rit must breed, forgetting that it was a revolution which
had made modern England possible. Here, where we must judge him to have
been mistaken in his cause, he succeeded for the first time. It was due
largely to Burke's influence that the growing sympathy for the French
people was checked in England, and war was declared, which ended in the
frightful victories of Trafalgar and Waterloo.

Burke's best known work of this period is his _Reflections on the French
Revolution_, which he polished and revised again Essay on and again before
it was finally printed. This ambitious literary essay, though it met with
remarkable success, is a disappointment to the reader. Though of Celtic
blood, Burke did not understand the French, or the principles for which the
common people were fighting in their own way[198]; and his denunciations
and apostrophes to France suggest a preacher without humor, hammering away
at sinners who are not present in his congregation. The essay has few
illuminating ideas, but a great deal of Johnsonian rhetoric, which make its
periods tiresome, notwithstanding our admiration for the brilliancy of its
author. More significant is one of Burke's first essays, _A Philosophical
Inquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful_, which
is sometimes read in order to show the contrast in style with Addison's
_Spectator_ essays on the "Pleasures of the Imagination."

Burke's best known speeches, "On Conciliation with America," "American
Taxation," and the "Impeachment of Warren Hastings," are still much studied
in our schools as models of English prose; and this fact tends to give them
an exaggerated literary importance. Viewed purely as literature, they have
faults enough; and the first of these, so characteristic of the Classic
Age, is that they abound in fine rhetoric but lack simplicity.[199] In a
strict sense, these eloquent speeches are not literature, to delight the
reader and to suggest ideas, but studies in rhetoric and in mental
concentration. All this, however, is on the surface. A careful study of any
of these three famous speeches reveals certain admirable qualities which
account for the important place they are given in the study of English.
First, as showing the stateliness and the rhetorical power of our language,
these speeches are almost unrivaled. Second, though Burke speaks in prose,
he is essentially a poet, whose imagery, like that of Milton's prose works,
is more remarkable than