the ear with the accent of some golden-tongued
oracle of the wise gods. His stride is the stride of a giant, from the
sentimental beauty of the picture of Marie Antoinette at Versailles, or the
red horror of the tale of Debi Sing in Rungpore, to the learning,
positiveness and cool judicial mastery of the _Report on the Lords'
Journals_ (1794), which Philip Francis, no mean judge, declared on the
whole to be the "most eminent and extraordinary" of all his productions.
But even in the coolest and driest of his pieces there is the mark of
greatness, of grasp, of comprehension. In all its varieties Burke's style
is noble, earnest, deep-flowing, because his sentiment was lofty and
fervid, and went with sincerity and ardent disciplined travail of judgment.
He had the style of his subjects; the amplitude, the weightiness, the
laboriousness, the sense, the high flight, the grandeur, proper to a man
dealing with imperial themes, with the fortunes of great societies, with
the sacredness of law, the freedom of nations, the justice of rulers. Burke
will always be read with delight and edification, because in the midst of
discussions on the local and the accidental, he scatters apophthegms that
take us into the regions of lasting wisdom. In the midst of the torrent of
his most strenuous and passionate deliverances, he suddenly rises aloof
from his immediate subject, and in all tranquillity reminds us of some
permanent relation of things, some enduring truth of human life or human
society. We do not hear the organ tones of Milton, for faith and freedom
had other notes in the 18th century. There is none of the complacent and
wise-browed sagacity of Bacon, for Burke's were days of personal strife and
fire and civil division. We are not exhilarated by the cheerfulness, the
polish, the fine manners of Bolingbroke, for Burke had an anxious
conscience, and was earnest and intent that the good should triumph. And
yet Burke is among the greatest of those who have wrought marvels in the
prose of our English tongue.

Not all the transactions in which Burke was a combatant could furnish an
imperial theme. We need not tell over again the story of Wilkes and the
Middlesex election. The Rockingham ministry had been succeeded by a
composite government, of which it was intended that Pitt, now made Lord
Chatham and privy seal, should be the real chief. Chatham's health and mind
fell into disorder almost immediately after the ministry had been formed.