_Present Discontents_ (1770), and when Burke wrote the _Reflections_,
Wordsworth was standing, with France "on the top of golden hours,"
listening with delight among the ruins of the Bastille, or on the
banks of the Loire, to "the homeless sound of joy that was in the
sky." When France lost faith and freedom, and Napoleon had built his
throne on their grave, he began to see those strong elements which for
Burke had all his life been the true and fast foundation of the
social world. Wide as is the difference between an oratorical and a
declamatory mind like Burke's, and the least oratorical of all poets,
yet under this difference of form and temper there is a striking
likeness in spirit. There was the same energetic feeling about moral
ideas, the same frame of counsel and prudence, the same love for the
slowness of time, the same slight account held of mere intellectual
knowledge, and even the same ruling sympathy with that side of the
character of Englishmen which Burke exulted in, as "_their awe
of kings and reverence for priests," "their sullen resistance
of innovation" "their unalterable perseverance in the wisdom of
prejudice_."

The conservative movement in England ran on for many years in the
ecclesiastical channel rather than among questions where Burke's
writings might have been brought to bear. On the political side
the most active minds, both in practice and theory, worked out the
principles of liberalism, and they did so on a plan and by methods
from which Burke's utilitarian liberalism and his historic
conservatism were equally remote. There are many signs around us that
this epoch is for the moment at an end. The historic method, fitting
in with certain dominant conceptions in the region of natural science,
is bringing men round to a way of looking at society for which Burke's
maxims are exactly suited; and it seems probable that he will be more
frequently and more seriously referred to within the next twenty years
than he has been within the whole of the last eighty.

THE END

_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_.

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