titude for carrying on the same general processes in some particular branches of philosophy rather than others. Thus we may see one man, whose intensity of abstraction shall peculiarly fit him for an investigation of the phenomena of mental philosophy; and another, whose powers of observation and comparison shall mark him out for the extensive inductions of physical science. One man shall excel in the analysis of some complicated object, and another for a comprehensive survey and comparison of independent facts. One individual shall be capable of the most splendid achievements in the exact sciences, but shall be baffled and confounded in all attempts at the rougher computation of moral evidence, and this too in great measure owing to the very nicety and over-accuracy of his intellectual habits, while another who has gained, by long familiarity, prodigious practical sagacity in estimating the complicated elements of moral and political reasoning, has neither precision nor patience enough for the refinements and subtilty of abstract philosophy. It was The peculiarities of Burke's genius were early manifested and strongly marked. evidently characterized rather by comprehensiveness than by subtilty; by an aptitude for inductive science, rather than for abstract reasoning. This in our opinion is sufficiently evident, even in his "Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful." That performance is valuable, not so much as a close and subtle analysis of the mental phenomena, which it professes to examine, as a collection of curious observations on the sources from which these emotions flow. It is valuable rather as a most extensive induction of facts, than as an instance of their successful application, and contains rather the elements of a correct theory, than a systematic exposition of the theory itself. Though it is well known that Burke studied metaphysical science much in his youth, it was always rather as a discipline and exercise of the mind, (for which purpose indeed it transcends all branches of philosophy,) than because he loved it, or was ever likely to become a master in it. If these observations on the character of Burke's intellect be well founded, we cannot wonder that he should have chiefly addicted himself to the science of government and political economy, by far the most difficult and complicated branches of inductive philosophy, demanding in a peculiar degree comprehensiveness of intellect and superlative powers of observation and comparison. These are absolutely requisite, since the phenomena which must decide all the profound problems with which they are conversant, are beyond all comparison more diversified and perplexing, than those in any other department of human inquiry. The very same habitudes of mind, we have already observed, characterized his attempts in intellectual philosophy; not to mention that they appear equally strong in his attachment to agriculture, of which he was passionately fond. Indeed, he was said to be one of the best farmers of his day. In the sciences of government and political economy, he was qualified to be a philosopher of the very highest order. The very complexity of the inquiries connected with them, just suited his comprehensive and far-seeing intellect. These observations will be hereafter more fully illustrated, when we come to speak of him as a statesman, and to characterize his political writings. It is only necessary at present just to indicate these peculiarities. Of the singular adaptation of his intellect to the departments of science we have mentioned, there can hardly be more conclusive proof than is furnished in the fact, that, in an age when the great principles of political economy were so little understood, he should have attained by his own unaided efforts such an extensive knowledge of them. Adam Smith declared that he was the only man, who, without any communication between them, had arrived at the same conclusions with himself. Let it be here recollected that Adam Smith had spent years of unremitted and secluded study in the cultivation of this science, while it formed only one of the multifarious pursuits to which Burke devoted his excursive and ever-active genius. Of the imagination of Burke it is not necessary to say more than a few words. It was undoubtedly the distinguishing attribute of his mind, and is impressed on almost every sentence he wrote. It is not, as in other men, an occasional and transient gleam, illumining the page at long intervals; it shines on with a steady and overpowering lustre from one end of his works to the other. So rapid and powerful is his perception of analogies that his only difficulty is in selection. The language of poetry is his mother-tongue; and beautiful imagery, instead of being, as in the case of many writers, long sought and coyly won, appears to come uncalled, and to thrust itself upon him. So active is his imagination, that the slightest effort of reasoning, the faintest breath of passion, is sufficient to excite this obedient faculty into exercise, and it is immediately present with some beautiful and impressive illustration, (often brought from the remotest realms of science,) with which to adorn and illustrate each new creation of thought or sentiment. The illustrations of Burke astonish not more by their beauty than their variety. Every species of knowledge, every region of art and science, is laid under tribute to supply the wants, or rather minister to the luxuries, of this prodigal faculty. Not content with the boundless range of external nature, or the wide field of historical and classical allusion,abstract and physical science, the most familiar and domestic arts, the professions, nay, the handicrafts, practised by all classes of men, must yield up their peculiar mysteries, their most recondite and technical phraseology, to furnish the materials of his illustrations. The vocabularies of astronomy and mechanics, surgery and medicine, agriculture and manufactures, all supply him with analogies with which to illustrate or adorn moral and political truth. His knowledge reminds one of the fabled use of comets, which are employed, as some philosophers tell us, to bring, by immense and eccentric revolutions, fuel to the sun. In the same manner Burke's knowledge furnished him, from every realm of human speculation, fresh matter to feed the ever-blazing orb of his imagination. The dress in which his thoughts must be habited, like that with which modern luxury clothes our bodies, was the costly produce of the most various industry, and furnished by the contributions of every clime under heaven. But the illustrations of Burke are remarkable not only for their beauty and variety: they are not less remarkable for their novelty. He affords a conclusive proof of the shallowness of a certain modern theory, that comparative ignorance, miscalled the simplicity of nature, is the natural ally of the imagination; that civilization and knowledge will proportionably limit the sphere of its exercise; and that an era of great refinement, therefore, will be the era of its decline. The fallacy of such reasoning may be easily shown; for though it is true, that in such an age many of the images (and those of course the most obvious) which were at first common property, will have become appropriated by those writers who are fortunate enough to be first, the want of these will be more than made up to a highly imaginative mind, by the endless sources of new analogies, which an increase of knowledge cannot fail to supply; and as these analogies are less likely to be observed by the generality of men, so they will necessarily afford delight proportioned to their novelty. Illustrations, when just, please as they are unexpected. Burke was probably the greatest master of metaphor the world has ever seen. It is the form of illustration which he generally employs, and is decidedly the most effective, especially to the orator. It is so, because it is the most compact and energetic; it does not break in on the continuity of close reasoning, or suspend the current of impassioned feeling; it dispenses with the frigid formalities of fully-stated comparison, and is wrought into the very substance of the sentiment it illustrates. Such are the metaphors of Burke; a complete transfer of language from one object to another takes places; his ideas are depicted before us. His metaphors are not movable figures, (clumsily introduced by the phrases, "like," and "like as,") which may be detached from the page without doing any injury to the meaning; they are chiselled into the solid mass of the reasoning itself. They are not mire ornaments on the body of thought, which may be removed without any other difference than that of leaving it in more simple attire; they are the very body of thought itself; the very form which it inspires and animates, and in which alone it holds intercourse with us. They are the eyes through which its intelligence looks out upon us, the countenance on which its varying feelings are impressed, the voice in which it makes itself known to us. To destroy the metaphor would be to destroy the sentiment. This excessive activity of imagination sometimes leads Burke into errors in point of taste. The reader is every now and then startled by a broken metaphor, and sees the members of two or more incongruous images suddenly forced into unnatural union. The fact is, Burke's images crowd upon him so fast, and with such importunity, that before he has done with one, another has taken possession of his mind. The electric fire of his genius fuses into one mass the hardest, most inflexible, and most heterogeneous materials. These violations of taste, however, are far less frequent than has often been represented. To hear some critics talk, one would think that they are to be met with in every page, and that his imagination was in perpetual revolt against the laws of taste. Nothing can be more remote from truth than such a supposition. The fact is so far otherwise, that Burke's taste was little inferior to his imagination. We are far from saying that there are not many violations of the principles of taste to be met with in his writings; but the great question is, what proportion, after all, do they bear to the number of instances in which he has obeyed them. Absolutely none. Considering how much he wrote, and with what rapidity he composed, the wonder is that his violations of taste should not have been more frequent, for had not his taste been highly cultivated, his prodigious powers of imagination would have borne him on to boundless extravagances. When fairly filled with the gale, it required no ordinary tackling to hold such breadth of canvass to the mast. Those who have no imagination, or but little, have small cause to plume themselves on the attainment of a cold correctness; it is a virtue which, like the temperance of old age, they cannot help practising. But no ordinary measure of taste will control such an imagination as that of Burke. None but Apollo himself could drive such steeds of fire. While it may be conceded that he sometimes errs most egregiously against taste and propriety, it cannot be denied that his very faults are often splendid ones, and display unbounded power over language. Even when we see that he has failed, it is often impossible not to admire the dexterity with which, somehow or other, he manages to mould the most incongruous elements of imagery into something like unity and harmony, and the sort of magical facility and ease with which he makes the most abrupt transitions. The manner, too, in which he recovers himself when careering on the very borders of extravagance is inimitable. One moment he seems trembling on the brink of absurdity, and anon, like some skilful charioteer who has been driving on the edge of a precipice, he suddenly turns the glowing wheels of his fancy, and is once more in a secure and beaten track. Some of these instances are almost miracles of combined powers of imagination and taste, perfect feats in the art of composition. Take the following brief specimens. "I know not how it has happened, but it really seems, that, whilst his Grace was meditating his well-considered censure upon me, he fell into a sort of sleep. Homer nods; and the Duke of Bedford may dream; and as dreams (even his golden dreams) are apt to be ill-pieced and incongruously put together, his Grace preserved his idea of reproach to me, but took the subject-matter from the Crown grants to his own family. This is the stuff of which his dreams are made.' In that way of putting things together his Grace is perfectly in the right. The grants to the house of Russel were so enormous, as not only to outrage economy, but even to stagger credibility. The Duke of Bedford is the leviathan among all the creatures of the Crown. He tumbles about his unwieldy bulk; he plays and frolicks in the ocean of the royal bounty. Huge as he is, and whilst he lies floating many a rood,' he is still a creature. His ribs, his fins, his whalebone, his blubber, the very spiracles through which he spouts a torrent of brine against his origin, and covers me all over with the spray-every thing of him and about him is from the throne. Is it for him to question the dispensation of the royal favour ?" Again: Deep philosophers are no triflers; brave sans-culottes are no formalists. They will no more regard a Marquis of Tavistock than an Abbot of Tavistock; the Lord of Woburn will not be more respectable in their eyes than the Prior of Woburn; they will make no difference between the superior of a Covent Garden of nuns and of a Covent Garden of another description. They will not care a rush whether his coat is long or short; whether the colour be purple or blue and buff. They will not trouble their heads with what part of his head his hair is cut from; and they will look with equal respect on a tonsure and a crop. Their only question will be that of their Legendre, or some other of their legislative butchers, how he cuts up? how he tallows in the cawl, or on the kidneys? "Is it not a singular phenomenon, that whilst the sans-culotte carcase-butchers, and the philosophers of the shambles, are pricking their dotted lines upon his hide, and like the print of the poor ox that we see at the shop-windows at Charing-cross, alive as he is, and thinking no harm in the world, he is divided into rumps, and sirloins, and briskets, and into all sorts of pieces for roasting, boiling, and stewing; that all the while they are measuring him, his Grace is measuring me; is invidiously comparing the bounty of the Crown with the deserts of the defender of his order, and in the same moment fawning on those who have the knife half out of the sheath-poor innocent! Once more: Pleas'd to the last, he crops the flowery food, 6 "I thank you for the bundle of state-papers which I received yesterday. I have travelled through the negociation; and a sad, founderous road it is. There is a sort of standing jest against my countrymen, that one of them on his journey having found a piece of pleasant road, he proposed to his companion to go over it again. This proposal, with regard to the worthy traveller's final destination, was certainly a blunder. It was no blunder as to his immediate satisfaction; for the way was pleasant. In the irksome journey of the regicide negociations it is otherwise: our paths are not paths of pleasantness, nor our ways the ways to peace.' All our mistakes, (if such they are,) like those of our Hibernian traveller, are mistakes of repetition; and they will be full as far from bringing us to our place of rest, as his well-considered project was from forwarding him to his inn. Yet I see we persevere. Fatigued with our former course, too listless to explore a new one, kept in action by inertness, moving only because we have been in motion, with a sort of plodding perseverance, we resolve to measure back again the very same joyless, hopeless, and inglorious track. Backward and forward; oscillation not progression; much going in a scanty space; the travels of a postillion, miles enough to circle the globe in one short stage; we have been, and we are yet to be jolted and rattled over the loose, misplaced stones, and the treacherous hollows of this rough, ill kept, broken up, treacherous French causeway!" Or take the following: "The October Politician is so full of charity and good nature, that he supposes, that these very robbers and murderers themselves are in a course of melioration; on what ground I cannot conceive, except on the long practice of every crime, and by its complete success. He is an Origenist, and believes in the conversion of the devil. All that runs in the place of blood in his veins is nothing but the milk of human kindness. He is as soft as a curd, though, as a politician, he might be supposed to be made of sterner stuff. He supposes (to use his own expression) that the salutary truths, which he inculcates, are making their way into their bosoms.' Their bosom is a rock of granite, on which falsehood has long since built her strong hold. Poor Truth has had a hard work of it with her little pickNothing but gunpowder will do." axe. The extraordinary vividness with which Burke's imagination exercised itself forms a wellknown feature in his character, and, indeed, very materially tended to mould and form it. It has been asserted by no mean masters in mental science, that whenever the mind forms a vivid conception of absent objects, it for the moment believes them actually present, till the obtrusions of the external world awaken it from its dream of abstraction. Whether this theory be accurate or not, as applied to men in general, we shall not stay to inquire; as applied to Burke it is scarcely more than sober truth. So intense was his imagination, that whatever he conceived, was conceived with a vividness only second to that which the actual presence of the object would have inspired. His ideas resemble those spectra which haunt a diseased vision, and affect the mind with the force of real sensations. That this excessive vividness of imagination exerted, in many cases, an unfavourable influence is evident. It often disturbed the exercise of judgment, and exacerbated the violence of his passions. It sometimes deluded his judgment, by submitting false materials to its decisions. Probability was frequently magnified into certainty, and fictions transmuted into realities. When his passions were asleep, and his judgment calm, no man could display more perspicacity; the range and comprehensiveness of his intellect peculiarly fitted him for grappling with the most difficult and complicated subjects. But his imagination was capable of leading him into the wildest extravagances. Thus, correct as he was in the main in his estimate of the French Revolution, so far as France itself was concerned, his terrors of its immediate consequences in our own country often wore almost a frantic and ridiculous air, and betrayed him into the most unjustifiable excesses of conduct and intemperance of expression. At length he could see nothing except through this gloomy spectrum. Wherever he went the horrid phantoms of the Revolution haunted his imagination. Every circumstance, however trivial or unimportant, was interpreted into some significant omen, and tortured into mysterious connexion with the events which were transpiring on the continent. An amusing instance of the extent to which his terrors on this subject could carry him, is recorded in Prior's life of him, which we shall extract for the gratification of our readers. The incident occurred on the night of the memorable-the eternal rupture between him and Charles James Fox. "The most powerful feelings," says Mr. Curwen, after the first open rupture between Burke and Fox, were manifested on the adjournment of the house. Whilst I was waiting for my carriage Mr. Burke came up to me and requested, as the night was wet, I would set him down.-I could not refuse-though I confess I felt a reluctance in complying. As soon as the carriage-door was shut, he complimented me on my being no friend to the revolutionary doctrines of the French, on which he spoke with great warmth for a few minutes, when he paused to afford me an opportunity of approving the view he had taken of those measures in the house. Former experience had taught me the consequences of differ ing from his opinions, yet at the moment I could not help feeling disinclined to disguise my sentiments. Mr. Burke, catching hold of the check-string, furiously exclaimed, You are one of these people! set me down!' With some difficulty I restrained him ;-we had then reached Charing Cross-a silence ensued, which was preserved till we reached his house in Gerrard Street, when he hurried out of the carriage without speaking, and thus our intercourse ended." Now Burke was here in error, not in thinking the French Revolution an event full of terror, but because he acted as though England, and not France, were the scene of it. Such a man, as Cicero says of the orator who begins to declaim with violence before his audience is prepared to sympathize with his emotions, must appear “like a madman amongst the sane and the sober." Croaker, in Goldsmith's inimitable comedy, is ridiculous, not for thinking that earthquakes, and conflagrations, and conspiracies are very terrible, but for permitting his imagination to be so possessed by them, that at length he fancied every thing a sign of their approach-interpreted every letter as the work of an incendiary—read conspiracy in every face he saw, and detected poison in every morsel he tasted. It is scarcely necessary to add, that the same excessive vividness of the imagination tended to inflame the passions. It is not only a fact, that strong passions and a powerful imagination generally go together, but we may account for their conjunction. We may see not only that it may be so, but, to a great extent, that it must be so. When there is little |