Born, in Dublin, 12 Jan. (?) 1729. Educated at a school at Ballitore, 1741–43; at Trinity Coll., Dublin, 1743–48; scholarship, 1746; B.A., 1748. To Middle Temple to study Law, 1750. Never called to Bar; gave up legal studies by 1755. Took to literary work. Married Jane Nugent, 1756 (or 1757?). Edited “Annual Register,” 1759–88. Gradually became known by literary work. Private Sec. to William Gerard Hamilton, 1759–64. To Ireland with Hamilton, 1761. Annual pension of £300, 1763. Threw up pension, April 1764. Private Sec. to Lord Rockingham, July 1765. M.P. for Wendover, Dec. 1765. First speech made, 27 Jan. 1766. To Ireland, summer of 1766; received freedom of city of Galway. Purchased estate near Beaconsfield, 1768. Appointed Agent to the Province of New York, 1771. Visit to Paris, Feb. to March 1773. M.P. for Malton after dissolution of Parliament in Sept. 1774; again after dissolution in Sept. 1780; and again in Nov. 1790. Intimacy with Fox begun. Appointed Paymaster of the Forces, 1782. Lord Rector of Glasgow University, 1784 and 1785. Impeachment of Warren Hastings, 10 May 1787; trial begun, 13 Feb. 1788. Grace for conferring Hon. LL.D. degree passed, Dublin Univ., 11 Dec. 1790. Burke apparently never attended to take the degree. Again elected M.P. for Malton, Nov. 1790. Rupture with Fox, 1791. Retired from Parliament, July 1794. Two pensions of £1,200 and £2,500 granted him, Aug. 1794. Interested in foundation of Maynooth Catholic College, 1795. Established, at Beaconsfield, school for sons of French emigrants, 1796. Died at Beaconsfield, 6 July 1797. Buried in Beaconsfield parish church. Works: Burke’s chief literary works are: “A Vindication of Natural Society” (anon.), 1756; “A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful” (anon.), 1757; “An Account of the European Settlements in America” (anon., probably edited by Burke, and written by himself and his cousin, William Burke), 1757; “A Short Account of a Short Administration” (anon.), 1766; “Observations on a late Publication intituled ‘The Present State of the Nation’” (anon.), 1769; “Thoughts on the Causes of the Present Discontents” (anon.), 1770; “Political Tracts and Speeches,” 1777; “Reflections on the Revolution in France,” 1790 (2nd edn. same year); “Appeals from the New to the Old Whigs” (anon.), 1791 (2nd edn. same year); “Thoughts on the Prospect of a Regicide Peace” (anon.), 1796 (11th edn. same year). [Burke published a number of his speeches, also of political pamphlets and letters, beween 1774 and 1791, and many were published posthumously. A complete collection is the “Works and Correspondence” (8 vols.), London, 1852]. Posthumous: “Correspondence with Dr. Laurence,” 1827; “Letters, 1744–97” (4 vols.), 1844; “Speeches, with Memoir,” 1854; “Letters, Speeches, and Tracts on Irish Affairs,” 1881. Collected Works: in 8 vols., 1792–1827; in 8 vols., 1852. Life: by MacCormick, 1798; by Bisset, 1798; by Sir James Prior, 5th edn. 1854; by MacKnight, 1858; by Morley (“English Men of Letters” series), 1879.

Personal

  It is time I should say who my friend is. His name is Edmond Burke. As a literary man he may possibly be not quite unknown to you. He is the author of a piece which imposed on the world as Lord Bolingbroke’s, called, “The Advantages of Natural Society,” and of a very ingenious book published last year, called, “A Treatise on the Sublime and Beautiful.” I must farther say of him, that his chief application has been to the knowledge of public business, and our commercial interests; that he seems to have a most extensive knowledge, with extraordinary talents for business, and to want nothing but ground to stand upon to do his country very important services.

  An Irishman, Mr. Burke, is sprung up, in the House of Commons who has astonished every body with the power of his eloquence, and his comprehensive knowledge in all our exterior and internal politics, and commercial interests. He wants nothing but that sort of dignity annexed to rank and property in England to make him the most considerable man in the Lower House.

  At Beaconsfield, Mr. Burke is an industrious farmer, a polite husband, a kind master, a charitable neighbour, and a most excellent companion. The demons of ambition and party who hover about Westminster do not extend their influences as far as the villa. I know not why it is, but these busy spirits seem more tranquil and pleased in their days of retreat than the honest, dull justice of the quorum, who never stretched forth his hand to snatch the sceptre of power, or raised his voice in publick to fill the trumpet of fame.

	Here lies our good Edmund, whose genius was such,
	We scarcely can praise it, or blame it too much;
	Who, born for the universe, narrow’d his mind,
	And to party gave up what was meant for mankind;
	Though fraught with all learning, yet straining his throat
	To persuade Tommy Townshend to lend him a vote;
	Who, too deep for his hearers, still went on refining,
	And thought of convincing, while they thought of dining;
	Though equal to all things, for all things unfit,
	Too nice for a statesman, too proud for a wit;
	For a patriot, too cool; for a drudge, disobedient;
	And too fond of the right to pursue the expedient.
	In short, ’twas his fate, unemploy’d, or in place, sir,
	To eat mutton cold, and cut blocks with a razor.

  No expectation that I had formed of Mr. Burke, either from his works, his speeches, his character, or his fame, had anticipated to me such a man as I now met. He appeared, perhaps, at this moment, to the highest possible advantage in health, vivacity, and spirits. Removed from the impetuous aggravations of party contentions, that, at times, by inflaming his passions, seem, momentarily at least, to disorder his character, he was lulled into gentleness by the grateful feelings of prosperity; exhilarated, but not intoxicated, by sudden success; and just risen, after toiling years of failures, disappointments, fire and fury, to place, affluence, and honours; which were brightly smiling on the zenith of his powers. He looked, indeed, as if he had no wish but to diffuse philanthropy, pleasure, and genial gaiety all around. His figure, when he is not negligent in his carriage, is noble; his air commanding; his address graceful; his voice clear, penetrating, sonorous, and powerful; his language copious, eloquent, and changefully impressive; his manners are attractive; his conversation is past all praise. You will call me mad, I know;—but if I wait till I see another Mr. Burke for such another fit of extasy—I may be long enough in my very sober good senses!

  Fox never talks in private company; not from any determination not to talk, but because he has not the first motion. A man who is used to the applause of the House of Commons has no wish for that of a private company. A man accustomed to throw for a thousand pounds, if set down to throw for sixpence, would not be at the pains to count his dice. Burke’s talk is the ebullition of his mind. He does not talk from a desire of distinction, but because his mind is full.

  So lively, and so foolish, and so good-humoured was he, and so like the agreeable Mr. Burke I once knew and admired, that I soon forgot his malefactions, and how often I had been in a passion with him for some of his speeches.

  He must again repeat that all he ever knew of men, that all he ever read in books, that all his reasoning faculties informed him of, or his fancy suggested to him, did not impart that exalted knowledge, that superior information, which he had acquired from the lessons of his right honourable friend. To him he owed all his fame, if fame he had any. And if he (Mr. Fox) should now, or at any time, prevail over him in discussion, he could acknowledge his gratitude for the capability and pride of the conquest in telling him “Hoc ipsum quod vincit id est tuum.”

	We trust thy liberal views, thy generous heart;
	We think of those who, naked, pale, and poor,
	Relieved and blessed, have wandered from thy door;
	We see thee with unwearied step explore
	Each track of bloodshed on the farthest shore
	Of injured Asia, and thy swelling breast
	Harrowing the oppressor, mourning for the oppressed.

  Burke is, indeed, a young man of his years. But the reason I take to be, that if age should deprive him of one half of his ideas he would have still more left him than any man of five-and-twenty.

	As late I lay in Slumber’s shadowy vale,
	With wetted cheek and in a mourner’s guise,
	I saw the sainted form of Freedom rise:
	She spake! not sadder moans the autumnal gale—
	“Great Son of Genius! sweet to me thy name,
	Ere in an evil hour with altered voice
	Thou bad’st Oppression’s hireling crew rejoice,
	Blasting with wizard spell my laurelled fame.
	Yet never, BURKE! thou drank’st Corruption’s bowl!
	Thee stormy Pity and the cherish’d lure
	Of Pomp, and proud precipitance of soul
	Wildered with meteor fires. Ah spirit pure!
	That error’s mist had left thy purged eye:
	So might I clasp thee with a Mother’s joy!”

  Mrs. Burke presents her compliments to Mr. Fox, and thanks him for his obliging inquiries. Mrs. Burke communicated his letter to Mr. Burke, and, by his desire, has to inform Mr. Fox that it has cost Mr. Burke the most heart-felt pain to obey the stern voice of his duty in rendering asunder a long friendship, but that he deemed his sacrifice necessary; that his principles remained the same; and that in whatever his life yet remained to him, he conceives that he must live for others and not for himself. Mr. Burke is convinced that the principles which he has endeavoured to maintain are necessary to the welfare and dignity of his country, and that these principles can be enforced only by the general persuasion of his sincerity. For herself, Mrs. Burke has again to express her gratitude to Mr. Fox for his inquiries.

  His end was suited to the simple greatness of his mind, which he displayed through life, every way unaffected, without levity, without ostentation, full of natural grace and dignity.

  There never was a more beautiful alliance between virtue and talents. All his conceptions were grand, all his sentiments generous. The great leading trait of his character, and that which gave it all its energy and its colour, was that strong hatred of vice which is no other than the passionate love of virtue. It breathes in all his writings; it was the guide of all his actions. But even the force of his eloquence was sufficient to transfuse it into the weaker or perverted minds of his contemporaries. This has caused much of the miseries of Europe; this has rendered of no effect towards her salvation the sublimest talents, the greatest and rarest virtues that the beneficence of Providence ever concentrated in a single character for the benefit of mankind. But Mr. Burke was too superior to the age in which he lived. His prophetic genius only astonished the nation which it ought to have governed.

  Had a long and interesting conversation with Mr. Mackintosh, turning principally on Burke and Fox. Of Burke he spoke with rapture, declaring that he was, in his estimation, without any parallel, in any age or country, except, perhaps, Lord Bacon and Cicero: that his works contained an ampler store of political and moral wisdom than could be found in any other writer whatever; and that he was only not esteemed the most severe and sagacious of reasoners, because he was the most eloquent of men, the perpetual force and vigour of his arguments being hid from vulgar observation by the dazzling glories in which they were enshrined. In taste alone he thought himself deficient; but to have possessed that quality in addition to his other, would have been too much for man.—Passed the last Christmas (of Mr. Burke’s Life) with Burke at Beaconsfield, and described, in glowing terms the astonishing effusions of his mind in conversation: perfectly free from all taint of affectation; would enter, with cordial glee, into the sports of children, rolling about with them on the carpet, and pouring out, in his gambols, the sublimest images, mingled with the most wretched puns.—Anticipated his approaching dissolution with due solemnity but perfect composure;—minutely and accurately informed, to a wonderful exactness, with respect to every fact relative to the French Revolution…. Of Gibbon, Mackintosh neatly remarked that he might have been cut out of a corner of Burke’s mind without his missing it.

	NEAR THIS PLACE LIES INTERRED ALL
	THAT WAS MORTAL OF THE
	RIGHT HONOURABLE EDMUND BURKE,
	WHO DIED ON THE 9TH OF JULY, 1797, AGED 68 YEARS.
	IN THE SAME GRAVE ARE DEPOSITED
	THE REMAINS OF HIS ONLY SON, RICHARD BURKE, ESQ.,
	REPRESENTATIVE IN PARLIAMENT FOR THE BOROUGH OF MALTON,
	WHO DIED THE 2ND OF AUGUST, 1794, AGED 35.
	AND OF HIS BROTHER, RICHARD BURKE, ESQ., BARRISTER-AT-LAW,
	AND RECORDER OF THE CITY OF BRISTOL,
	WHO DIED ON THE 4TH OF FEBRUARY, 1794:
	AND OF HIS WIDOW, JANE MARY BURKE,
	WHO DIED THE 2ND OF APRIL, 1812, AGED 78.

  Burke’s conversation was rambling, but splendid, rich and instructive beyond comparison.

  In person, he was five feet ten inches high, erect, well-formed, never very robust; when young, expert in the sports of his country and time, active in habits suited to his years until his last illness, and always, it scarcely need be added, particularly active in mind, having nothing of what he called “the master-vice, sloth,” in his composition. His countenance in early life possessed considerable sweetness, and by his female friends was esteemed handsome. At a later period, it did not appear to be marked, particularly when in a state of quiescence, by that striking expression which, from the well-known qualities of his mind, many persons expected to see; but the lines of thought were evident, and when excited by discussion, there was an occasional working of the brow, occasioned partly by being near-sighted, which let the attentive observer into the secret of the powerful workings within. From this defective state of vision, he almost constantly, from about the year 1780, wore spectacles…. Like Mr. Fox, Mr. Burke was somewhat negligent in common dress, being latterly distinguished by a tight brown coat, which seemed to impede all freedom of motion, and a little bob-wig with curls, which, in addition to his spectacles, made his person be recognized by those who had never previously seen him, the moment he rose to speak in the House of Commons…. His address in private life possessed something of a chivalrous air—noble, yet unaffected and unreserved, impressing upon strangers of every rank, imperceptibly and without effort, the conviction of his being a remarkable man.

  It was a great pity that Burke accepted a pension, because as he turned out so right about the Revolution it dimmed the glory of genius. Lord Mulgrave said: “Mr. Fox acknowledged afterwards that Burke was right too soon.” It was cruel to break up his friendship with Sheridan and Fox, but Burke had no other way of becoming again an isolated object of public astonishment. Sheridan and Fox had rather dulled his fame, and his only chance of self-applause, the only chance of soothing his wounded vanity left him, was to burst like a fiery star from his regular orbit, and become the object of wonder and abuse, enthusiasm and admiration, which he was no longer in the ordinary progress. Love of power was at the bottom of his heart, depend upon it; to be sure, the weakness of the greatest minds. To think that Burke was always giving Barry caution about his temper, while he was such a signal instance of violence himself.

  I saw a letter or two of Burke’s in which there is an épanchement du cœur not visible in those of Pitt, who writes like a Premier to his colleague. Burke was under the strange hallucination that his son, who predeceased him, was a man of greater talents than himself. On the contrary, he had little talent and no resolution.

  What a guardian angel he proved to the nation. There are two individuals who have adorned and benefited our country, whom it is a pleasure to trace into the very recesses of private life: there are no discoveries to make;—all is so fair, so clear, so honourable—the milk of human kindness flows forth so abundantly. I speak of Edmund Burke and Walter Scott. How delightful it is to find those diamonds without a flaw.

  It is strange, considering the eminence of the man, and how early his biographers were in the field, what an impenetrable cloud hangs over the life of Edmund Burke, from the time when he left college to his avowed entrance into a public career. The same observation was made long years since by one who knew him personally and well. “It always appeared to Mr. West (‘Life of West’) that there was about Mr. Burke a degree of mystery connected with his early life which their long intercourse never tended to explain.” This mystery was not only maintained during life, but prepared for after death. There is not in existence, as far as we know or have a right to infer from the silence of the biographers, one single letter, paper, or document of any kind,—except a mysterious fragment of one letter,—relating to the domestic life of the Burke’s, until long after Edmund Burke became an illustrious and public man,—from brothers to brother, or brothers to sister. Such letters could not, of course, find a place in the formal “Correspondence of the Right Honourable,”—but they were the best possible material for the biographer—for the man Burke must grow in and out of them. These letters and documentary evidence must have been intentionally collected and destroyed; and the probabilities are, that they were destroyed by Edmund himself, for he was the last survivor of the family.

  I confess that he does not interest me chiefly as either statesman, essayist, or orator—that I should not care for him in any of these characters if I did not perceive that he was first of all a Man. I may disagree with a number of his opinions; I shall not tell you with how many I agree or disagree. But he himself, I think, is a subject worthy of all study, and of very sincere affection.

  A few months after her [Mrs. Burke] death, the house which she had occupied to the last was destroyed by fire. All that was pleasant and beautiful in the abode became a dream of the past. Some blackened walls and charred timbers alone remained to tell the tale of desolation. Perhaps it was better so. No stranger was long to inhabit the mansion which had been the scene of so much pure enjoyment, so much domestic affection, so many noble aspirations. Its fate was symbolical of the sad family history of which it had been the scene. The blackened ruins were a fitting memorial of blighted hopes, and of a broken heart.

  He was well versed in Greek and Latin literature, was familiar with the great masters of his own language, and had read the best models of the French. Ancient and modern history he had deeply studied; he was an admirable connoisseur in art; and he was not unfamiliar with some of the natural sciences. To theology and philosophy he paid considerable attention. His acquaintance with English law astonished professional men themselves, while from the Roman jurisprudence he not unfrequently drew happy illustrations; and, as is said of Shakespeare, he loved to converse with laborers and mechanics about their trades. He was a skilful, practical agriculturist; in matters of commerce and finance he was exceedingly well versed, and in the whole science of economics he was far beyond his age.

  He sits erect and firm, his head thrown somewhat back as if conscious of his intellectual strength. His face is one that a painter would find it hard adequately to portray, for its expression is constantly varying, but full of benevolence; now darkened by the shadow of deep thought, now marked by vigorous intellect, softened by sensibility.

  There is no public man whose character is more clearly reflected in his life and in his intimate correspondence; and it may be confidently said that there is no other public man whose character was in all essential respects more transparently pure. Weak health, deep and fervent religious principles, and studious habits, saved him from the temptations of youth; and amid all the vicissitudes and corruption of politics his heart never lost its warmth, or his conscience its sensitiveness. There were faults indeed which were only too apparent in his character as in his intellect—an excessive violence and irritability of temper; personal antipathies, which were sometimes carried beyond all the bounds of reason; party spirit, which was too often suffered to obscure his judgment, and to hurry him into great intemperance and exaggeration of language. But he was emphatically a good man; and in the higher moral qualities of public as of private life he has not often been surpassed.

  So wide and various are the genius and career of Burke that you might as well attempt to exhaust the character of Shakespeare in a speech of this kind as attempt to deal adequately with the genius of Burke…. There was no stronger party man than Burke. He was a Whig of the Whigs. He glorified Whigs. He inspired Whigs. He was, if I may so express myself, the prose Poet Laureate of Whiggery. And yet, without hesitation or murmur, he forsook all and followed what he believed to be the truth. He loved Charles Fox and all his other political associates. His eulogy on Charles Fox in his speech on his Indian Bill is perhaps the noblest tribute ever paid in eloquence by one politician to another. But he forsook them all, Charles Fox and all, to follow what he believed to be the truth. The wrench was terrible. It brought tears to the eyes of all who witnessed it. But Burke never flinched and never blenched. He went home to his lonely country home. He went home to see his son die, and all his hopes and future die with that son, and then to die in solitude and sorrow himself. And what of him? Is he a shadow? No, he is, in my opinion, the one figure of the time which is likely never to be a shadow. He brightens on the historic canvas—as the other figures fade—by his speeches, which, as I have said, were read and not listened to. He will be remembered as long as there are readers to read, when those orators on whose lips Parliaments and people hung enthralled are forgotten with the tongue that spoke and the ears that listened to them.

  He became a statesman and great Parliamentary orator, so to speak, in spite of himself. But he must have early discovered the great barrier to complete success created by his poverty. He may be said to have passed his life in pecuniary embarrassment. This alone might not have shut him out from the Whig official Paradise, for the same thing might have been said of Pitt and Fox: but they had connections; they belonged by birth and association to the Whig class. Burke’s relatives were no help or credit to him. In fact, they excited distrust of him. They offended the fastidious aristocrats with whom he associated, and combined with his impecuniousness to make him seem unsuitable for a great place. These aristocrats were very good to him. They lent him money freely, and settled a pension on him, and covered him with social adulation; but they were never willing to put him beside themselves in the government. His latter years therefore had an air of tragedy. He was unpopular with most of those who in his earlier years had adored him, and was the hero of those whom in earlier years he had despised. His only son, of whose capacity he had formed a strange misconception, died young, and he passed his own closing hours, as far as we can judge, with a sense of failure. But he left one of the great names in English history. There is no trace of him in the statue book, but he has, it is safe to say, exercised a profound influence in all succeeding legislation, both in England and America. He has inspired or suggested nearly all the juridical changes which distinguish the England of to-day from the England of the last century, and is probably the only British politician whose speeches and pamphlets, made for immediate results, have given him immortality.

  The genius of Burke is platonically democratic in its multifariousness…. While the mind is fascinated by the mere enumeration of the attributes of his prodigal genius, curiosity and controversy, have been ceaselessly attracted to such questions as to the reason why his youth is so enveloped in obscurity, to the interminable dispute as to whether or not he was Junius, and how he managed to purchase the Beaconsfield estate. Many of the rumours on these subjects are, no doubt, mere contes en l’air. Some thirty years ago, according to Mr. Lecky, the last word was said about the purchase of Beaconsfield estate, and the same eminent authority considers that the account rendered was satisfactory enough, and that it is idle to pursue the subject. Mr. Morley even takes the trouble to deny the rumour that Burke ever went to America, or that he was a cavaliere servente of Peg Woffington. The evidence that Burke paid a visit to America seems, perhaps, worth a little more consideration than Mr. Morley gives it, since it rests on the highly respectable evidence of Benjamin West, a President of the Royal Academy, who was himself an American.

  Edmund Burke gave the most striking proofs of his character and genius in the 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 full-pulsed 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.

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.

  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.

  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.”

  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.

  Burke always disappointed 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.

  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 second-rate one.”

  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.

  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. 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.

  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.

  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 cognosere 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.

  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.

  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.

  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.

  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.

A Vindication of Natural Society, 1756

  The book is a parody upon the style and manner of Lord Bolingbroke…. The wit of Burke’s essay is that he supposes this very aristocratic man to maintain the advantage of a purely natural society upon the very same ground upon which he had maintained the advantages of a purely natural religion. The imitation of style was so skilful, that many are said to have been deceived by it. I 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.

  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.

  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 government. The appearance of Burke’s “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.

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.

  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.

  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.

  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.

  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 eighteenth-century 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.

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 considerable in the House of Commons as you are—and holding the station you have obtained in the opinion of the world, to enter into a War of pamphlets with Dr. Price? If he answered you, as assuredly he will (and so will many others), can you refuse to reply to a person whom you have attacked? If you do, you are defeated in a battle of your own provoking, and driven to fly from ground of your own choosing. If you do not, where is such a contest to lead you, but into a vile and disgraceful, though it was ever so victorious, an altercation? “Dî meliora.” But if you will do it, away with all jest, and sneer, and sarcasm; let every thing you say be grave, direct, and serious. In a case so interesting as the errors of a great nation, and the calamities of great individuals, and feeling them so deeply as you profess to do, all manner of insinuation is improper, all gibe and nickname prohibited.

  I wish Mr. Burke would publish what he intended on the present state of France. He is a man of principle, and a friend to religion, to law, and to monarchy, as well as to liberty.

  His pamphlet came out this day se’nnight, and is far superior to what was expected, even by his warmest admirers. I have read it twice; and though of three hundred and fifty pages, I wish I could repeat every page by heart. It is sublime, profound, and gay. The wit and satire are equally brilliant; and the whole is wise, though in some points he goes too far: yet in general there is far less want of judgment than could be expected from him. If it could be translated,—which, from the wit and metaphors and allusions, is almost impossible,—I should think it would be a classic book in all countries, except in present France. To their tribunes it speaks daggers; though, unlike them, it uses none. Seven thousand copies have been taken off by the booksellers already, and a new edition is preparing. I hope you will see it soon.

  Burke’s book is a most admirable medicine against the French disease, which has made too much progress even in this happy country. I admire his eloquence, I approve his politics, I adore his chivalry, and I can forgive even his superstition.

  The Revolution of France does not astonish me as much as the Revolution of Mr. Burke. I wish I could believe the latter proceeded from as pure motives as the former. But what demonstration could scarcely have established before, less than the hints of Dr. Priestley & Mr. Paine established firmly now. How mortifying that this evidence of the rottenness of his mind must oblige us now to ascribe to wicked motives those actions of his life which wore the mark of virtue & patriotism.

  An author whose splendid and unequalled powers have given a vogue and fashion to certain tenets which from any other pen would have appeared abject and contemptible. In the field of reason the encounter would not be difficult, but who can withstand the fascination and magic of his eloquence? The excursions of his genius are immense. His imperial fancy has laid all nature under tribute, and has collected riches from every scene of the creation and every walk of art. His eulogium on the Queen of France is a masterpiece of pathetic composition; so select are its images, so fraught with tenderness, and so rich with colours “dipt in heaven,” that he who can read it without rapture may have merit as a reasoner, but must resign all pretentions to taste and sensibility. His imagination is, in truth, only too prolific; a world of itself, where he dwells in the midst of chimerical alarms, is the dupe of his own enchantments, and starts, like Prospero, at the spectres of his own creation. His intellectual views in general, however, are wide and variegated, rather than distinct; and the light he has let in on the British constitution in particular, resembles the coloured effulgence of a painted medium, a kind of mimic twilight, solemn and soothing to the senses, but better fitted for ornament than use.

  I conceive there is not to be found in all the writings of my day, perhaps I may say not in the English language, so brilliant a cluster of fine and beautiful passages in the declamatory style, as we are presented with in Edmund Burke’s inimitable tract upon the French Revolution. It is most highly coloured and most richly ornamented, but there is elegance in its splendour, and dignity in its magnificence. The orator demands attention in a loud and lofty tone, but his voice never loses its melody, nor his periods their sweetness.—When he has aroused us with the thunder of his eloquence, he can at once, Timotheus-like, chuse a melancholy theme, and melt us into pity: there is grace in his anger; for he can inveigh without vulgarity; he can modulate the strongest bursts of passion, for even in his madness there is music. I was so charmed with the style and matter of his pamphlet, that I could not withstand the pleasure of intruding upon him with a letter of thanks.

  This was Dodsley’s book for authors’ receipts; in that he showed me William Burke’s receipt for 6l. 6s. on account of Edmund Burke, for the copy of the “Vindication of Natural Society.” That book, said Nicoll, was so much admired in France by d’Alembert, Diderot, &c., &c., that it made them mad, and really produced the Revolution. “And now” (he added) “I have shown you what Burke had for kindling the Revolution, let me also show you what he had for putting it out,” and then he pointed out his (Burke’s) own receipt for 1,000l. for the profits of his famous volume.

  The publication proved one of the remarkable events of the year, perhaps of the century; for it may be doubted whether any previous political production ever excited so much attention, so much discussion, so much praise from one party, so much animadversion from another, but ultimately, among the great majority of persons, such general conviction of the correctness of his views, as to have fully succeeded in turning the stream of public opinion to the direction he wished, from the channel in which it had hitherto flowed…. The interest which it excited did not cease with the moment, for it was sought after then and since by persons little prone to political discussion, for the wisdom of the lessons it taught; by many for its literary beauties; by many in order to retrace the outline of fearful and extraordinary events there in great measure foretold; and it will ever be a source of deep interest to the practical statesman, and of unfeigned admiration to the man of taste and genius.

  The very greatest writers write best when calm, and exerting themselves upon subjects unconnected with party. Burke rarely shows all his powers, unless where he is in a passion. The French Revolution was alone a subject fit for him.

  The merits of his production are, we think, greatly enhanced by the simplicity of the vehicle in which its thoughts ride. The book is a letter; but such a letter! In this simplest shape of literature, we find philosophy the most subtle; invective the most sublime; speculation the most far-stretching; Titantic ridicule, like the cachinnation of a Cyclops; piercing pathos; powerful historic painting; and eloquence the most dazzling that ever combined depth with splendor.

  Not a single weak point in the position of the French Revolutionists escaped his glance. We doubt whether modern critics have discovered a single revolutionary error or fallacy which he overlooked, but to the good or the better side of the revolutionary movement he was as blind as the stupidest of Tory squires.

  When Mr. Windham received his copy of Burke’s “Reflections,” and came to read it, he pronounced the work to be “capable of overturning the National Assembly, and turning the stream of opinion throughout Europe.” So thought very many worthy persons who had hoped much from the first prospects of the French Revolution, but, ignorant of the signs of the times, had at length become thoroughly scared. Mr. Burke, indeed, “turned the stream” of opinion; for the stream, which had hitherto flowed with at least some aspect of peacefulness, as over a flat alluvial basin, was at once diverted into two opposite channels of torrent-like character. Mr. Burke may be credited with having evoked one of the most violent conflicts of opinion in English history; and, of the rival parties, those who had expected much from the early stages of the Revolution, and had become frightened at its later, untoward aspects, who forgot that a too sudden disruption must, under any circumstances, leave a certain amount of wreck, were perhaps the most unreasonable.

  This extraordinary book was published near the outbreak of the French Revolution and justly takes rank as one of the masterpieces of English literature. It is at once a condemnation of the Revolution, and a prophecy of the evils the Revolution would produce. As a specimen of denunciatory writing, it is probably one of the most remarkable ever produced in any language. It pours out torrent after torrent, Niagara after Niagara. But though it is repetitious, and therefore somewhat monotonous, it abounds in shrewd judgments, in brilliant pictures, and in prophecies that seem inspired. At times it is so unfair and so unjust that some have attempted to explain its excesses by the presumption that Burke had lost his reason. There is no need, however, of resorting to this violent hypothesis. Burke’s mind was always essentially denunciatory in its nature; and he was never able to be quite just either to men or to political methods he disliked. Moreover, though he was a passionate friend of liberty, he never believed liberty was to be secured or preserved by submitting political affairs to the control of masses of ignorant men. These characteristics of his mind and of his political doctrines are quite sufficient to account for the peculiarities of what, with all its drawbacks, must probably be considered the greatest work of the greatest writer of English prose.

  Burke though of all rhetoricians the most philosophic was still a rhetorician and presented only one side of a case. Of this his essay on the French Revolution is the memorable and disastrous proof. Though he goes deep into everything he seldom goes to the bottom.

  Because Burke broke away in the “Reflections” from the judicial self-restraint which usually characterized him we are apt to forget that, in that wonderful composition, he deviates again and again into his earlier and better manner, and rewards the persevering reader with passages of calm wisdom and solid, fruitful speculation.

General

  The most eloquent and rational madman that I ever knew.

  With Mr. Burke’s book I do not mean to find fault, but to distinguish between what delights me, and what I only respect. I adore genius; to judgment I pull off my hat, and make it a formal bow; but as I read only to amuse myself, and not to be informed or convinced, I had rather (for my private pleasure) that in his last pamphlet he had flung the reins on the neck of his boundless imagination, as he did in the first. Genius creates enthusiasts or enemies; judgment only cold friends; and cold friends will sooner go over to your enemies than to your bigots.

  Burke’s pamphlets and speeches have lost nothing of their attraction by time.

  When I have revolved the various labours of EDMUND BURKE and THE CAUSE HE HAS MAINTAINED (as it generally regards government, religion, and society, not the details of the war and its conduct), I say, with this allowance for the feverous frailties of the passions, and the taint of mortality in all our best actions, I could record in lasting characters, and in our holiest and most honourable temple, the departed Orator of England, the Statesman, and the Christian, EDMUND BURKE! “Remuneratio ejus CUM ALTISSIMO!”

	Eloquent statesman and sage, who, though late, broke loose from his trammels,
	Giving then to mankind what party too long had diverted.

  I have been assured by a person who had the best means of knowing, that the “Letter to a Noble Lord” (the most rapid, impetuous, glancing, and sportive of all his works) was printed off, and the proof sent to him; and that it was returned to the printing-office with so many alterations and passages interlined, that the compositors refused to correct it as it was—took the whole matter in pieces, and re-set the copy. This looks like elaboration and after-thought.

  To our imperfect notice of some of the benefits, not less durable than numerous, which Burke achieved for the civil liberties, the national welfare of his country, we cannot neglect to add—and to rank in the highest degree—the marked and still living influence of his writings,—an influence derived not only from the personal character, and the earnest and impressive language of the writer, but from the gradual and conclusive testimony of events. If we supposed their value to be confined to the refutation of the doctrines, and the exposure of the tendency of the French Revolution, we should underrate the matter most unjustly. Great and useful as may be this merit, the works of Burke would possess, if entirely stripped of it, undoubted claims to the gratitude of Englishmen. The honesty of his alarms at the danger of the contagion of French doctrines, and of jacobinical anarchy, has been, and will continue to be, questioned; but it can scarcely be disputed that, in pursuing his purpose of denouncing the influence of revolutionary France, he did profoundly examine the true principles of the British constitution, and explain its genuine excellence with a force of argument and a wealth of illustration of which our preceding political literature had exhibited no example. He made it an object of affection and of reverence on the higher grounds of reason and of philosophy; and by displaying in the strongest light the value of the possession, he rendered the possible loss of it a more active and more general cause of apprehension…. Henceforth it was as easy to disprove the existence of that constitution, as its value; and in the merit of having rooted this principle of national faith and personal devotion more firmly in the hearts of his countrymen, Burke stands alone and far above all competition.

  Burke was, indeed, a great man. No one ever read history so philosophically as he seems to have done. Yet, until he could associate his general principles with some sordid interest, panic of property, Jacobinism, &c., he was a mere dinner bell. Hence you will find so many half truths in his speeches and writings. Nevertheless, let us heartily acknowledge his transcendent greatness. He would have been more influential if he had less surpassed his contemporaries, as Fox and Pitt, men of much inferior minds in all respects.

  Yesterday I read Burke’s appeal from the new to the old Whigs, which contains astonishing coincidences with the present times. His definition of the people is somewhat tumid and obscure, and involved in a splendid confusion of generalities and abstruse doctrine; but it is a wonderful monument of his genius, and exhibits that extent of knowledge and accuracy of insight into the nature of parties and the workings of political ambition which make him an authority for all times, and show him to be in the political what Shakespeare was in the moral world. But his writings, however as objects of study they may influence the opinions or form the judgment of young men, would have no more power than a piece of musty parchment to arrest the tide of present violence, and superinduce reflection and calmness. A speech of Tom Duncombe’s would produce far greater effect than the perusal of a discourse of Burke’s.

  He was a writer of the first class, and excelled in almost every kind of prose composition. Possessed of most extensive knowledge, and of the most various description; acquainted alike with what different classes of men knew, each in his own province, and with much that hardly any one ever thought of learning; he could either bring his masses of information to bear directly upon the subjects to which they severally belonged—or he could avail himself of them generally to strengthen his faculties and enlarge his views—or he could turn any portion of them to account for the purpose of illustrating his theme or enriching his diction. Hence, when he is handling any one matter, we perceive that we are conversing with a reasoner or a teacher, to whom almost every other branch of knowledge is familiar. His views range over all the cognate subjects; his reasonings are derived from principles applicable to other matters as well as the one in hand; arguments pour in from all sides, as well as those which start up under our feet, the natural growth of the path he is leading us over; while to throw light round our steps, and either explore its darker places or serve for our recreation, illustrations are fetched from a thousand quarters; and an imagination marvellously quick to descry unthought-of resemblances pours forth the stores which a lore yet more marvellous has gathered from all ages and nations and arts and tongues.

  His oratorical impressiveness was strongly connected with the weight of those maxims which he had formed from a long and profound study of the heart of man. And it is the force and abundance of those fine reflections which give an immortal value to his works on topics of the most temporary nature.

  A sufficiently poetical politician to interest one just when one’s sonnetteering age is departing, but before one has come down quite to arid fact.

  Burke’s words are continually practising the broad-sword exercise, and sweeping down adversaries with every stroke.

  His most universal charm is a style so copious as to enrich the student’s vocabulary by the aptitude and flow of words, to gratify the taste by its elegance, and the ear by its musical periods. Withal it is a manly style. Burke is not fastidious in his choice of epithets or illustrations to the extent of weakening his force of statement. He can use the most homely as well as the most classic phrases and figures. He does not sacrifice truth to beauty, but aims to render them mutually illustrative. Few English writers boast passages that exhibit so clearly the dignity of the language, its facility of application, and its persuasive grace.

  On the subject of Irish Catholic freedom he wrote fully in letters to Sir Hercules Langrishe and others. He also dealt with this important theme in the defence of his parliamentary conduct, which will be found in this volume amongst his speeches delivered at Bristol. His support of the Catholic side of the question was one of the causes of his unpopularity with the electors of that city. Respecting the liberty of the press he was in advance of his age…. On the subject of the toleration of Dissenters, Burke was large-minded and liberal, and supported the principle on several occasions…. On questions connected with Irish Trade and with Irish Parliamentary freedom, Burke took the side of his native country.

  I have now finished reading again most of Burke’s works. Admirable! The greatest man since Milton.

  The contrast between the manner of his characteristic writings and their matter is very remarkable. He too threw over the detail of business and of politics those graces and attractions of manner which seems in some sort inconsistent with them; which are adapted for topics more intrinsically sublime and beautiful. It was for this reason that Hazlitt asserted that no woman ever cared for Burke’s writings: the matter, he said, was “hard and dry,” and no superficial glitter or eloquence could make it agreeable to those who liked what is in its very nature fine and delicate…. His mind was the reverse of historical: although he had rather a coarse, incondite temperament, not finely susceptible to the best influences, to the most exquisite beauties of the world in which he lived, he yet lived in that world thoroughly and completely. He did not take an interest, as a poet does, in the sublime because it is sublime, in the beautiful because it is beautiful; but he had the passions of more ordinary men in a degree, and of an intensity, which ordinary men may be most thankful that they have not. In no one has the intense faculty of intellectual hatred—the hatred which the absolute dogmatist has for those in whom he incarnates and personifies the opposing dogma—been fiercer or stronger; in no one has the intense ambition to rule and govern—in scarcely any one has the daily ambition of the daily politician—been fiercer and stronger: he, if any man, cast himself upon his time.

  The slightest sketch of the reign of George III. would indeed be miserably imperfect if it were to omit the name of Edmund Burke. The studies of this extraordinary man not only covered the whole field of political inquiry, but extended to an immense variety of subjects, which, though apparently unconnected with politics, do in reality bear upon them as important adjuncts; since, to a philosophic mind, every branch of knowledge lights up even those that seem most remote from it. The eulogy passed upon him by one who was no mean judge of men, might be justified, and more than justified by passages from his works, as well as by the opinions of the most eminent of his contemporaries. Thus it is, that while his insight into the philosophy of jurisprudence has gained the applause of lawyers, his acquaintance with the whole range and theory of the fine arts has won the admiration of artists; a striking combination of two pursuits, often, though erroneously, held to be incompatible with each other. At the same time, and notwithstanding the occupations of political life, we know on good authority, that he had paid great attention to the history and filiation of languages, a vast subject, which within the last thirty years has become an important resource for the study of the human mind, but the very idea of which had, in its large sense, only begun to dawn upon a few solitary thinkers. And, what is even more remarkable, when Adam Smith came to London full of those discoveries which have immortalized his name, he found to his amazement that Burke had anticipated conclusions the maturing of which cost Smith himself many years of anxious and unremitting labour.

  Burke’s acknowledged writings I had studied diligently many years before I thought of writing anything on his career. They have ever appeared to me as a treasure in English literature, only second in genius and worth to Shakespeare’s Plays; and it is through the noble archway they afford, that all men must, as an indispensable condition, enter into the spirit of his life. Until we can raise ourselves to the elevation of his mind, and accustom ourselves to look at the events of his time through his own medium, any criticism on his character or political career can be of little worth. We may otherwise complacently remonstrate with him, rebuke him, wonder at him, and misjudge him; but we shall certainly not understand him.

  All hail to Edmund Burke, the supreme writer of his century, the man of the largest and finest understanding! Upon that word understanding, we lay a stress: for, oh! ye immortal donkeys who have written “about him and about him,” with what an obstinate stupidity have ye brayed away for one-third of a century about that which ye are pleased to call his “fancy.” Fancy in your throats, ye miserable twaddlers! As if Edmund Burke were the man to play with his fancy for the purpose of separable ornament! He was a man of fancy in no other sense than as Lord Bacon was so, and Jeremy Taylor, and as all large and discursive thinkers are and must be; that is to say, the fancy which he had in common with all mankind, and very probably in no eminent degree, in him was urged into unusual activity under the necessities of his capacious understanding. His great and peculiar distinction was that he viewed all objects of the understanding under more relations than other men, and under more complex relations.

  The freedom of Burke’s style in all his more characteristic writings would be altogether strange and startling in a writer of the present day.

  Burke has not only loftier qualities of the mind than Bolingbroke—a knowledge of books, though not of men, more accurate, comprehensive, and profound—a reasoning more subtle, an imagination more splendid—but this superiority in gifts and acquirements is accompanied by an equal superiority over Bolingbroke in the very beauties for which Bolingbroke is most remarkable. He excels him in luxury and pomp of language; he excels him in discipline and art of style. The most sovereign genius will be always that, whether in prose or verse, which unites in the highest degree the faculty of reasoning with the faculty of imagination; the most beautiful writing, either in prose or verse, will be that which unites the logical arrangement that satisfies our reason with the splendour of language that delights our imagination. And it appears to me that, in this felicitous union, we have no prose-writer who is the equal of Burke.

  Burke is so great because, almost alone in England, he brings thought to bear upon politics, he saturates politics with thought; it is his accident that his ideas were at the service of an epoch of concentration, not of an epoch of expansion; it is his characteristic that he so lived by ideas, and had such a source of them welling up within him, that he could float even an epoch of concentration and English Tory politics with them. It does not hurt him that Dr. Price and the Liberals were enraged with him; it does not even hurt him that George the Third and the Tories were enchanted with him. His greatness is that he lived in a world which neither English Liberalism nor English Toryism is apt to enter,—the world of ideas, not the world of catchwords and party habits.

  With a fertility of fancy sufficient to make a poet of the rank of Milton, and a power of general reasoning which might have furnished a philosopher of the rank of Bacon, he devoted these rare gifts to political pursuits. He was not indeed the ivory paper-knife which Swift considers as the true measure of sharpness of intellect for a practical statesman, and was rather the razor to which Goldsmith compares him.

  Read him only several pages at a time: only thus he is great; otherwise all that is exaggerated, commonplace, and strange will arrest and shock you; but if you give yourself up to him, you will be carried away and captivated. The vast amount of his work rolls impetuously in a current of eloquence. Sometimes a spoken or written discourse needs a whole volume to unfold the train of his multiplied proofs and courageous anger.

  Considered simply as a master of English prose, Burke has not, in my judgment, been surpassed in any period of our literature. Critics may point to certain faults of haste; the evolution of his thought is sometimes too slow; his majestic march is trammeled by the sweep of his gorgeous rhetoric; or his imagination takes fire, and he explodes into fierce denunciations which shock the reader when the excitement which prompted them has become unintelligible. But, whatever blemishes may be detected, Burke’s magnificent speeches stand absolutely alone in the language. They are, literally speaking, the only English speeches which may still be read with profit when the hearer and the speaker have long been turned to dust. His pamphlets, which are written speeches, are marked by a fervour, a richness, and a flexibility of style which is but a worthy incarnation of the wisdom which they embody. It matters little if we dissent from his appreciations of current events, for it is easy to supply the corrective for ourselves. The charge of over-refinement sometimes brought against him is in great part nothing more than the unconscious testimony of his critics that he could see farther than themselves. To a certain degree it is, perhaps, well founded.

  The varieties of Burke’s literary or rhetorical method are very striking. It is almost incredible that the superb imaginative amplification of the description of Hyder Ali’s descent upon the Carnatic should be from the same pen as the grave, simple, unadorned “Address to the King” (1777), where each sentence falls on the ear with the accent of some golden-tongued oracle of the wise gods. His stride is the stride of a giant, from the sentimental beauty of the picture of Marie Antoinette at Versailles, or the red horror of the tale of Debi Sing in Rungpore, to the learning, positiveness, and cool judicial mastery of the “Report on the Lord’s Journals” (1794), which Phillip Francis, no mean judge, declared on the whole to be the “most eminent and extraordinary” of all his productions. Even in the coolest and dryest of his pieces there is the mark of greatness, of grasp, of comprehension. In all its varieties Burke’s style is noble, earnest, deep-flowing, because his sentiments were lofty and fervid, and went with sincerity and ardent disciplined travail of judgment…. Burke will always be read with delight and edification, because in the midst of discussions on the local and the accidental, he scatters apophthegms that take us into the regions of lasting wisdom. In the midst of the torrent of his most strenuous and passionate deliverances, he suddenly rises aloof from his immediate subject, and in all tranquility reminds us of some permanent relation of things, some enduring truth of human life or society. We do not hear the organ tones of Milton, for faith and freedom had other notes in the seventeenth century. There is none of the complacent and wise-browed sagacity of Bacon, for Burke’s were days of eager personal strife and party fire and civil division…. The only great English writer of that age whom we can name along with Burke in the literature of enduring power, is Wordsworth, that great representative in another and a higher field, and with many rare elements added that were all his own, of those harmonising and conciliatory forces and ideas that make man’s destiny easier to him through piety in its oldest and best sense; through reverence for the past, for duty, for institutions.

  Except when dealing with American questions (as to which Burke has the calmness which arises from the sense of being absolutely in the right), he never entirely carries even his admirers with him. You feel that an unknown something spoils what would otherwise be perfect. This “something” is a want of justness of mind. Burke was an enthusiast for justice. He would have sacrificed everything on earth to put an end to any act of oppression, but he was not a just man. The calmness requisite to balance one side against another, the attempt to realize what were the strong points of an opponent’s case, the faculty even of showing that kind of appreciation of an enemy’s position which is requisite if one is fully to expose its weakness, was the one moral or intellectual gift which Burke did not possess. Hence the persons he assailed suffered from a sense of unfairness which was the greater because of the indubitable force of the assault.

  The most distinguished of warriors, the great Burke, the most eloquent and potent champion against whom a young assailant ever tried his powers.

  In one of his elaborated sentences you will sometimes find words and clauses selected and multiplied and arranged and compacted and qualified and defined and repeated, for the very purpose of extending and limiting the truth to its exact and undoubted measure. He obviously labors to say just what he means, no more, no less, no other. Still, on the whole, he fails, because he is so elaborately precise in details. The thought is suffocated by the multitude of words employed to give it life. It is buried alive. To change the figure, you can divide and subdivide a field into so many, so small, so regular, and so exact patches, that the chief impression it shall leave on your eye is that of the fences. Similar is the impression of an excessively precise style.

  To my mind Burke looms up, after the lapse of a century, as a prodigy of thought and knowledge, devoted to the good of his country; an unselfish and disinterested patriot, as wise and sagacious as he was honest; a sage whose moral wisdom shines brighter and brighter, since it was based on the immutable principles of justice and morality. One can extract more profound and striking epigrams from his speeches and writings than from any prose writer that England has produced, if we except Francis Bacon. And these writings and speeches are still valued as among the most precious legacies of former generations; they form a thesaurus of political wisdom which statesmen can never exhaust. Burke has left an example which all statesmen will do well to follow. He was not a popular favorite, like Fox and Pitt; he was not born to greatness, like North and Newcastle; he was not liked by the king or the nobility; he was generally in the ranks of the opposition; he was a new man, like Cicero, in an aristocratic age,—yet he conquered by his genius the proudest prejudices; he fought his way upward, inch by inch; he was the founder of a new national policy, although it was bitterly opposed; and he died universally venerated for his integrity, wisdom and foresight. He was the most remarkable man, on the whole, who has taken part in public affairs, from the Revolution to our times. Of course, the life and principles of so great a man are a study. If history has any interest or value, it is to show the influence of such a man on his own age and the ages which have succeeded,—to point out his contribution to civilization.

  Burke spoke well but wrote better, and his political writing has, in the grand style, few equals.

  It was Burke’s peculiarity and his glory to apply the imagination of a poet of the first order to the facts and the business of life. Arnold says of Sophocles—

“He saw life steadily, and saw it whole.”

Substitute for the word “life” the words “organised society,” and you get a peep into Burke’s mind…. Wordsworth has been called the High Priest of Nature. Burke may be called the High Priest of Order—a lover of settled ways, of justice, peace, and security. His writings are a storehouse of wisdom, not the cheap shrewdness of the mere man of the world, but the noble, animating wisdom of one who has the poet’s heart as well as the statesman’s brain.

  With all due enthusiasm for the majestic merit of his style, that extremity of praise will not be reached here. Notwithstanding all its magnificence it appears to me that the prose of Burke lacks the variety, the delicacy, the modulated music of the very finest writers. When Mr. Leslie Stephen applauds the “flexibility” of Burke’s style, he attributes to him the very quality which to my ear he seems most to lack. A robe of brocaded damask is splendid, sumptuous, and appropriate to noble public occasions, but it is scarcely flexible. To be a perfect prose-writer, a man must play sometimes upon thrilling and soul-subduing instruments, but Burke never takes the trumpet from his lips. To those few who may think him humorous, I resign him in despair; and surely still fewer will be found to think him pathetic. The greatest of English prose-writers, we may be sure, would be found to have some command over laughter and tears, but Burke has none.

  The writer of a prose illumined as with fire; enthusiastic and yet supremely logical; fearless and yet absolutely obedient to order and to law; eloquent and yet restraint; stirred by every popular movement, and yet suggestive and philosophical. More completely than any man he showed, in style no less perfectly than in spirit and in sympathy, all that was most typical of the best genius of his age—its restraint, its philosophy, its obedience to order and to law, and its gift to literary instinct—removed as far from the exaggeration and pedantry of what had gone before, as from the vulgar platitude and superficial complacency of what was to follow.

  How much of the artist dwelt in the brains of the statesman the record of his indefatigable toil in composition is witness. In answer to the assertion that he is the greatest of English prose writers it is often said that his style lacks restraint and the dignity that accompanies reserve. His temper rather than any lack of taste made him too eager-voiced; he grasped at much that did not fall naturally within his reach, lost chiaroscuro in unrelieved emphasis, and attained the massive at the expense of the beautiful. But genius like Burke’s declines the selective economy of weaker artists compelled to a choice of material easily handled. He swept into his service all that his excursive imagination took captive, and frequently marshals an unequal array of arguments. But if his touch fails at times to transmute the baser metal into gold, amid such profusion as his we cannot feel ourselves the poorer.

  Political writers both sagacious and eloquent have flourished at all periods of modern English history. The thought and the expression were often united in the same person, and in some instances with a profundity in the one gift matched worthily with distinction in the other. But it may well be doubted whether any writer on politics and the philosophy of politics has ever combined sagacity and eloquence in such measure, or anything approaching to such measure, as that in which they are combined by Burke.

  Burke is the prince of pamphleteers. His great speeches are in reality pamphlets, manifestly written and cast in the pamphlet form. He is a politician among philosophers, a profound philosopher among politicians. He is at his best in the speeches on the American question and the letter on the same question to the sheriffs of Bristol. Here our reason and our moral sense are with him throughout. The elevation of sentiment is noble; the style is superb; with all its fervour and force it retains the calmness, the sobriety, the dignity of truth. He hardly ever became declamatory, he is never vituperative. Only once or twice does he lapse into the tasteless extravagant metaphor which defaced his later style. Political writing grander or more full of instruction, moral and prudential, there is none.

  Steeped as we are to-day in evolutionary conceptions, Burke’s thought speaks to us in the language we understand best; it speaks besides with a power that makes it more than simply parallel to already existing influences. Modern evolutionary philosophy has produced no master of political science worthy to be compared for a moment to Burke, in depth of thought, wealth of observation, experience, and research; and above all, in that primal energy of mind which, baffling all explanation or formulation, in its mighty outflow bears along with it the minds and feelings of men in enforced but willing subdual.

  No account of the great writers of our country could be written without a mention of Edmund Burke and his works…. Nearly all he wrote he wrote well, and few men did more to teach and guide the people of his time than Edmund Burke.

  In no part of the world should his name be held more in honor than in this country. He was among the earliest, as he was the greatest, of the defenders of the rights of the American colonies. He gave to the cause of the colonies all the powers of his intellect and the resources of his peculiar and unapproachable knowledge of their affairs and the interests of the empire. No one in England knew the colonial side of the question as he did; few understood as he did the dangers and difficulties of a vast colonial empire; no one could unite as he could the interests of the colonies and of the mother country in one comprehensive view, in which rights upon the one hand and duties upon the other would be harmoniously blended. The War of Independence vindicated his statesmanship.

  In a well-known canon of style Burke lays it down that the master sentence of every paragraph should involve, first, a thought, secondly, an image, and, thirdly, a sentiment. The rule is certainly not one of universal application; it is one not always followed by Burke himself, but it expresses the character of his mind. A thought, an image, a sentiment, and all bearing upon action,—it gives us an intimation that the writer who set forth such a canon was a complete nature, no fragment of a man, but a full-formed human spirit, and that when he came to write or speak, he put his total manhood into his utterance. This is, indeed, Burke’s first and highest distinction.

  In the whole scope of political literature there is no writer so often read or so frequently quoted in the present day, and none whose influence has been so deep and lasting, as that of Edmund Burke…. He never touched a subject without adorning it with reflections that go to the root of the principles of government in all ages and all nations.

  The times were seeking the man of large and liberal ideas. There existed a reading public. Parliamentary speeches were now allowed to be published. The press was practically free to praise or blame. The post carried the pamphlet and the newspaper to the villages, and thus the English people became the audience. At length the man was found, and that man was Edmund Burke.