greedy bishops, the fat-headed squires, the hide-bound politicians, the crass princes, that we find it hard to forgive the man of genius who made himself the organ of their selfishness, their timidity, and their blindness. We know that the parts of his writings on French affairs to which all these mean souls would fly, could not be the parts which men now read with delighted sympathy, but the scoldings, the screamings, the unworthy vituperation with which, especially in the latest of them, he attacked everybody who had a hand in the Revolution, from Condorcet and La Fayette down to Marat and Couthon. It was the feet of clay that they adored in their image, and not the head of fine gold and the breast and the arms of silver. They | were grovelling in terror for their tithes and their rents, for their privileges and immunities in law-making and law-breaking, for their sinecures and pluralities, for a supremacy which they had seldom actively used except to originate a folly, or to perpetuate an oppression. there any spectacle more grievous in history than this of such a crew, led by such a man as Edmund Burke, and dragging after them such a man as William Pitt?

Is

The ideas engendered of the attempt to subdue the American colonists, the pestilent reaction upon the national character of the crime of holding Ireland by

the bonds by which we then held it, the overflowing of arbitrary and despotic notions from India-all these we have already looked upon as preparatives for that state of ignoble enslavement into which England fell at this time, an enslavement to the imperious selfishness and shortsightedness of the ruling classes. But in all these preliminary events, Burke had been the eloquent and untiring enemy of the sections and the opinions, to which he now lent the support as of an oracle from the eternal gods. We may be sure that the motives which were at the bottom of his envenomed war against the Revolution, were different from the motives of the men who chose him for leader. We owe him this justice. He hated the tenor of affairs in France with a large and understanding hatred. He knew what it was that he was attacking, and he knew distinctly both why he attacked it, and how his present views were no more than the fair corollaries of the views which he had maintained throughout a public life of five and twenty years. His clamorous admirers perceived little more than that the strongholds of privilege had gone down before the cry for liberty, like the walls of Jericho before the voice of the trumpet, and they were instantly filled with a blind and sinister antipathy to every part of a movement which they

felt might eventually undermine the foundations of their own strongholds. What the Revolution meant, where its errors lay, why its aspirations were premature, to what high ends these aspirations pointed, were matters on which no power on earth could have enlightened them. They were simply the creatures of a blind and black hatred. Of Burke's writings, on the other hand, it may be truly said that the further we get away from the immediate passions of that time, the more surprisingly do we find how acute, and at the same time how broad and rational his insight was, though neither acute nor broad enough. I am not sure that they who most desire the consummation of the Revolution, will not also be those who find most to admire in his remarks upon this phase of it. Perhaps in the lapse of very many scores of years, when the ends which the French Revolution vainly pursued have been reached by a long process, of which it was the first stage, the Reflections will be accepted as furnishing, what is upon the whole, and in a large philosophic sense, the soundest contemporary criticism we possess.

✓ This famous composition was written in 1790, the year of Federations, Feasts of Pikes, the steady growth of the Constitution under the hands of the Assembly, and the time when everything wore its happiest and

most auspicious aspect. On Burke the apparently bright signs of the hour made no impression. They did not for a moment destroy his conviction, which subsequent events so signally confirmed, that the plan which the Constituent Assembly had followed was hopeless from its outset. He spoke of the virtuous and high-minded men who were conspicuous in that Assembly, in language of shamefully unjustifiable harshness. The contempt which he had for their scheme was more reasonable. At a moment when Robespierre himself fully believed that he was a royalist, and that a monarchic constitution would. stand, Burke perceived that the memorable Sixth of October, when the King and Queen and the Assembly were conducted with triumphant violence from Versailles to Paris, was the virtual dethronement of Louis XVI., the final alienation of the monarch from the movement which had so outraged his authority, and the virtual transference of supreme power to the rabble of Paris. Excuse me," he says, "if I have dwelt too long on the atrocious spectacle of the Sixth of October, 1789, or have given too much scope to the reflections which have arisen in my mind on occasion of the most important of all revolutions which may be dated from that day; I mean a revolution in sentiments,

manners, and moral opinions." 1 It was precisely this revolution of sentiments and moral opinions, which might have taught the Constituents that their honourable toil was bootless. Its sacro-sanctity had been istripped away in the minds of the people from the

kingly office. The King in person had received insults which he would have been more than mortal if he could have placidly forgotten, or loftily forgiven. He had been brought up, let us remember, in a court where majesty was as powerful and holy as in Turkey; his consort was the daughter of a heroic Queen, whose heart had never for an instant fainted before accumulated troubles and wrongs, which surpassed even those of Marie Antoinette. Yet this was the pair on whose sincere amity and cordial co-operation the Constituents counted for the success of their projects.

Another side of the acts of the Assembly presented itself to Burke in a way which subsequent events have shown to be perfectly just. Their geometrical division of the country, their isolation of the different bodies, to say nothing of the confiscation of Church lands, and the entire change of administrative forms and agents, he compared to the treatment which a conReflections, Works, i. 411, a.