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worried that he might be overstating the case, Burke replied in 1786 "I know what I am doing, whether the white people like it or not". 15
    What Burke had to say against the "junto of robbers" in Dublin could have been said also of Hastings' men in India: they built no schools or public services, being motivated only by the love of quick profit; and so they had the boldness of obscure young men who "drink

the intoxicating draughts of authority and dominion before their heads are able to bear it". 16 Burke was shocked by the complicity in all this of Indian middle-men, who prospered as stewards in much the same fashion as the bailiffs denounced so wearily by the Gaelic poets. But it was for the fallen nobles of India that Burke offered his plangent caoineadh ar chéim síos na nuasal (lament for fallen nobility). To the House of Lords in 1794 he declared: "I do not know a greater insult that can be offered to a man born to command than to find himself made a tool of a set of obscure men, come from an unknown country, without anything to distinguish them but an usurped power . . " 17
    Whether the subject was England, India or France, the threat to traditional sanctity and loveliness was evoked by Burke in the image of a ravaged womanhood. In the Reflections, Marie Antoinette was described rather colourfully as fleeing from a royal palace in which no chivalric hand was raised to defend her:
    I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. 18
    The Gaelic poets usually imagined their monarch wedded to the land, which was emblematized by a beautiful woman: if she was happy and fertile, his rule was righteous, but if she grew sad and sorrowful, that must have been because of some unworthiness in the ruler. The artist was the fittest interpreter of the state of this relationship. So it was not hard for Burke to cast himself in the role made familiar by a hundred aisling (vision) poems, which evoked a willing, defenceless spéirbhean or "sky-woman", who would only recover her happiness when a young liberator would come to her defence. Where natural laws were transgressed, however, there could only be pain and strife. So it was, also, in Hastings' India, where Burke imagined that the Hindu womanhood stood defiled by an East India Company whose officials "ravage at pleasure". 19 Like Ireland, India appeared to him as a theatre of the unconscious, a place where unbridled instincts ran riot, while the constraints of civilization were abandoned by those very people who pretended to sponsor them.
    In his later years, Burke chose to imagine the return of the repressed in the figure of an animal from the colonies now unleashed on the mother of parliaments:
    I can contemplate without dread a royal or a national tiger on the borders of Pegu. I can look at him with an easy curiosity, as a prisoner within bars in the menagerie of the tower. But if, by habeas corpus or otherwise, he was to come into the lobby of the House of Commons while your door was open, any of you would be more stout than wise, who would not gladly make your escape out of the back windows. I certainly should dread more from a wild cat in my bed-chamber, than from all the lions in the desert behind Algiers. But in this parallel it is the cat that is at a distance, and the lions and tigers that are in our chambers and lobbies. 20
    His disillusionment with policies in Ireland and India led him to prophesy the end of empire (even before it had fully formed). That makes him the somewhat surprising precursor of today's "Third World" theorists, who offer critiques of cultural imperialism in the years of its slow decline. Ireland provided him, as it would provide many others, with a metaphor for the world beyond Dover, affording points of comparison which helped to