evil days in which his life ended-not when he was a leader in the Commons, but when he was a stricken old man at Beaconsfield. That Burke was a great statesman, no thinking man could read his pamphlets and speeches can deny; but a man may be a great statesman and yet fall very short of being a great man. Burke makes as deep an impression upon our hearts as upon our minds. We are taken captive, not so much by his reasoning, strongly as that moves to its conquest, as by the generous warmth that steals out of him into our hearts. There is a tonic breath of character and of generous purpose in which he writes-the fine sentiment of a pure man; and we are made aware that he who could write thus was great, not so much by reason of what he said or did, as by reason of what he was. What a man was you may often discover in the records of his days of bitterness and pain better than in what is told of his seasons of cheer and hope; for if the noble qualities triumph then and show themselves still sound and sweet, if his courage sink not, if he show himself still capable of self-forgetfulness, if he still stir with a passion for the service of causes and policies which are beyond himself, his stricken age is even greater than his fullpulsed years of manhood. This is the test which Burke endures-the test of fire.

It has not often been judged so, I know; but let any man of true insight take that extraordinary "Letter to a Noble Lord," which was written in 1796, and which is Burke's apologia pro vita sua, consider the circumstances under which it was written, its tone, its scope, its truth, its self-revelations, and the manner of man revealed, and say whether this be not the real Burke, undaunted, unstained, unchanged in purpose and in principle.-WILSON, WOODROW, 1901, Edmund Burke and the French Revolution, The Century Magazine, vol. 62, p. 784.

SPEECHES AND ORATORY

Burke also abounds with these fine passages, and he soars also as much out of the lower regions of discourse and infinitely further into those of imagination and fancy; but no man could ever perceive in him the least trace of preparation, and he never appears more incontestably inspired by the moment and transported with the fury of the god within him.

than in those finished passages which it would cost Shakespeare long study and labour to produce.-ELLIOT, SIR GILBERT, 1751-1806, Life of Elliot by Lady Minto, vol. I, p. 215.

His performance ["Conciliation with America"] was the best I have heard from him in the whole winter. He is always brilliant to an uncommon degree, and yet I believe it would be better he were less so. I don't mean to join with the cry which will always run against shining parts, when I say that I sincerely think it interrupts him so much in argument that the House are never sensible that he argues as well as he does. Fox gives a strong proof of this, for he makes use of Burke's speech as a repertory, and by stating crabbedly two or three of those ideas which Burke has buried under flowers, he is thought almost always to have had more argument.-FLOOD, HENRY, 1775, Letter to Charlemont.

While we are waiting at Trinity Lodge for the deputation from the Senate to conduct the Chancellor, I had a conversation with Lord Erskine upon the qualifications of Burke as an orator. Lord Erskine said that his defect was episode. "A public speaker," said he, "should never be episodical-it is a very great mistake. I hold it to be a rule respecting public speaking, which ought never to be violated, that the speaker should not introduce into his oratory insular brilliant passages they always tend to call off the minds of his hearers, and to make them wander from what ought to be the main business of his speech. If he wish to introduce brilliant passages, they should run along the line of his subject-matter, and never quit it. Burke's episodes were highly beautiful-I know nothing more beautiful, but they were his defects in speaking." Lord Erskine also told me that Burke's manner was sometimes bad-"it was like that of an Irish chairman. "Once," said he, "I was so tired of hearing him in a debate upon the India Bill, that not liking he should see me leave the House of Commons while he was speaking, I crept along under the benches and got out, and went to the Isles of Wight. Afterwards that very speech of his was published, and I found it to be so extremely beautiful that I actually wore it into pieces by reading it."-CLARKE, E,

D., 1819, Journal, July 5; Prior's Life of Burke, vol. II, p. 431.

The variety and extent of his power in debate was greater than that of any other orator in ancient or modern times. No one ever poured forth such a flood of thought so many original combinations of inventive genius; as much knowledge of man and the working of political systems; so many just remarks on the relation of government to the manners, the spirit, and even the prejudices of a people; so many wise maxims as to a change in constitutions and laws; so many beautiful effusions of lofty and generous sentiment; such exuberant stores of illustration, or ornament, and apt allusion; all intermingled with the liveliest sallies of wit or the boldest flights of a sublime imagination. In actual debate, as a contemporary informs us, he passed more rapidly from one exercise of his powers to another, than in his printed productions. During the same evening, sometimes in the space of a few moments, he would be pathetic and humorous, acrimonious and conciliating, now giving vent to his indignant feelings in lofty declamation, and again, almost in the same breath, convulsing his audience by the most laughable exhibitions of ridicule or burlesque. -GOODRICH, CHAUNCEY A., 1852, ed., Select British Eloquence, p. 237.

Burke always dissappointed me as a speaker. I have heard him, during his speeches in the House, make use of the most vulgar expressions, such as "three nips of a straw," "three skips of a louse, &c.; and, on one occasion when I was present, he introduced, as an illustration, a most indelicate story about a French king, who asked his physician why his natural children were so much finer than his legitimate.-MALTBY, WILLIAM, 1854, In The Recollections of the Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers, p. 79.

Sheridan once said to me, "When posterity read the speeches of Burke, they will hardly be able to believe that, during his life-time, he was not considered as a first-rate speaker, not even as a secondrate one."-ROGERS, SAMUEL, 1855, TableTalk, p. 66.

Burke is rescued from the usual doom of orators, because his learning, his experience, his sagacity are rimmed with a halo by this bewitching light behind the

intellectual eye from the highest heaven of the brain. LOWELL, JAMES RUSSELL, 1871, Carlyle, My Study Windows, p. 118.

His speeches on the Stamp Acts and the American War soon lifted him into fame. The heavy Quaker-like figure, the little wig, the round spectacles, the cumbrous roll of paper which loaded Burke's pocket, gave little promise of a great orator and less of the characteristics of his oratory— its passionate ardor, its poetic fancy, its amazing prodigality of resources; and dazzling succession in which irony, pathos, invective, tenderness, and the most brilliant word-pictures, the coolest argument followed each other. It was an eloquence indeed of a wholly new order in English experience. The philosophical

cast of Burke's reasoning was unaccompanied by any philosophical coldness of tone or phrase. phrase. The groundwork, indeed, of his nature was poetic. His ideas, if conceived by the reason, took shape and color from the splendor and fire of his imagination. A nation was to him a great living society, so complex in its relations, and whose institutions were so interwoven with glorious events in the past, that to touch it rudely was a sacrilege.-GREEN, JOHN RICHARD, 1874, A Short History of the English People, pp. 761, 762.

Burke, before the spectre of the French Revolution shot across his path, was listened to as a seer by the House of Commons; but, after that event, his Cassandra-like croakings bored his hearers, and his rising to speak was a signal for a stampede from the benches. . . Greater as a thinker than Chatham or Fox, but inferior as an orator, was Edmund Burke, who, in the variety and extent of his powers, surpassed every other orator of ancient or modern times. He was what he called Charles Townshend, "a prodigy," and ranks not merely with the eloquent speakers of the world, but with the Bacons, Newtons, and Shakespeares. His speeches and pamphlets are saturated with thought; they absolutely swarm, like an ant-hill, with ideas, and, in their teeming profusion, remind one of the "myriad-minded" author of Hamlet. To the broadest sweep of intellect, he added the most surprising subtlety, and his almost oriental imagination was fed by a vast and varied knowledge, -the stores of a memory that held everything in its

grasp. The only man who, according to Adam Smith, at once comprehended the total revolution the latter proposed in political economy, he was at the same time the best judge of a picture that Sir Joshua Reynolds ever knew; and while his knowledge was thus boundless, his vocabulary was as extensive as his knowledge. Probably no orator ever lived on whose lips language was more plastic and ductile. MATHEWS, WILLIAM, 1878, Oratory and Orators, pp. 134, 268.

There is much in the oratory of Edmund Burke to suggest the amplitude of mind and the power and scope of intellectual grasp that characterized Shakespeare. He surveyed every subject as if standing on an eminence and taking a view of it in all its relations, however complex and remote. United with this remarkable comprehensiveness was also a subtlety of intellect that enabled him to penetrate the most complicated relations and unravel the most perplexed intricacies. Why? Whence? For what end? With what results? were the questions that his mind seemed always to be striving to answer. The special objects to which he applied himself were the workings of political institutions, the principles of wise legislation, and the sources of national security and advancement. Rerum cognoscere causas,-to know the causes of things-in all the multiform relations of organized society, was the constant end of his striving. More than any other one that has written in English he was a political philosopher. But he was far more than that. He had a memory of extraordinary grasp and tenacity; and this, united with a tireless industry, gave him an affluence of knowledge that has rarely been equalled. He had the fancy of a poet, and his imagination surveyed the whole range of human experience for illustrations with which to enrich the train of his thought.-ADAMS, CHARLES KENDALL, 1884, ed. Representative British Orations, p. 172.

Tall and vigorous, of dignified deportment, with massive brow and stern expression, he had an air of command. His voice was of great compass; his words came fast, but his thoughts seemed almost to overcome even his powers of utterance. Invective, sarcasm, metaphor, and argument followed hard after one another; his

powers of description were gorgeous, his scorn was sublime, and in the midst of a discussion of some matter of ephemeral importance came enunciations of political wisdom which are for all time, and which illustrate the opinion that he was, "Bacon alone excepted, the greatest political thinker who has ever devoted himself to the practice of English politics" (Buckle, "Civilization in England," c. VII). Although he spoke with an Irish accent, with awkward action, and in a harsh tone, his "imperial fancy" and commanding eloquence excited universal admiration. No parliamentary orator has ever moved his audience as he now and again did. His speech on the employment of the Indians in war, for example, is said at one time to have almost choked Lord North, against whom it was delivered, with laughter, and at another to have drawn "iron tears down Barré's cheek." (Walpole to Mason, 12 Feb., 1778, Letters, vii, 29.) Unfortunately, his power over the house did not last; his thoughts were too deep for the greater part of the members, and were rather exhaustive discussions than direct contributions to debate (Morley, Life, 209), while the sustained loftiness of his style and a certain lack of sympathy with

his audience marred the effect of his oratory.-HUNT, WILLIAM, 1886, Dictionary of National Biography, vol. vii, p. 348.

Burke's prose is as prominent an example as there is in English Letters of the oratorical style, in the best sense of that term. The reported speeches of Fox and Grattan, Pitt and Sheridan-his great contemporaries, evince occasional passages of equal excellence, but as to the entire body of oratorical prose produced, Burke is the superior of any one of them and marks the highest point as yet attained in England in forensic prose. HUNT, THEODORE W., 1887, Representative English Prose and Prose Writers, p. 342.

To Burke has already been assigned the honour of being the first statesman and orator who used the Platform at election time as a real instrument in political power. The occasions on which he so used it were few, but his speeches at Bristol in 1774 and 1780 recognised clearly the claims of constituents to the fullest explanation of the conduct of their representative, and his full accountability

to them. That was the most important matter to have put so prominently on record. Though taking part in the Economy Agitation he does not appear to have actually spoken from the Platform in its support, but in the crisis of the struggle between Pitt and the Coalition he had recourse to the Platform at Aylesbury in 1784. After that, however, his voice from the Platform was silent.-JEPHSON, HENRY, 1891, The Platform, Its Rise and Progress, vol. 1, p. 223.

It is in his oratory that Burke's paragraphs are remarkable. He exhibits here such qualities as make him the best paragrapher our literature produced before the present century. His unity is simple (as opposed to that of compound paragraphs) and organic. His paragraph bears the test, as Wendell has pointed out, of having its substance expressed in one organic sentence. For purposes of oratorical emphasis and oratorical rhythm, he has completely mastered the short sentence. His percentage of sentences of less than fifteen words is higher than the highest yet reached. The great orator

had, to a degree uncommon even in the most eminent orators, the power of marshalling his propositions in a specious order. His emotion never ran away with him; he drove straight at his hearer's intellect did so too constantly for his highest immediate success. There is always the impression of a convincing chain of logic. In short, Burke is the earliest great master of the paragraph, and in impassioned prose he still remains a master of the paragraph. But for his lingering sense of the prime importance of balancing and rounding the sentence he is a nineteenth century paragrapher, and one of the best.-LEWIS, EDWIN HERBERT, 1894, The History of the English Paragraph, pp. 122, 123.

A VINDICATION OF NATURAL

SOCIETY 1756

said to have been deceived by it. 1 cannot understand how such a mistake could have been possible for any who had the very slightest acquaintance with the designs or character of Bolingbroke. The outside resemblance only makes the internal contrast more striking. Burke did

not appear in his first conspicuous work merely or chiefly as a successful jester. A parody may be very amusing; but he had as distinct and serious a purpose in this as in any of his writings.-MAURICE, FREDERICK DENISON, 1857, Edmund Burke, The Friendship of Books and Other Lectures, ed. Hughes, p. 311.

Intended as a parody of Bolingbroke's reasonings on religion, is sometimes praised as a successful piece of mimicry; but it contains more of the real Burke than of the sham Bolingbroke. It may be viewed as an exercise in the style that the author ultimately adopted as his habitual manner of composition. The "Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful" has much less glow and sweep of style; the writer's flow of words seems to be painfully embarrassed by the necessity of observing order and proportion of statement.-MINTO, WILLIAM, 1872-80, Manual of English Prose Literature, p. 437.

From the very beginning Burke was drawn to the deepest of all the currents in the thought of the eighteenth century.

What is remarkable in Burke's first

performance is his discernment of the important fact, that behind the intellectual disturbances in the sphere of philosophy, and the noisier agitations in the sphere of theology, there silently staked a force that might shake the whole fabric of civil society itself. In France, as all students of its speculative history are agreed, there came a time in the eighteenth century when theological controversy was turned into political controversy. Innovators left the question about the truth of Christianity, and busied themselves with questions about the ends and means of

"Vindication of Natural Society" coincides in time with the beginning of this important transformation. Burke foresaw from the first what, if rationalism were allowed to run an unimpeded course, would be the really great business of the second half of his century.- MORLEY, JOHN, 1879, Burke (English Men of Letters).

THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL

1757

I began to-day, as a natural supplement to Longinus, a philosophical inquiry into the nature of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful, and read the introduction upon Taste, p. 1-40, which, like all other researches into our primary ideas, is rather loose and unsatisfactory. The division, however, of the passive impression which is common to all men, and relates chiefly to positive beauty or faultiness, and the active judgment which is founded on knowledge, and exercised mostly on comparison, pleased me; perhaps because very like an idea of my own. . . . The author writes with ingenuity, perspicuity, and candour.-GIBBON, EDWARD, 1762, Journal, Nov. 1, 4.

As I walked out before breakfast with Mr. B., I proposed to him to revise and enlarge his admirable book on the "Sublime and Beautiful," which the experience, reading, and observation of thirty years could not but enable him to improve considerably. But he said the train of his thoughts had gone another way, and the whole bent of his mind turned from such subjects; that he was much fitter for such speculations at the time he published that book (about 1758) than now. Besides, he added, the subject was then new, but several writers have since gone over the same ground, Lord Kames and others. The subject he said had been long rolling in his thoughts before he wrote his book, he having been used from the time he was in college to speculate on the topics which form the subjects of it. He was six or seven years employed on it, and when it was produced he was about 28 or 29 years old--a prodigious work for such a period of life.-MALONE, EDMOND, 1789, Maloniana, ed. Prior, July 28, p. 154.

Burke's "Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful" seems to me a poor thing; and what he says upon Taste is neither profound nor accurate.-COLERIDGE, SAMUEL TAYLOR, 1827, Table Talk, ed. Ashe, July 12, p. 54.

The essay on the Sublime and Beautiful fell in with a set of topics, on which the curiosity of the better minds of the age, alike in France, England, and Germany, was fully stirred. In England the essay has been ordinarily slighted; it has

perhaps been overshadowed by its author's fame in weightier matters. The nearest approach to a full and serious treatment of its main positions is to be found in Dugald Stewart's lectures. The great rhetorical art-critic of our own day refers to it in words of disparagement, and in truth it has none of the flummery of modern criticism. It is a piece of hard thinking, and it has the distinction of having interested and stimulated Lessing, the author of "Laoköon" (1766), by far the most definitely valuable of all the contributions to æsthetic thought in an age which was not poor in them.—MORLEY, JOHN, 1879, Burke (English Men of Letters), p. 17.

In the great Mr. Burke's "Essay on the Sublime and the Beautiful"--a singularly modern book, considering how long ago it was wrote (as the great Mr. Steele would have written the participle a little longer ago), and full of a certain well-mannered and agreeable instruction. In some things it is of that droll little eighteenthcentury world, when philosophy had got the neat little universe into the hollow of its hand, and knew just what it was, and what it was for; but it is quite without arrogance.-HoWELLS, WILLIAM DEAN, 1891, Criticism and Fiction, p. 6.

REFLECTIONS ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE

1790

Waving all discussion concerning the substance and general tendency of this printed letter, I must declare my opinion, that what I have seen of it is very loosely put together. In point of writing, at least, the manuscript you showed me first. was much less objectionable. Remember that this is one of the most singular, that it may be the most distinguished, and ought to be one of the most deliberate acts of your life. Your writings have hitherto been the delight and instruction of your own country. You now undertake to correct and instruct another nation, and your appeal, in effect, is to all Europe. Allowing you the liberty to do so, in an extreme case, you cannot deny that it ought to be done with special deliberation in the choice of the topics, and with no less care and circumspection in the use you make of them. Have you thoroughly considered whether it be worthy of Mr. Burke-of a privy-counsellor of a man so high and