on the French Revolution"; in his
"Letter to the Duke of Bedford"; and in the "Regicide Peace." The two last
of these are perhaps the most remarkable of all his writings, from the
contrast they afford to each other. The one is the most delightful
exhibition of wild and brilliant fancy, that is to be found in English
prose, but it is too much like a beautiful picture painted upon gauze; it
wants something to support it: the other is without ornament, but it has
all the solidity, the weight, the gravity of a judicial record. It seems
to have been written with a certain constraint upon himself, and to shew
those who said he could not _reason_, that his arguments might be stripped
of their ornaments without losing any thing of their force. It is
certainly, of all his works, that in which he has shewn most power of
logical deduction, and the only one in which he has made any important use
of facts. In general he certainly paid little attention to them: they were
the playthings of his mind, he saw them as he pleased, not as they were;
with the eye of the philosopher or the poet, regarding them only in their
general principle, or as they might serve to decorate his subject. This is
the natural consequence of much imagination: things that are probable are
elevated into the rank of realities. To those who can reason on the
essences of things, or who can invent according to nature, the
experimental proof is of little value. This was the case with Burke. In
the present instance, however, he seems to have forced his mind into the
service of facts: and he succeeded completely. His comparison between our
connection with France or Algiers, and his account of the conduct of the
war, are as clear, as convincing, as forcible examples of this kind of
reasoning, as are any where to be met with. Indeed I do not think there is
any thing in Fox (whose mind was purely historical) or in Chatham, (who
attended to feelings more than facts) that will bear a comparison with
them.

Burke has been compared to Cicero--I do not know for what reason. Their
excellences are as different, and indeed as opposite, as they well can 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.

It has been well observed, that the ancients had no word that properly
expresses what we mean by the word _genius