obles had crossed the Rhine, to brood impotently in the safety
of Coblenz over projects of a bloody revenge upon their country. But
France, meanwhile, paid little heed either to the anger of the clergy
or the menaces of the emigrant nobles, and at the very moment when
Burke was writing his most sombre pages, Paris and the provinces were
celebrating with transports of joy and enthusiasm the civic oath,
the federation, the restoration of concord to the land, the final
establishment of freedom and justice in a regenerated France. This was
the happy scene over which Burke suddenly stretched out the right arm
of an inspired prophet, pointing to the cloud of thunder and darkness
that was gathering on the hills, and proclaiming to them the doom that
had been written upon the wall by the fingers of an inexorable hand.
It is no wonder that when the cloud burst and the doom was fulfilled,
men turned to Burke, as they went of old to Ahithophel, whose counsel
was as if a man had inquired of the oracle of God.

It is not to our purpose to discuss all the propositions advanced in
the _Reflections_, much less to reply to them. The book is like
some temple, by whose structure and design we allow ourselves to be
impressed, without being careful to measure the precise truth or
fitness of the worship to which it was consecrated by its first
founders. Just as the student of the _Politics_ of Aristotle may well
accept all the wisdom of it, without caring to protest at every turn
against slavery as the basis of a society, so we may well cherish all
the wisdom of the _Reflections_, at this distance of time, without
marking as a rubric on every page that half of these impressive
formulae and inspiring declamations were irrelevant to the occasion
which called them forth, and exercised for the hour an influence that
was purely mischievous. Time permits to us this profitable lenity. In
reading this, the first of his invectives, it is important, for the
sake of clearness of judgment, to put from our minds the practical
policy which Burke afterwards so untiringly urged upon his countrymen.
As yet there is no exhortation to England to interfere. We still
listen to the voice of the statesman, and are not deafened by the
passionate cries of the preacher of a crusade. When Burke wrote the
_Reflections_ he was justified in criticising the Revolution as
an extraordinary movement, but still a movement professing to be
conducted on the principles of ration