BURKE

1729-1797

EDMUND BURKE was born in Dublin in 1729, and died in 1797. Unlike his great contemporary, Pitt, he was not a youthful prodigy, but a warmhearted boy of apparently average intellectual capacity. Having graduated at Trinity College, Dublin, he went to London and entered upon the study of law. But the profession did not suit him, and he soon abandoned

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it to devote himself to literary labors. His first considerable work was an essay entitled "A Vindication of Natural Society." It was a parody on the works of Lord Bolingbroke, who had maintained that natural religion is sufficient for man, and that he does not need a revelation. His second book was one which gave him permanent and honorable fame, "An Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas on the Sublime and Beautiful." In 1759 Burke returned to Ireland as private secretary to William Gerard Hamilton (known

in history as "Single-Speech Hamilton "), Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant. He held his place but a short time, leaving it to become Secretary to the Marquis of Rockingham. Soon obtaining a seat in Parliament, he began the brilliant political career the outlines of which are familiar to all. He was especially prominent in the debates upon the relations of the British government to the American colonies, and displayed a more thorough knowledge of the subject than any of his colleagues. In 1796, after a long and honorable career, he retired to private life, and died the next year. Burke was not a popular man; he alienated his closest friends by the singularity and obstinacy of his opinions; but remembering that Goldsmith loved him, and that he had befriended George Crabbe in the hour of the latter's extremity, we may believe that his infirmities were rather those of temperament than of character.

As a writer Burke stands in the very front rank. Hazlitt says: "Burke was so far from being a gaudy or flowery writer that he was one of the severest writers. His words are the most like things; his style is the most strictly suited to the subject. He unites every extreme and every variety of composition; the lowest and the meanest words and descriptions with the highest. He exults in the display of power, in showing the extent, the force and intensity of his ideas; he is led on by the mere impulse and vehemence of his fancy, not by the affectation of dazzling his readers by gaudy conceits or pompous images. He was completely carried away by his subject.

"He had no other object but to produce the strongest impression on his reader, by giving the truest, the most characteristic, the fullest, and most forcible description of things, trusting to the power of his own mind to mold them into grace and beauty. He did not produce a splendid effect by setting fire to the light vapors that float in the regions of fancy, as the chemists make fine colors with phosphorus, but by the eagerness of his blows struck fire from the flint, and melted the hardest substances in the furnace of his imagination. He most frequently produced an effect by the remoteness and novelty of his combinations, by the force of contrast, by the striking manner in which the most opposite and unpromising materials were harmoniously blended together; not by laying his hands on all the fine things he could think of, but by bringing together those things which he knew would blaze out into glorious light by their collision. The florid style is a mixture of affectation and commonplace. Burke's was a union of untamable vigor and originality.

"Burke has been compared to Cicero,—I do not know for what reason. Their excellences are as different, and indeed as opposite, as they can well be. Burke had not the polished elegance, the glossy neatness, the artful regularity, the exquisite modulation, of Cicero; he had a thousand times more richness and originality of mind, more strength and pomp of diction."

We give selections from one of his parliamentary addresses, and from his famous essay, "Reflections on the French Revolution."

ON CONCILIATION WITH AMERICA1

My hold of the Colonies is in the close affection which grows from common names, from kindred blood, from similar privileges, and equal protection. These are ties which, though light as air, are as strong as links of iron. Let the Colonies always keep the idea of their civil rights associated with your government ;- they will cling and grapple to you; and no force under heaven will be of power to tear them from their allegiance. But let it be once understood, that your government may be one thing and their privileges another; that these two things may exist without any mutual relation: the cement is gone; the cohesion is loosened; and everything hastens to decay and dissolution. As long as you have the wisdom to keep the sovereign authority of this country as the sanctuary of liberty, the sacred temple consecrated to our common faith, wherever the chosen race and sons of England worship freedom, they will turn their faces towards you. The more they multiply, the more friends you will have; the more ardently they love liberty, the more perfect will be their obedience. Slavery they can have anywhere. It is a weed that grows in every soil. They may have it from Spain, they may have it from Prussia. But, until you become lost to all feeling of your true interest and your natural dignity, freedom they can have from none but you. This is the commodity of price, of which you have the monopoly. This is the true act of navigation, which binds to you the commerce of the Colonies, and through them secures to you the wealth of the world. Deny them this participation of freedom, and you break that sole bond which originally made, and must still preserve, the unity of the empire. Do not entertain so weak an imagination, as that your registers and your bonds, your affidavits and your sufferances, your cockets 2 and your clearances, are what form the great securities of your commerce. Do not dream that

1 The famous speech from which this extract is taken was delivered in the House of Commons, March 22, 1775.

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your letters of office, and your instructions, and your suspending clauses, are the things that hold together the great contexture of this mysterious whole. These things do not make your government. Dead instruments, passive tools as they are, it is the spirit of the English communion 1 that gives all their life and efficacy to them. It is the spirit of the English constitution, which, infused through the mighty mass, pervades, feeds, unites, invigorates, vivifies every part of the empire, even down to the minutest member.

Is it not the same virtue which does everything for us here in England? Do you imagine, then, that it is the land-tax act which raises your revenue? that it is the annual vote in the committee of supply, which gives you your army? or that it is the mutiny bill, which inspires it with bravery and discipline? No! surely no! It is the love of the people; it is their attachment to their government, from the sense of the deep stake they have in such a glorious institution, which gives you your army and your navy, and infuses into both that liberal obedience, without which your army would be a base rabble, and your navy nothing but rotten timber.

All this, I know well enough, will sound wild and chimerical to the profane herd of those vulgar and mechanical politicians, who have no place among us; a sort of people who think that nothing exists but what is gross and material; and who therefore, far from being qualified to be directors of the great movement of empire, are not fit to turn a wheel in the machine. But to men truly initiated and rightly taught, these ruling and master principles, which, in the opinion of such men as I have mentioned, have no substantial existence, are in truth everything, and all in all. Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together. If we are conscious of our situation, and glow with zeal to fill our places as becomes our station and ourselves, we ought to auspicate 2 our public proceedings on America with the old warning of the Church, Sursum corda! We ought to elevate our minds to the great

1 fellowship, community of interest and blood

2 begin favorably

3 Lat. Lift up your hearts!

ness of that trust to which the order of Providence has called us. By adverting to the dignity of this high calling, our ancestors have turned a savage wilderness into a glorious empire; and have made the most extensive, and the only honorable conquests, not by destroying, but by promoting the wealth, the number, the happiness of the human race. Let us get an American revenue as we have got an American empire. English privileges have made it all that it is; English privileges alone will make it all it can be.

THE DECAY OF CHIVALROUS SENTIMENT1

Ir is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the Queen of France, then the Dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in, glittering like the morning star, full of life and splendor and joy. O, what a revolution! and what a heart must I have, to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom ; little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor, and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone.

1 This is justly esteemed one of the finest rhetorical passages in our language. The work in which it occurs appeared in 1790. In the preceding autumn (October, 1789) Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, together with her husband, Louis XVI., had been carried in mock triumph from Versailles to Paris by a revolutionary mob. Here the unfortunate lady was held captive till 1793, when she was executed. The passages in which occur the phrases "the age of chivalry" and "the cheap defense of nations" are justly famous.