thousand copies were sold within the next six years.

The first curiosity had languished in the course of the long delay,
but it was revived in its strongest force when the book itself
appeared. A remarkable effect instantly followed. Before the
_Reflections_ was published the predominant sentiment in England had
been one of mixed astonishment and sympathy. Pitt had expressed this
common mood both in the House of Commons and in private. It was
impossible for England not to be amazed at the uprising of a nation
whom they had been accustomed to think of as willing slaves, and
it was impossible for her, when the scene did not happen to be the
American colonies or Ireland, not to profess good wishes for the cause
of emancipation all over the world. Apart from the natural admiration
of a free people for a neighbour struggling to be free, England saw
no reason to lament a blow to a sovereign and a government who had
interfered on the side of her insurgent colonies. To this easy state
of mind Burke's book put an immediate end. At once, as contemporaries
assure us, it divided the nation into two parties. On both sides it
precipitated opinion. With a long-resounding blast on his golden
trumpet Burke had unfurled a new flag, and half the nation hurried to
rally to it--that half which had scouted his views on America, which
had bitterly disliked his plan of Economic Reform, which had mocked
his ideas on religious toleration, and which a moment before had hated
and reviled him beyond all men living for his fierce tenacity in the
impeachment of Warren Hastings. The king said to everybody who came
near him that the book was a good book, a very good book, and every
gentleman ought to read it. The universities began to think of
offering the scarlet gown of their most honourable degree to the
assailant of Price and the Dissenters. The great army of the indolent
good, the people who lead excellent lives and never use their reason,
took violent alarm. The timorous, the weak-minded, the bigoted, were
suddenly awakened to a sense of what they owed to themselves. Burke
gave them the key which enabled them to interpret the Revolution in
harmony with their usual ideas and their temperament.

Reaction quickly rose to a high pitch. One preacher in a parish church
in the neighbourhood of London celebrated the anniversary of the
restoration of King Charles II. by a sermon, in which the pains of
eternal damnation were confidently promised to polit