on the Revolution in France, which appeared very late in 1790, and produced an
unparalleled sensation. At the moment of its conception Burke had been extremely

hed at hey them for Armour

Scoile saw the break sides He was a great generatior, & of things.

+ Was timid the Meal Mater

It is perfectly true.

in the human wind in every

himman Work inli

one

was for of reducing way they totysten more perhaps then the varich of principle

principle which

operated in away lama jestely endine. Broke this whist disponi obrkatha's

& plow exported every live contion to the ralizing & classifie of his qued for time that is the great glory of Whad he affectation on that saber I [ Shadeshed this nearly, in other word +900 not know a facelt of

Cory of the humor mild, that modeled which tistega, man pom other animals of localness of her that he did is the scource of every thing

autumn convert into somet that boderd on air the miten than can be called Scéimes. of pushing it to the comfries of I belive his early acquation with In Mudge of freter.

witted with a great
in my t
Mencio have fund

MS. Note by Burke on Sir Joshua Reynolds

unpopular; this book made him the darling of the nation. King George III., now
quite recovered from his madness, pronounced the Reflections to be "a good book, a
very good book, a book every gentleman ought to read." Another king, Louis XVI.,

VOL. IV.

F

translated it into French with his own hand. Some Whigs in England, however, disapproved and regretted Burke's attitude, and Fox in particular was hostile. It was not, however, until May 1791, that the actual and public rupture took place between these friends so long allied by mutual admiration. Burke published his Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs in August, and early in 1792 his Thoughts on French Affairs, tracts in which his violence was seen steadily rising in volume. He was now so habitually excited by apprehension that Frances Burney, who met him at this time, saw on his face "the expression of a man who is going to defend himself from murderers." How little command of his feelings Burke now possessed is proved by the scene in which he threw a dagger on the floor of the House in December 1792. He announced his intention of leaving Parliament, and in the summer of 1794 he did so, in favour of his only son, Richard. But this darling of his age suddenly died, and Burke lay like an old oak torn up by a hurricane. He was to have been raised to the peerage, as Lord Beaconsfield, but this was now abandoned. The first thing which roused the stricken statesman was the action of the Duke of Bedford in the matter of royal pensions. Burke poured forth the splendid invective of his Letters to a Noble Lord (1795), and he passed on to the still more gorgeous rhetoric of his Thoughts on the Prospect of a Regicide Peace (1796-7), in four public Letters. To the end he was excited beyond all sobriety of judgment by the mere thought of " that putrid carcass, that mother of all evil-the French Revolution." But he was now dying, and he presently passed away at Beaconsfield on the 9th July 1797, being buried in the parish church. Burke's magnificent gifts of private conversation and of public oratory greatly impressed all the best judges during his own generation, and have remained a tradition ever since.

FROM "A VINDICATION OF NATURAL SOCIETY."

There are in Great Britain upwards of a hundred thousand people employed in lead, tin, iron, copper, and coal mines; these unhappy wretches never see the light of the sun; they are buried in the bowels of the earth; and here they work at a severe and dismal task without the least prospect of being delivered from it; they subsist upon the coarsest and worst sort of fare; they have their health miserably impaired and their lives cut short by being perpetually confined in the close vapour of these malignant minerals. A hundred thousand more at least are tortured without remission by the suffocating smoke, intense fires, and constant drudgery necessary in refining and managing the products of those mines. If any man informed us that two hundred thousand innocent persons were condemned to so intolerable slavery, how should we pity the unhappy sufferers, and how great would be our indignation against those who inflicted so cruel and ignominious a punishment!

FROM "THOUGHTS ON A REGICIDE PEACE."

In wishing this nominal peace not to be precipitated, I am sure no man living is less disposed to blame the present Ministry than I am. Some of my oldest friends (and I wish I could say it of more of them) make a part in that Ministry. There are some indeed "whom my dim eyes in vain explore." In my mind a greater calamity could not have fallen on the public than their exclusion. But I drive away that with other melancholy thoughts. As to the distinguished persons to whom my friends who remain are joined, if benefits, nobly and generously conferred, ought to procure good wishes, they are entitled to my best vows: and they have them all. They have administered to me the only consolation I am capable of receiving, which is to know that no individual will suffer by my thirty years' service to the public. If things should give us the comparative happiness of a struggle, I shall be found, I was going to say, fighting (that would be foolish), but dying by the side of Mr. Pitt. I must add that if anything defensive in our domestic system can possibly save us from the disasters of a regicide peace, he is the man to save us. If the

finances in such a case can be repaired, he is the man to repair them. If I should lament any of his acts, it is only when they appear to me to have no resemblance to acts of his. But let him have a confidence in himself which no human abilities can warrant. His abilities are fully equal (and that is to say much for any man) to those that are opposed to him. But if we look to him as our security against the consequences of a regicide peace, let us be assured that a regicide peace and a constitutional Ministry are terms that will not agree. With a regicide peace the King cannot long have a Minister to serve him, nor the Minister a King to serve. If the Great Disposer, in reward of the royal and the private virtues of our Sovereign, should call him from the calamitous spectacles which will attend a state of amity with regicide, his successor will surely see them, unless the same Providence greatly anticipates the course of nature.

Against Burke there wrote the revolutionary rhetoricians, those who saw the colours of dawn, not of sunset, in the blood-red excesses of the French. Richard Price (1723-1791) and Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) were the leaders of this movement in idea; but in style they remained heavy and verbose, handing down the heritage

of Locke to Bentham and Godwin. Priestley, after, in 1791, having his house wrecked and his scientific instruments destroyed, as a popular punishment for his sympathy with the Revolution, lived on until 1804 to see something like a justification of his prophecies. These men were the pathetic victims of Burke's splendid indignation, but in 1791 a direct attack on the Reflections took up the cudgels in defence. This was the once-famous Rights of Man, by Tom Paine (1737-1809), an audacious work, the circulation of which was so enormous that it had a distinct effect in colouring public opinion. A sturdier and more modern writer of the same class was WILLIAM

GODWIN, whose Political Justice shows a great advance in lucidity and command of logical language. He has been compared, but surely to his own moral advantage, with Condorcet; yet there is no question that he was curiously related to the French precursors of the Revolution, and particularly to Rousseau and Helvetius, from whom he caught, with their republican ardour, not a little of the clear merit of their style.