ft: in fact, this fault is mainly revealed to us by the higher
standard of judgment which his later plays supply. Here all is
straightforward, genuine, natural, with no rhetorical trickeries or
fineries whatever; and among all modern writers his style stands quite
alone in the solid purity, directness, and inward virtue of that
perfect art which not only conceals itself from others, but is even a
secret unto itself; or at least is too intent on something else to be
listening to the music of its own voice. For so his highest style was
when, in the maturity of his power, he left the style to take care of
itself, and therefore had it perfectly subordinated to his matter and
thought: in other words, he always writes best when most unconscious
of it, being so possessed with his theme as to take no thought of
himself.

We have somewhat the same order and course of things in Burke, who may
be not unfitly described as the Shakespeare of political philosophy.
His treatise _On the Sublime and Beautiful_ was, though in a good
sense, mainly the fruit of literary ambition. There he rather sought
for something to say because he wanted to speak, than spoke because he
had something he wanted to say. And so he is not properly himself in
that work, but only a studious, correct, and tasteful writer. When
thoroughly roused and kindled in the work of defending, intrenching,
and illustrating the Constitution of his country as the sacred
guardian of liberty and order, he became quite another man; then it
was that all the powers of his great mind were taught and inspired to
act in concert and unity. As Wordsworth says of him,--

"This is no trifler, no short-flighted wit,
No stammerer of a minute, painfully
Deliver'd. No! the Orator hath yok'd
The Hours, like young Aurora, to his car:
Thrice-welcome Presence! how can patience e'er
Grow weary of attending on a track
That kindles with such glory!"

The mere ambitions of authorship are not enough to make good authors;
and what Burke needed was something to lift him far above them. And
when he came to grapple with the high practical questions and living
interests of mankind, here he was too full of his matter, and too
earnest in his cause, to observe how finely he was working; and
because he was captivated by his theme, not by the figure he made in
handling it, therefore he earned a prerogative place among the sons of
light.

The distinction I have been remarking