given finally up to
fanatics, atheists, and theorisers, who talked of nothing but the
rights of man, and deliberately set as wide a gulf as ruin and
bloodshed could make between themselves and every incident or
institution in the history of their land. The statesman who had once
declared, and habitually proved, his preference for peace over even
truth, who had all his life surrounded himself with a mental paradise
of order and equilibrium, in a moment found himself confronted by the
stupendous and awful spectre which a century of disorder had raised in
its supreme hour. It could not have been difficult for any one who had
studied Burke's character and career, to foretell all that now came to
pass with him.

It was from an English, and not from a French point of view, that
Burke was first drawn to write upon the Revolution. The 4th of
November was the anniversary of the landing of the Prince of Orange,
and the first act in the Revolution of 1688. The members of an
association which called itself the Revolution Society, chiefly
composed of Dissenters, but not without a mixture of Churchmen,
including a few peers and a good many members of the House of Commons,
met as usual to hear a sermon in commemoration of the glorious day.
Dr. Price was the preacher, and both in the morning sermon, and in
the speeches which followed in the festivities of the afternoon, the
French were held up to the loudest admiration, as having carried the
principles of our own Revolution to a loftier height, and having
opened boundless hopes to mankind. By these harmless proceedings
Burke's anger and scorn were aroused to a pitch which must seem to us,
as it seemed to not a few of his contemporaries, singularly out of all
proportion to its cause. Deeper things were doubtless in silent motion
within him. He set to work upon a denunciation of Price's doctrines,
with a velocity that reminds us of Aristotle's comparison of anger
to the over-hasty servant, who runs off with all speed before he
has listened to half the message. This was the origin of the
_Reflections_. The design grew as the writer went on. His imagination
took fire; his memory quickened a throng of impressive associations;
his excited vision revealed to him a band of vain, petulant upstarts
persecuting the ministers of a sacred religion, insulting a virtuous
and innocent sovereign, and covering with humiliation the august
daughter of the Caesars; his mind teemed with the sage maxims of