titution in the Austrian
Netherlands, and as Prussia had interfered to snatch even the
malignant and the turban'd Turk from the pounce of the Russian eagle.
Was not the King of France as much an object of policy and compassion
as the Grand Seignior? As this was the first piece in which Burke
hinted at a crusade, so it was the first in which he began to heap
upon the heads, not of Hebert, Fouquier-Tinville, Billaud, nor even of
Robespierre or Danton--for none of these had yet been heard of--but of
able and conscientious men in the Constituent Assembly, language of a
virulence which Fox once said seriously that Burke had picked, even to
the phrases of it, out of the writings of Salmasius against Milton,
but which is really only to be paralleled by the much worse language
of Milton against Salmasius. It was in truth exactly the kind of
incensed speech which, at a later date, the factions in Paris levelled
against one another, when Girondins screamed for the heads of
Jacobins, and Robespierre denounced Danton, and Tallien cried for the
blood of Robespierre.

Burke declined most wisely to suggest any plan for the National
Assembly. "Permit me to say,"--this is in the letter of January 1791,
to a member of the Assembly,--"that if I were as confident as I ought
to be diffident in my own loose general ideas, I never should venture
to broach them, if but at twenty leagues' distance from the centre of
your affairs. I must see with my own eyes; I must in a manner touch
with my own hands, not only the fixed, but momentary circumstances,
before I could venture to suggest any political project whatsoever.
I must know the power and disposition to accept, to execute, to
persevere. I must see all the aids and all the obstacles. I must see
the means of correcting the plan, where correctives would be wanted.
I must see the things: I must see the men. Without a concurrence and
adaptation of these to the design, the very best speculative projects
might become not only useless but mischievous. Plans must be made for
men. People at a distance must judge ill of men. They do not
always answer to their reputation when you approach them. Nay, the
perspective varies, and shows them quite other than you thought them.
At a distance, if we judge uncertainly of men, we must judge worse of
_opportunities_, which continually vary their shapes and colours,
and pass away like clouds." Our admiration at such words is quickly
stifled when we recall the con