pressing his faith, they grossly misrepresent, foully belie, and fiercely insult the faith of the Christian world. We are far, indeed, from advocating state prosecutions for blasphemy; we think them machines of unjust power, at once cruel and clumsy; nor will we be suspected of undue straitlacedness or of bigotry at all; but we would have public opinion brought to bear, with all its weight, upon the subject. We would seek to crush such unworthy memorials of genius under the silence of universal contempt or pity. We do not wish them mutilated nor extinguished; we wish them preserved; but preserved as other monstrosities are preserved, in secluded corners, on lofty shelves, for the contemplation of those in whom curiosity overpowers disgust, and who can wring a lesson and a moral even from things abominable and unutterable. We are irresistibly reminded of the lines of Milton in his “ Battle of the Angels : “I might relate of thousands, and their names No. IV.-EDMUND BURKE. ALL hail to Edmund Burke, the greatest and least appreciated man of the eighteenth century, even as Milton had been the greatest and least appreciated man of the century before! Each century, in fact, bears its peculiarly great ! man, and as certainly either neglects or abuses him. Nor do after ages always repair the deficiency. For instance, 66 66 Peace.” He was between the writing of the first and the second sentences of this paper, we have happened to take up a London periodical, which has newly come in, and have found Burke first put at the feet of Fox, and, secondly, accused of being actuated in all his political conduct by two objects—those of places and pensions for himself and his family; so that our estimate of him, although late, may turn out, on the whole, a word in season." It is, at all events, refreshing for us to look back from the days of a Derby and a Biographer Russell, to those of the great and eloquent Burke, and to turn from the ravings of the" Latter-Day Pamphlets, to the noble rage and magnificent philippics of a “ Regicide First of all, in this paper, we feel ourselves constrained to proclaim what, even yet, is not fully understood Burke's unutterable superiority to all his parliamentary rivals. It was not simply that he was above them as one bough in a tree is above another, but above them as the sun is above the top of the tree. “not of their order.” He had philosophic intellect, while they had only arithmetic. He had genius, while they had not even fancy. He had heart, while they had only passions. He had widest and most comprehensive views; their minds had little real power of generalisation. He had religion; most of them were infidels of that lowest order, who imagine that Christianity is a monster, bred between priestcraft and political expediency. He loved literature with his inmost soul; they (Fox on this point must be excepted) knew little about it, and cared less. In a word, they were men of their time; he belonged to all ages, and ; his mind was as catholic as it was clear and vast. Contrast the works and speeches of the men! Has a sentence of Pitt's ever been quoted as a maxim? Does one appear in even our common books of elocutionary extracts ? Are Sheridan's flights remembered except for their ambitious and adventurous badness? Unless one or two showy climaxes of Grattan and Curran, what else of them is extant? How different with Burke. His works are to this hour burning with genius, and swarming with wisdom. You cannot open a page, without finding passage of Fox a either a profound truth expressed in the shortest and sharpest form, looking up at you like an eye; or a brilliant image flashing across with the speed and splendour of a meteor; or a description, now grotesque, and now gorgeous; or a literary allusion, cooling and sweetening the fervour of th political discussion; or a quotation from the poets, so ; pointed and pat, that it assumes the rank of an original beauty. Burke's writing is almost unrivalled for its combination and dexterous interchange of excellences. It is by turns statistics, metaphysics, painting, poetry, eloquence, wit, and wisdom. It is so cool and so warm, so mechanical and so impulsive, so measured and so impetuous, so clear and so profound, so simple and so rich. Its sentences are now the shortest, and now the longest; now bare as Butler, and now figured as Jeremy Taylor ; now conversational, and now ornate, intense, and elaborate in the highest degree. He closes many of his paragraphs in a rushing thunder and fiery flood of eloquence, and opens the next as calmly as if he had ceased to be the same being. Indeed, he is the least monotonous and manneristic of modern writers, and in this, as in so many other respects, excels such authors as Macaulay and Chalmers, who are sometimes absurdly compared to him. He has, in fact, as we hinted above, three, if not four or five, distinct styles, and possesses equal mastery over all. He exhibits specimens of the law-paper style, in his articles of charge against Warren Hastings; of the calm, sober, uncoloured argument, in his“ Thoughts on the present Discontents ;” of the ingenious, high-finished, but temperate philosophical essay, in his “ Sublime and Beautiful;" of the flushed and fiery diatribe, here storming into fierce scorn and invective, and there soaring into poetical eloquence, in his “Letter to a Noble Lord,” and in his Regicide Peace ;” and of a style combining all these qualities, and which he uses in his Speech on the Nabob of Arcot's debts, and in his "Reflections on the French Revolution.” Thus you may read a hundred pages of him at once, without finding any power but pure intellect at work, and at other times every sentence is starred with an image, even as every moment of some men's sleep is spiritualised by a dream; and, in many of them, figures cluster and 1 66 crowd upon each other. It is remarkable that his imagination becomes apparently more powerful as he draws near the end of his journey. The reason of this probably was: : he became more thoroughly in earnest towards the close. Till the trial of Warren Hastings, or even on to the outbreak of the French Revolution, he was a volcano speaking and snorting out fire at intervals-an Etna at ease; but from these dates he began to pour out incessant torrents of molten lava upon the wondering nations. Figures are a luxury to cool thinkers; they are a necessity to prophets. The Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel have no choice. Their thought Must come forth with the fiery edge of metaphor around it. Let us look, in the course of the remarks that follow, to the following points--to Burke's powers, to his possible achievements, to his actual works, to his oratory, to his conversation, to his private character, to his critics, and to the question, what has been the result of his influence as a writer and a thinker? 1. We would seek to analyse shortly his powers. These were distinguished at once by their variety, comprehensiveness, depth, harmony, and brilliance. He was endowed in the very "prodigality of heaven" with genius of a creative order, with boundless fertility of fancy, with piercing acuteness and comprehension of intellect, with a tendency leading him irresistibly down into the depths of every subject, and with an eloquence at once massive, profuse, fiery, and flexible. To these powers he united, what are not often found in their company, slow plodding perseverance, indomitable industry, and a cautious, balancing disposition. We may apply to him the words of Scripture, “He could mount up with wings as an eagle, he could run and not be weary, he could walk and not be faint." Air, earth, and the things under the earth, were equally familiar to him; and you are amazed to see how easily he can fold ир the mighty wings which had swept the ether, and “knit” the mountain to the sky, and turn to mole-like minings in the depths of the miry clay, which he found it necessary also to explore. These vast and various powers he had fed with the most extensive, most minute, most accurate, most a artistically managed reading, with elaborate study, with the closest yet kindliest observation of human nature, and with free and copious intercourse with all classes of men. And to inspirit and inflame their action, there were a profound sense of public duty, ardent benevolence, the passions of a hot but generous heart, and a strong-felt, although uncanting and unostentatious piety. 2. His possible achievements. To what was a man like this, who could at once soar and delve, overtop the mountain, skim the surface, and explore the mine, not competent? He was, shall we say? a mental camelopardpatient as the camel, and as the leopard swift and richly spotted. We have only in his present works the fragments of his genius. Had he not in some measure, “ Born for the universe, narrow'd his mind, And to party given up what was meant for mankind,” what works on general subjects had he written! It had been, perhaps, a system of philosophy, merging and kindling into poetry, resembling Brown's “Lectures,” but informed by a more masculine genius; or it had been, perhaps, a treatise on the Science of Politics, viewed on a large and liberal scale; or it had been, perhaps, a history of his country, abounding in a truer philosophy and a more vivid narrative than Hume, and in pictures more brilliant than Macaulay's; or it had been, perhaps, a work on the profounder principles of literature or of art; or it had been, perhaps—for this, too, was in his power—some strain of solemn poetry, rising higher than Akenside or Thomson ; or else some noble argument or apology for the faith that was in him in the blessed religion of Jesus. Any or all of these tasks we believe to have been thoroughly within the compass of Burke's universal mind, had his lot been otherwise cast, and had his genius not been so fettered by circumstance and subject, that he seems at times a splendid generaliser in chains. 3. These decided views, as to the grand possibilities of this powerful spirit, must not be permitted to blind us to what he has actually done. This, alike in quantity and in quality, challenges our wonder.' Two monster octavos |