it became as the
disputants conversed across the echoes of the Terror, rather a dialogue
between the past and the future, than a discussion between human voices.
Burke answered Dr. Price, and to Burke in turn replied Tom Paine with
the brilliant, confident, hard-hitting logic of a pamphlet (_The Rights
of Man_) which for all the efforts of Pitt to suppress it, is still read
and circulated to-day. Two notable answers were ephemeral, one from Mary
Wollstonecraft, and another (_Vindiciae Gallicae_) from Mackintosh, who
afterwards recanted his own opinions and lived to be known as Sir James.

To lift the discussion to the height of a philosophical argument was
reserved for William Godwin, a mind steeped in the French and English
speculation of his century, gifted with rare powers of analysis, and
inspired with a faith in human reason in general and his own logical
capacity in particular, which no English mind before him or after him
has approached. In spite of a lucid style and a certain cold eloquence
which illumines if it does not warm, Godwin's _Political Justice_ was
dead before its author, while Burke lives and was never more widely read
than to-day.

The ghosts of great men have an erratic habit in walking. It is passion
rather than any mere intellectual momentum which drives them from the
tomb. There is, moreover, in Burke a variety and a humanity which
appeals in some one of its phases and moods to all of us in turn. The
great store-house of his emotions and his phrases has the catholicity of
the Bible. Each man can find in it what he seeks. He is like the
luminous phantom which walked in _Faust_ through the witcheries of the
Brocken. Each man saw in her his own first love. He has been hero and
prophet to Whigs and Tories, and in our own generation we have seen him
bequeath an equal inspiration to a Cecil and a Morley. It is no part of
our task to attempt even the briefest exposition of his philosophy; we
are concerned with him here chiefly as an influence which helped by its
vehemence and its superb rhetorical exaggerations to drive the
revolutionary thinkers who answered him to parallel exaggerations and
opposite extremes. Inspired himself with a distrust of generalisation,
and a hatred of philosophers, he none the less evolved a philosophy as
he talked. Against his will he was forced into the upper air in his
furious pursuit of the "political aeronauts." His was a volcanic
intellect which flung up principles in