burlington from 1778 until his death. Fort Ethan Allen, a United States military post, is about 3 m. east of the city, with which it is connected by an electric line. Burlington is the most important manufacturing centre in the state; among its manufactures are sashes, doors and blinds, boxes, furniture and wooden-ware, cotton and woollen goods, patent medicines, refrigerators, house furnishings, paper and machinery. In 1905 the city's factory products were valued at $6,355,754, three-tenths of which was the value of lumber and planing mill products, including sashes, doors and blinds. The Winooski river, which forms the boundary between Burlington and the township of Colchester and which enters Lake Champlain N.W. of the city, [v.04 p.0838] furnishes valuable water-power, but most of the manufactories are operated by steam. Quantities of marble were formerly taken from quarries in the vicinity. The city is a wholesale distributing centre for all northern Vermont and New Hampshire, and is one of the principal lumber markets in the east, most of the lumber being imported from Canada. It is the port of entry for the Vermont customs district, whose exports and imports were valued respectively in 1907 at $8,333,024 and $5,721,034. A charter for a town to be founded here was granted by the province of New Hampshire in 1763, but no settlement was made until 1774. Burlington was chartered as a city in 1865.

BURMA, a province of British India, including the former kingdom of independent Burma, as well as British Burma, acquired by the British Indian government in the two wars of 1826 and 1852. It is divided into Upper and Lower Burma, the former being the territory annexed on 1st January 1886. The province lies to the east of the Bay of Bengal, and covers a range of country extending from the Pakchan river in 9° 55' north latitude to the Naga and Chingpaw, or Kachin hills, lying roughly between the 27th and 28th degrees of north latitude; and from the Bay of Bengal on the west to the Mekong river, the boundary of the dependent Shan States on the east, that is to say, roughly, between the 92nd and 100th degrees of east longitude. The extreme length from north to south is almost 1200 m., and the broadest part, which is in about latitude 21° north, is 575 m. from east to west. On the N. it is bounded by the dependent state of Manipur, by the Mishmi hills, and by portions of Chinese territory; on the E. by the Chinese Shan States, portions of the province of Yunnan, the French province of Indo-China, and the Siamese Shan, or Lao States and Siam; on the S. by the Siamese Malay States and the Bay of Bengal; and on the W. by the Bay of Bengal and Chittagong. The coast-line from Taknaf, the mouth of the Naaf, in the Akyab district on the north, to the estuary of the Pakchan at Maliwun on the south, is about 1200 m. The total area of the province is estimated at 238,738 sq.m., of which Burma proper occupies 168,573 sq.m., the Chin hills 10,250 sq.m., and the Shan States, which comprise the whole of the eastern portion of the province, some 59,915 sq.m.

_Natural Divisions._--The province falls into three natural divisions: Arakan with the Chin hills, the Irrawaddy basin, and the old province of Tenasserim, together with the portion of the Shan and Karen-ni states in the basin of the Salween, and part of Kengtung in the western basin of the Mekong. Of these Arakan is a strip of country lying on the seaward slopes of the range of hills known as the Arakan Yomas. It stretches from Cape Negrais on the south to the Naaf estuary, which divides it from the Chittagong division of Eastern Bengal and Assam on the north, and includes the districts of Sandoway, Kyaukpyu, Akyab and northern Arakan, an area of some 18,540 sq.m. The northern part of this tract is barren hilly country, but in the west and south are rich alluvial plains containing some of the most fertile lands of the province. Northwards lie the Chin and some part of the Kachin hills. To the east of the Arakan division, and separated from it by the Arakan Yornas, lies the main body of Burma in the basin of the Irrawaddy. This tract falls into four subdivisions. First, there is the highland tract including the hilly country at the sources of the Chindwin and the upper waters of the Irrawaddy, the Upper Chindwin, Katha, Bhamo, Myitkyina and Ruby Mines districts, with the Kachin hills and a great part of the Northern Shan states. In the Shan States there are a few open plateaus, fertile and well populated, and Maymyo in the Mandalay district, the hill-station to which in the hot weather the government of Burma migrates, stands in the Pyin-u-lwin plateau, some 3500 ft. above the sea. But the greater part of this country is a mass of rugged hills cut deep with narrow gorges, within which even the biggest rivers are confined. The second tract is that known as the dry zone of Burma, and includes the whole of the lowlands lying between the Arakan Yomas and the western fringe of the Southern Shan States. It stretches along both sides of the Irrawaddy from the north of Mandalay to Thayetmyo, and embraces the Lower Chindwin, Shwebo, Sagaing, Mandalay, Kyauksè, Meiktila, Yamèthin, Myingyan, Magwe, Pakôkku and Minbu districts. This tract consists mostly of undulating lowlands, but it is broken towards the south by the Pegu Yomas, a considerable range of hills which divides the two remaining tracts of the Irrawaddy basin. On the west, between the Pegu and the Arakan Yomas, stretches the Irrawaddy delta, a vast expanse of level plain 12,000 sq.m. in area falling in a gradual unbroken slope from its apex not far south of Prome down to the sea. This delta, which includes the districts of Bassein, Myaungmya, Thôngwa, Henzada, Hanthawaddy, Tharrawaddy, Pegu and Rangoon town, consists almost entirely of a rich alluvial deposit, and the whole area, which between Cape Negrais and Elephant Point is 137 m. wide, is fertile in the highest degree. To the east lies a tract of country which, though geographically a part of the Irrawaddy basin, is cut off from it by the Yomas, and forms a separate system draining into the Sittang river. The northern portion of this tract, which on the east touches the basin of the Salween river, is hilly; the remainder towards the confluence of the Salween, Gyaing and Attaran rivers consists of broad fertile plains. The whole is comprised in the districts of Toungoo and Thaton, part of the Karen-ni hills, with the Salween hill tract and the northern parts of Amherst, which form the northern portion of the Tenasserim administrative division. The third natural division of Burma is the old province of Tenasserim, which, constituted in 1826 with Moulmein as its capital, formed the nucleus from which the British supremacy throughout Burma has grown. It is a narrow strip of country lying between the Bay of Bengal and the high range of hills which form the eastern boundary of the province towards Siam. It comprises the districts of Mergui and Tavoy and a part of Amherst, and includes also the Mergui Archipelago. The surface of this part of the country is mountainous and much intersected with streams. Northward from this lies the major portion of the Southern Shan States and Karen-ni and a narrowing strip along the Salween of the Northern Shan States.

_Mountains._--Burma proper is encircled on three sides by a wall of mountain ranges. The Arakan Yomas starting from Cape Negrais extend northwards more or less parallel with the coast till they join the Chin and Naga hills. They then form part of a system of ranges which curve north of the sources of the Chindwin river, and with the Kumon range and the hills of the Jade and Amber mines, make up a highland tract separated from the great Northern Shan plateau by the gorges of the Irrawaddy river. On the east the Kachin, Shan and Karen hills, extending from the valley of the Irrawaddy into China far beyond the Salween gorge, form a continuous barrier and boundary, and tail off into a narrow range which forms the eastern watershed of the Salween and separates Tenasserim from Siam. The highest peak of the Arakan Yomas, Liklang, rises nearly 10,000 ft. above the sea, and in the eastern Kachin hills, which run northwards from the state of Möng Mit to join the high range dividing the basins of the Irrawaddy and the Salween, are two peaks, Sabu and Worang, which rise to a height of 11,200 ft. above the sea. The Kumon range running down from the Hkamti country east of Assam to near Mogaung ends in a peak known as Shwedaunggyi, which reaches some 5750 ft. There are several peaks in the Ruby Mines district which rise beyond 7000 ft. and Loi Ling in the Northern Shan States reaches 9000 ft. Compared with these ranges the Pegu Yomas assume the proportions of mere hills. Popa, a detached peak in the Myingyan district, belongs to this system and rises to a height of nearly 5000 ft., but it is interesting mainly as an extinct volcano, a landmark and an object of superstitious folklore, throughout the whole of Central Burma. Mud volcanoes occur at Minbu, but they are not in any sense mountains, resembling rather the hot springs which are found in many parts of Burma. They are merely craters raised above the level of the surrounding country by the gradual accretion of the soft oily mud, which overflows at frequent intervals whenever a discharge of gas occurs. Spurs of the Chin hills run down the whole length of the Lower Chindwin district, almost to Sagaing, and one hill, Powindaung, is particularly noted on account of its innumerable cave temples, which are said to hold no fewer than 446,444 images of Buddha. Huge caves, of which the most noted are the Farm Caves, occur in the hills near Moulmein, and they too are full of relics of their ancient use as temples, though now they are chiefly visited in connexion with the bats, whose flight viewed from a distance, as they issue from the caves, resembles a cloud of smoke.