Sheridan rose, and in the plainest terms that he could find, expressed
his dissent from everything that Burke had said. Burke immediately
renounced his friendship. For the first time in his life he found the
sympathy of the House vehemently on his side.

In the following month (March 1790) this unpromising incident was
succeeded by an aberration which no rational man will now undertake to
defend. Fox brought forward a motion for the repeal of the Test and
Corporation Acts. He did this in accordance with a recent suggestion
of Burke's own, that he should strengthen his political position
by winning the support of the Dissenters. Burke himself had always
denounced the Test Act as bad, and as an abuse of sacred things. To
the amazement of everybody, and to the infinite scandal of his party,
he now pronounced the Dissenters to be disaffected citizens, and
refused to relieve them. Well might Fox say that Burke's words had
filled him with grief and shame.

Meanwhile the great rhetorical fabric gradually arose. Burke revised,
erased, moderated, strengthened, emphasised, wrote and re-wrote with
indefatigable industry. With the manuscript constantly under his
eyes, he lingered busily, pen in hand, over paragraphs and phrases,
antitheses and apophthegms. The _Reflections_ was no superb
improvisation. Its composition recalls Palma Giovine's account of the
mighty Titian's way of working; how the master made his preparations
with resolute strokes of a heavily-laden brush, and then turned his
picture to the wall, and by and by resumed again, and then again and
again, redressing, adjusting, modelling the light with a rub of his
finger, or dabbing a spot of dark colour into some corner with a
touch of his thumb, and finally working all his smirches, contrasts,
abruptnesses, into the glorious harmony that we know. Burke was so
unwearied in this insatiable correction and alteration that the
printer found it necessary, instead of making the changes marked upon
the proof-sheets, to set up the whole in type afresh. The work was
upon the easel for exactly a year. It was November (1790) before the
result came into the hands of the public. It was a small octavo of
three hundred and fifty-six pages, in contents rather less than twice
the present volume, bound in an unlettered wrapper of gray paper, and
sold for five shillings. In less than twelve months it reached its
eleventh edition, and it has been computed that not many short of
thirty