we may doubt whether there is any instance of an orator throwing
his spell over a large audience, without frequent resort to the higher
forms of commonplace. Two of the greatest speeches of Burke's time are
supposed to have been Grattan's on Tithes and Fox's on the Westminster
Scrutiny, and these were evidently full of the splendid commonplaces
of the firstrate rhetorician. Burke's mind was not readily set to
these tunes. The emotion to which he commonly appealed was that
too rare one, the love of wisdom; and he combined his thoughts and
knowledge in propositions of wisdom so weighty and strong, that the
minds of ordinary hearers were not on the instant prepared for them.

It is true that Burke's speeches were not without effect of an
indirect kind, for there is good evidence that at the time when Lord
North's ministry was tottering, Burke had risen to a position of the
first eminence in Parliament. When Boswell said to him that people
would wonder how he could bring himself to take so much pains with his
speeches, knowing with certainty that not one vote would be gained by
them, Burke answered that it is very well worth while to take pains
to speak well in Parliament; for if a man speaks well, he gradually
establishes a certain reputation and consequence in the general
opinion; and though an Act that has been ably opposed becomes law, yet
in its progress it is softened and modified to meet objections whose
force has never been acknowledged directly. "Aye, sir," Johnson broke
in, "and there is a gratification of pride. Though we cannot outvote
them, we will out-argue them."

Out-arguing is not perhaps the right word for most of Burke's
performances. He is at heart thinking more of the subject itself than
of those on whom it was his apparent business to impress a particular
view of it. He surrenders himself wholly to the matter, and follows
up, though with a strong and close tread, all the excursions to which
it may give rise in an elastic intelligence--"motion," as De Quincey
says, "propagating motion, and life throwing off life." But then this
exuberant way of thinking, this willingness to let the subject lead,
is less apt in public discourse than it is in literature, and from
this comes the literary quality of Burke's speeches.

With all his hatred for the book-man in politics, Burke owed much of
his own distinction to that generous richness and breadth of judgment
which had been ripened in him by literature and his