f a great rebellion. And it was the year of the
political crime of Campo Formio, that sinister pacification in which
violence and fraud once more asserted their unveiled ascendancy in
Europe. These sombre shadows were falling over the western world when
a life went out which, notwithstanding some grave aberrations, had
made great spaces in human destiny very luminous.

CHAPTER X

BURKE'S LITERARY CHARACTER

A story is told that in the time when Burke was still at peace with
the Dissenters, he visited Priestley, and after seeing his library
and his laboratory, and hearing how his host's hours were given to
experiment and meditation, he exclaimed that such a life must make
him the happiest and most to be envied of men. It must sometimes have
occurred to Burke to wonder whether he had made the right choice when
he locked away the fragments of his History, and plunged into the
torment of party and Parliament. But his interests and aptitudes were
too strong and overmastering for him to have been right in doing
otherwise. Contact with affairs was an indispensable condition for
the full use of his great faculties, in spite of their being less
faculties of affairs than of speculation. Public life was the actual
field in which to test, and work out, and use with good effect the
moral ideas which were Burke's most sincere and genuine interests. And
he was able to bring these moral ideas into such effective use because
he was so entirely unfettered by the narrowing spirit of formula. No
man, for instance, who thought in formulae would have written the
curious passage that I have already referred to, in which he eulogises
gin, because "under the pressure of the cares and sorrows of our
mortal condition, men have at all times and in all countries called
in some physical aid to their moral consolation." He valued words at
their proper rate, that is to say, he knew that some of the greatest
facts in the life and character of man, and in the institutions of
society, can find no description and no measurement in words. Public
life, as we can easily perceive, with its shibboleths, its exclusive
parties, its measurement by conventional standards, its attention to
small expediencies before the larger ones, is not a field where such
characteristics are likely to make an instant effect.

Though it is not wrong to say of Burke that as an orator he was
transcendent, yet in that immediate influence upon his hearers which
is commonl