asoning, but such passages only make us wonder how they come to be
where they are. The reader is in no humour for them. In splendour
of rhetoric, in fine images, in sustention, in irony, they surpass
anything that Burke ever wrote, but of the qualities and principles
that, far more than his rhetoric, have made Burke so admirable and so
great--of justice, of firm grasp of fact, of a reasonable sense of the
probabilities of things--there are only traces enough to light up the
gulfs of empty words, reckless phrases, and senseless vituperations,
that surge and boil around them.

It is with the same emotion of "grief and shame" with which Fox heard
Burke argue against relief to Dissenters, that we hear him abusing the
courts of law because they did not convict Hardy and Horne Tooke. The
pages against divorce and civil marriage, even granting that they
point to the right judgment in these matters, express it with a
vehemence that is irrational, and in the dialect, not of a statesman,
but of an enraged Capucin. The highly wrought passage in which Burke
describes external aggrandisement as the original thought and the
ultimate aim of the earlier statesmen of the Revolution, is no better
than ingenious nonsense. The whole performance rests on a gross
and inexcusable anachronism. There is a contemptuous refusal to
discriminate between groups of men who were as different from one
another as Oliver Cromwell was different from James Nayler, and
between periods which were as unlike in all their conditions as the
Athens of the Thirty Tyrants was unlike Athens after Thrasybulus had
driven the Tyrants out. He assumes that the men, the policy, the
maxims of the French Government are the men, the policy, and the
maxims of the handful of obscure miscreants who had hacked priests and
nobles to pieces at the doors of the prisons four years before. Carnot
is to him merely "that sanguinary tyrant," and the heroic Hoche
becomes "that old practised assassin," while the Prince of Wales, by
the way, and the Duke of York are the hope and pride of nations.
To heap up that incessant iteration about thieves, murderers,
housebreakers, assassins, bandits, bravoes with their hands dripping
with blood and their maw gorged with property, desperate paramours,
bombastical players, the refuse and rejected offal of strolling
theatres, bloody buffoons, bloody felons--all this was as unjust to
hundreds of disinterested, honest, and patriotic men who were then
e