Clearness, Perspicuity.-His earlier writings are arranged with great clearness. His later works, like Carlyle's political rhapsodies, are less perspicuous. He was aware of the importance of method; in his Reflections on the French Revolution,' he adopted the form of a letter advisedly, that he might have greater scope. "A different plan, he was sensible, might have been more favourable to a commodious division and distribution of the matter." In such a work, rigid obedience to a plan would have been a cold obstruction to the warm flow of his eloquence.

Precision. It may be doubted whether, with all his industry, he had patience enough to be a precise writer. His treatise on the 'Sublime and Beautiful' is very much wanting in the exactness required for scientific discussion. He shows himself conscious of the principle that in scientific writing each word should be used in a definite sense; and himself proposes to give the loose word "delight" a distinctive signification; but before many pages are over he violates his own definition.

Strength. Strength is the prominent quality in Burke's style, as it is in our literature generally. The peculiar mode is difficult to express; but it may be said that Burke's strength has something of the quality of Macaulay's, although possessing greater body and less rapidity and point. We have already mentioned the similarity in the structure of their sentences. They have also a similar declamatory energy, a similar concreteness, and something of the same mixture of original turns of expression with a copious use of stock-phrases. Before we can feel the resemblance, we must leave out of sight the differences in opinion and in depth and range of thought; when we succeed in disregarding these differences in subject-matter, the resemblance otherwise is very striking.

The following is a fair specimen of the general style of the 'Reflections.' In it we can easily trace all the above points of resemblance to Macaulay :

"I find a preacher of the Gospel profaning the beautiful and prophetic ejaculation commonly called nunc dimittis, made on the first presentation of our Saviour in the Temple, and applying it with an inhuman and unnatural rapture, to the most horrid, atrocious, and afflicting spectacle that perhaps ever was exhibited to the pity and indignation of mankind. This leading in triumph,' a thing in its best form unmanly and irreligious, which fills our preacher with such unhallowed transports, must shock, I believe, the moral taste of every well-born mind. Several English were the stupefied and indignant spectators of that triumph. It was (unless we have been strangely deceived) a spectacle more resembling a procession of American savages, entering into Onondago, after some of their murders called victories, and leading into hovels hung round with scalps, their captives, overpowered with the scoffs and buffets of women as ferocious as themselves, much more than it resembled the triumphal pomp of a civilised, martial nation ;—if a civilised nation, or any merr who had a sense of generosity, were capable of a personal triumph over the fallen and the afflicted. I must believe

that the National Assembly find themselves in a state of the greatest humiliation in not being able to punish the authors of this triumph or the actors in it; and that they are in a situation in which any inquiry they may make upon the subject must be destitute even of the appearance of liberty or impartiality. The apology of that Assembly is found in their situation; but when we approve what they must bear, it is in us the degenerate choice of a vitiated mind.

"With a compelled appearance of deliberation they vote under the dominion of a stern necessity. They sit in the heart, as it were, of a foreign republic; they have their residence in a city whose constitution has emanated neither from the charter of their king, nor from their legislative power. There they are surrounded by an army not raised either by the authority of their crown, or by their command; and which, if they should order to dissolve itself, would instantly dissolve them. There they sit, after a gang of assassins had driven away some hundreds of the members; whilst those who held the same moderate principles, with more patience or better hope, continued every day exposed to outrageous insults and murderous threats. There a majority, sometimes real, sometimes pretended, captive itself, compels a captive king to issue as royal edicts, at third hand, the polluted nonsense of their most licentious and giddy coffee-houses. It is notorious that all their measures are decided before they are debated. It is beyond doubt that under the terror of the bayonet, and the lamp-post, and the torch to their houses, they are obliged to adopt all the crude and desperate measures suggested by clubs composed of a monstrous medley of all conditions, tongues, and nations. Among these are found persons, in comparison of whom Catiline would be thought scrupulous, and Cethegus a man of sobriety and moderation. Nor is it in the clubs alone that the public measures are deformed into monsters. They undergo a previous distortion in academies, intended as so many seminaries for these clubs, which are set up in all the places of public resort. In these meetings of all sorts, every counsel, in proportion as it is daring, and violent, and perfidious, is taken for a mark of superior genius. Humanity and compassion are ridiculed as the fruits of superstition and ignorance. Tenderness to individuals is considered as treason to the public. Liberty is always to be estimated perfect as property is rendered insecure. Amidst assassination, massacre, and confiscation, perpetrated or meditated, they are forming plans for the good order of future society. Embracing in their arms the carcases of base criminals, and promoting their relations on the title of their offences, they drive hundreds of virtuous persons to the same end, by forcing them to subsist by beggary or by crime."

In passages specially laboured, where Burke's individual genius is at its height, and the figures and turns of expression are peculiarly his own, we cannot profess to trace any appreciable likeness. The following is quoted by De Quincey, with the remark that Burke is said to have acknowledged spending more labour upon it than upon any passage in all his writings, and to have been tolerably satisfied with the result:

"As long as the well-compacted structure of our Church and State, the sanctuary, the holy of holies of that ancient law, defended by reverence, defended by power, a fortress at once and a temple, shall stand inviolate on the brow of the British Zion; as long as the British monarchy, not more limited than fenced by the orders of the State, shall, like the proud keep of

Windsor, rising in the majesty of proportion, and girt with the double belt of its kindred and coeval towers, as long as this awful structure shall oversee and guard the subjected land, so long the mounds and dykes of the low flat Bedford level will have nothing to fear from all the pickaxes of all the levellers of France. As long as our sovereign lord the king, and his faithful subjects the lords and commons of this realm, the triple cord which no man can break; the solemn sworn constitutional frank-pledge of this nation; the firm guarantees of each other's being and each other's rights; the joint and several securities, each in its place and order for every kind and every quality of property and of dignity,-as long as these endure, so long the Duke of Bedford is safe, and we are all safe together; the high from the blights of envy and the spoliation of rapacity; the low from the iron hand of oppression and the insolent spurn of contempt. Amen! and so be it : and so it will be,

'Dum domus Enea Capitoli immobile saxum

Accolet; imperiumque pater Romanus habebit.'"

The great element of power in Burke, over and above what he has in common with Macaulay, is his extravagant splendour of imagery. This, especially in the picked passages usually quoted from him, gives such a flavour to his composition, that readers, forming their judgment upon these passages, would refuse to believe how much Macaulay had made him a model. He rises to a pitch of wild excitement that Macaulay was incapable of. The images thrown off in these ungovernable moments were such as Macaulay could never have imitated. The following, from the 'Letters on a Regicide Peace,' describing the embassy to the French Minister, is a well-known quotation:

"To those who do not love to contemplate the fall of human greatness, I do not know a more mortifying spectacle than to see the assembled majesty of the crowned heads of Europe waiting as patient suitors in the ante-chamber of regicide. They wait, it seems, until the sanguinary tyrant Carnot shall have snorted away the fumes of the indigested blood of his sovereign. Then, when, sunk on the down of usurped pomp, he shall have sufficiently indulged his meditations with what monarch he shall next glut his ravening maw, he may condescend to signify that it is his pleasure to be awake; and that he is at leisure to receive the proposals of his high and mighty clients for the terms on which he may respite the execution of the sentence he has passed upon them. At the opening of those doors, what a sight it must be to behold the plenipotentiaries of royal impotence, in the precedency which they will intrigue to obtain, and which will be granted to them according to the seniority of their degradation, sneaking into the regicide presence, and, with the relics of the smile, which they had dressed up for the levee of their masters, still flickering on their curled lips, presenting the faded remains of their courtly graces, to meet the scornful, ferocious, sardonic grin of a bloody ruffian, who, whilst he is receiving their homage, is measuring them with his eye, and fitting to their size the slider of his guillotine! These ambassadors may easily return as good courtiers as they went but can they ever return from that degrading residence, loyal and faithful subjects; or with any true affection to their master, or true attachment to the constitution, religion, or laws of their country? There is great danger that they, who enter smiling into this Trophonian cave, will come out of it sad and serious conspirators; and such will continue as long

as they live. They will become true conductors of contagion to every country which has had the misfortune to send them to the source of that electricity."

Pathos.-Burke is often said to excel in pathos as in every other quality of style; but if we take tranquillity and composure to be part of the essence of pathos, there is very little of it to be found within the range of his published works. It was inconsistent with his purposes as an orator to draw soothing pictures of distress. In the conclusion of the celebrated Begum charge in the trial of Warren Hastings, he is said to have made "an affecting appeal to the feelings and the passions of their lordships;" but his object was to horrify and inflame them, not to fill them with luxurious feelings of compassion. The soft tranquillity of pathos was inconsistent with his purposes as an orator. It was no less inconsistent with his nature. An excitable man, of ungovernable sensibility, when his feelings were moved he was ever prone to run into wild extravagance. He probably possessed the power of communicating his own excitement to such as were not repelled by it; but the effect produced went very far beyond the tranquil borders of pathos.

His well-known allusion to Marie Antoinette is very touching, but it touches our sensibilities more keenly than pathos. The emotion cannot sustain itself in the melting mood, but passes into fiery indignation.

The Ludicrous.-During his quarter of a century of polemical life, he made abundant use of the weapon of ridicule. In his earlier writings he had recourse chiefly to dignified irony-irony that shows no great wit, but is always pleasing and effective from the copiousness and vigour of the language. The ridicule of his later writings, of which we have had a specimen in the quotations from his 'Letter to a Noble Lord,' is extravagantly excited and personal. "If by wit," says Mr Rogers, "be meant any of its lighter and more playful species, then it can hardly be doubted that in these Burke did not excel; at least whatever powers of this kind he might possess, they were in no sort of proportion to his other intellectual endowments. It is true that Burke was fond of punning; his success, however, was not equal to his ardour in the pursuit. Again, if by wit be meant that caustic and subtle irony, which is the more powerful from the calmness of the style, and stings the deeper from the collected manner of him who utters it-neither did Burke possess much of this. But if by wit be meant any of its forms compatible with fierce invective, his speeches abound with innumerable instances of the highest merit." His invective, as we see in his attack upon the Duke of Bedford, is of the most direct and unvarnished kind. He does not scruple to make the most grossly offensive comparisons in the plainest

terms. Frequently, indeed, by his vehemence, he defeated his own ends. Only partisans could have applauded his recriminations on the Duke of Bedford, and his unmeasured abuse of Hastings provoked a reaction in favour of the victim.

The following are examples of the licence that he ventured to take in his invective against Hastings. We quote from the collection of his speeches :—

"What (said Mr Burke) could make this proud and haughty ruler of India submit to such language, and bear with such opprobrium? Guilt, conscious guilt! The cursed love of money had got possession of his soul; and in the contemplation of his detested wealth, he found sufficient consolation for the loss of character and of honour. Under the lash of Sir John Clavering, and the execration of all Asia, he seemed to say with the poet— - Populus me sibilat, at mihi plaudo

Ipse domi, simul ac nummos contemplor in arca.' 1

It was this love of money that made him deaf to the calls of glory, and callous to the feelings of honour. It was this unbounded and insatiable passion for money that had seared his conscience and his feelings; and happy in the accumulation of wealth, even by the foulest means, he could bear, unmoved, the most cutting reproaches of Sir John Clavering. He lay down in his stye of infamy, wallowed in the filth of disgrace, and fattened upon the offals and excrements of dishonour."

Again

"Mr Burke then cited passages from a variety of Oriental authors, proving the right of property in India, and showing that that property had been respected by the greatest princes and conquerors, by Tamerlane, Gengis Khan, Khouli Khan, and others. But (said Mr Burke) the Council have fancied that we compared Mr Hastings to Tamerlane and others, and they have told your lordships of the thousands of men slaughtered by the ambition of those princes. Good God! have they lost their senses? Can they suppose that we meant to compare a fraudulent maker of bullock-contracts with an illustrious conqueror? We never compared Hastings to a lion or a tiger; we have compared him to a rat or a weasel. When we assimilate him to such contemptible animals, we do not mean to convey an idea of their incapability of doing injury. When God punished Pharaoh and Egypt, it was not by armies, but by locusts and by lice, which, though small and contemptible, are capable of the greatest mischiefs."

Such puerile meanness of invective must inevitably recoil upon the author. In a cooler frame of mind, Burke himself would have been the first to condemn it; and we cannot suppose that he ever indulged in it without to some extent bullying his artistic as well as his prudential conscience.

His fury against Hastings carried him to lengths still more outrageous:

"He made some very sarcastic similes as to the connection between Mr Hastings and the Begums, quoting Dean Swift's 'Progress of Love' as

1 "The people hiss me, but when I go home and feast my eyes upon the coins in my safe, I cry Bravo!' to myself."