, but that of the
prolific power of nature. Yet the plant is the same, and though we by
no means say, that even this letter gives demonstration, yet the
arrogant ease of the style is such, as we should have expected to find
in the familiar correspondence of Junius. His letter obviously excited
in Burke a mixture of pain and indignation.

He answered it the next day in a long and eloquent vindication which
was oddly enough inclosed in a letter from his son, scarcely less than
menacing. It begins--"My dear sir, You must conceive that your letter,
combating many old ideas of my father's, and proposing many new ones,
could not fail to set his mind at work, and to make him address the
effect of those operations to you. I must, therefore, entreat you not
to draw him aside from the many and great labours he has in hand, by
_any further written communications of this kind_, which would,
indeed, be very useful, because they are valuable, if they were
conveyed at a time when there was leisure to settle opinions." Those
are hard hits at the critic, but harder were still to come. "There is
one thing of which I must inform you. It is, that my father's opinions
are never hastily adopted, and that even those ideas which have often
appeared to me only the effect of momentary heat, or casual
impression, I have afterwards found, beyond a possibility of doubt, to
be the result of systematic meditation, perhaps of years. * * * * The
thing, I say, is a paradox, but _when we talk of things superior to
ourselves_, what is not paradox?"

He strikes harder still. "When we say, that one man is wiser than
another, we allow that the wiser man forms his opinions upon grounds
and principles which, though to him justly conclusive, cannot be
comprehended and received by _him who is less wise_. To be wise, is
only to see deeper, and further, and differently _from others_."

Yet this strong rebuke, which was followed by a long letter from Burke
himself, half indignant, half argumentative, does not seem to have
disturbed the temper of Francis, proverbially petulant as he was, if
it did not rather raise his respect for both parties. He tells Burke,
in a subsequent letter, that he has looked for his work, his
_Reflections on the Revolution_, with great impatience, and read it
with studious delight. He proceeds--"My dear Mr Burke, when I took
what is vulgarly called the liberty of opposing my thoughts and wishes
to the _publication_ of yours, on the late