situations should strive by
night and by day to possess. If the theme with which they deal were
less near than it is to our interests and affections as free citizens,
these three performances would still abound in the lessons of an
incomparable political method. If their subject were as remote as the
quarrel between the Corinthians and Corcyra, or the war between Rome
and the Allies, instead of a conflict to which the world owes the
opportunity of the most important of political experiments, we should
still have everything to learn from the author's treatment; the
vigorous grasp of masses of compressed detail, the wide illumination
from great principles of human experience, the strong and masculine
feeling for the two great political ends of Justice and Freedom, the
large and generous interpretation of expediency, the morality, the
vision, the noble temper. If ever, in the fulness of time, and surely
the fates of men and literature cannot have it otherwise, Burke
becomes one of the half-dozen names of established and universal
currency in education and in common books, rising above the
waywardness of literary caprice or intellectual fashions, as
Shakespeare and Milton and Bacon rise above it, it will be the
mastery, the elevation, the wisdom, of these far-shining discourses in
which the world will in an especial degree recognise the combination
of sovereign gifts with beneficent uses.

The pamphlet on the _Present Discontents_ is partially obscured or
muffled to the modern reader by the space which is given to the cabal
of the day. The _Reflections on the French Revolution_ over-abounds in
declamation, and--apart from its being passionately on one side, and
that perhaps the wrong one--the splendour of the eloquence is out
of proportion to the reason and the judgment. In the pieces on the
American war, on the contrary, Burke was conscious that he could trust
nothing to the sympathy or the prepossessions of his readers, and
this put him upon an unwonted persuasiveness. Here it is reason and
judgment, not declamation; lucidity, not passion; that produces
the effects of eloquence. No choler mars the page; no purple patch
distracts our minds from the penetrating force of argument; no
commonplace is dressed up into a vague sublimity. The cause of freedom
is made to wear its own proper robe of equity, self-control, and
reasonableness.

Not one, but all those great idols of the political market-place whose
worship and servi