saw the queen of France in 1774, and the contrast between
that brilliancy, splendour and beauty, with the prostrate homage of a
nation to her, and the abominable scene of 1780 which I was describing,
_did_ draw tears from me and wetted my paper. These tears came again into
my eyes almost as often as I looked at the description,--they may again.
You do not believe this fact, nor that these are my real feelings; but that
the whole is affected, or as you express it, downright foppery. My friend,
I tell you it is truth; and that it is true and will be truth when you and
I are no more; and will exist as long as men with their natural feelings
shall exist" (_Corr._ iii. 139).

Burke's conservatism was, as such a passage as this may illustrate, the
result partly of strong imaginative associations clustering round the more
imposing symbols of social continuity, partly of a sort of corresponding
conviction in his reason that there are certain permanent elements of human
nature out of which the European order had risen and which that order
satisfied, and of whose immense merits, as of its mighty strength, the
revolutionary party in France were most fatally ignorant. When Romilly saw
Diderot in 1783, the great encyclopaedic chief assured him that submission
to kings and belief in God would be at an end all over the world in a very
few years. When Condorcet described the Tenth Epoch in the long development
of human progress, he was sure not only that fulness of light and
perfection of happiness would come to the sons of men, but that they were
coming with all speed. Only those who know the incredible rashness of the
revolutionary doctrine in the mouths of its most powerful professors at
that time; only those who know their absorption in ends and their
inconsiderateness about means, can feel how profoundly right Burke was in
all this part of his contention. Napoleon, who had begun life as a disciple
of Rousseau, confirmed the wisdom of the philosophy of Burke when he came
to make the Concordat. That measure was in one sense the outcome of a mere
sinister expediency, but that such a measure was expedient at all sufficed
to prove that Burke's view of the present possibilities of social change
was right, and the view of the Rousseauites and too sanguine
Perfectibilitarians wrong. As we have seen, Burke's very first niece, the
satire on Bolingbroke, sprang from his conviction that merely rationalistic
or destructive criticism, applied to