had none to sell them. Pray
keep yourself provided with that letter and with this; you have got
very well by the former, but I did not then write for your sake, any
more than I do now. Pray advertise both in every news-paper, and let
it not be your fault or mine if our countrymen will not take warning.
I desire you likewise to sell them as cheap as you can.--I am your
Servant, M.B.

_Aug. 4, 1724._

IV.--'SECOND LETTER ON A REGICIDE PEACE'

BY THE RIGHT HONOURABLE EDMUND BURKE

(_I have found the selection of a suitable sample of Burke to be my
most difficult task in this volume. All his writings, as I have
pointed out in the general introduction, are, after a sort, pamphlets;
and this of itself was an embarrassment. It was partly complicated and
partly lessened by the fact that the form of his speeches naturally
excluded them. Many of his other works--notably the _Thoughts on the
Present Discontents_, the immortal _Reflections on the French
Revolution_, and the _Appeal from the New Whigs to the Old_--were much
too long for a scheme in which I have made it a rule to give in each
case entire works or divisions of works. I at last reduced the
suitable candidates to three--the _Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe_,
that _To a Noble Lord_, and the present number of the _Letters on a
Regicide Peace_. The first went as being to some extent identical in
subject with the examples of another writer, Sydney Smith, which I had
already resolved on giving; the second as being too much in the nature
of a personal apologia. With the third, which I looked on at first
with least favour, I have become increasingly well satisfied. It has
not the gorgeous rhetoric of _The Letter to a Noble Lord_, the
_Reflections_, and others. It has nothing so lively as the contrast
between France and Algiers in its immediate predecessor. It may even
seem, to those who have accustomed themselves to think of Burke wholly
or mainly as a gorgeous rhetorician, rather tame as a whole. But if it
does not soar, it never droops; it is admirably proportioned,
admirably written, and admirably argued throughout, and it shows great
knowledge and mastery of foreign politics--the point in which English
statesmen have always been weakest. I may add that it seems to me a
triumphant refutation of the charge--constantly brought against Burke
not merely by extreme democrats, but by the usual advocate of the
_juste milieu_,--that in his later years, and especially