led by Rousseau, was drawing its
theories from the abstract conception of "natural rights" Burke was
laying down that sounder and deeper notion of politics which has
governed thinking in that department of knowledge since. Besides this,
he had face to face with the affairs of his own day, a far-sightedness
and sagacity which kept him right where other men went wrong. In a
nation of the blind he saw the truth about the American colonies; he
predicted with exactitude the culmination of the revolution in Napoleon.
Mere rhetorical vehemence cannot explain the earnestness with which in a
day of diplomatic cynicism he preached the doctrine of an international
morality as strict and as binding as the morality which exists between
man and man. Surest of all, we have the testimony, uninfluenced by the
magic of language, of the men he met. You could not, said Dr. Johnson,
shelter with him in a shed for a few moments from the rain without
saying, "This is an extraordinary man."

His literary position depends chiefly on his amazing gift of expression,
on a command of language unapproached by any writer of his time. His
eloquence (in writing not in speaking; he is said to have had a
monotonous delivery) was no doubt at bottom a matter of race, but to his
Irish readiness and flash and colour he added the strength of a full
mind, fortified by a wonderful store of reading which a retentive and
exact memory enabled him to bring instantly to bear on the subject in
hand. No writer before him, except Defoe, had such a wide knowledge of
the technicalities of different men's occupations, and of all sorts of
the processes of daily business, nor could enlighten an abstract matter
with such a wealth of luminous analogy. It is this characteristic of his
style which has led to the common comparison of his writing with
Shakespeare's; both seem to be preternaturally endowed with more
information, to have a wider sweep of interest than ordinary men. Both
were not only, as Matthew Arnold said of Burke, "saturated with ideas,"
but saturated too in the details of the business and desire of ordinary
men's lives; nothing human was alien from them. Burke's language is,
therefore, always interesting and always appropriate to his thought; it
is also on occasion very beautiful. He had a wonderful command of clear
and ringing utterance and could appeal when he liked very powerfully to
the sensibilities of his readers. Rhetoricians are seldom free from
occasio