first took his
seat, in the House of Commons, and it is eighty-five years since his
voice ceased to be heard there. Since his death, as during his life,
opinion as to the place to which he is entitled among the eminent men
of his country has touched every extreme. Tories have extolled him as
the saviour of Europe. Whigs have detested him as the destroyer of his
party. One undiscriminating panegyrist calls him the most profound and
comprehensive of political philosophers that has yet existed in the
world. Another and more distinguished writer insists that he is a
resplendent and far-seeing rhetorician, rather than a deep and subtle
thinker. A third tells us that his works cannot be too much our study,
if we mean either to understand or to maintain against its various
enemies, open and concealed, designing and mistaken, the singular
constitution of this fortunate island. A fourth, on the contrary,
declares that it would be hard to find a single leading principle or
prevailing sentiment in one half of these works, to which something
extremely adverse cannot be found in the other half. A fifth calls
him one of the greatest men, and, Bacon alone excepted, the greatest
thinker, who ever devoted himself to the practice of English politics.
Yet, oddly enough, the author of the fifth verdict will have it that
this great man and great thinker was actually out of his mind when
he composed the pieces for which he has been most widely admired and
revered.

A sufficient interval has now passed to allow all the sediment of
party fanaticism to fall to the bottom. The circumstances of the world
have since Burke's time undergone variation enough to enable us
to judge, from many points of view, how far he was the splendid
pamphleteer of a faction, and how far he was a contributor to the
universal stock of enduring wisdom. Opinion is slowly, but without
reaction, settling down to the verdict that Burke is one of the
abiding names in our history, not because he either saved Europe
or destroyed the Whig party; but because he added to the permanent
considerations of wise political thought, and to the maxims of wise
practice in great affairs, and because he imprints himself upon us
with a magnificence and elevation of expression that places him among
the highest masters of literature, in one of its highest and most
commanding senses. Those who have acquired a love for abstract
politics amid the almost mathematical closeness and precision of