h
and fire, that we hardly know where else to look either in Burke's own
writings or elsewhere for such an exhibition of the rhetorical resources of
our language. We cannot wonder that the whole nation was stirred to the
very depths, or that they strengthened the aversion of the king, of Windham
and other important personages in the government against the plans of Pitt.
The prudence of their drift must be settled by external considerations.
Those who think that the French were likely to show a moderation and
practical reasonableness in success, such as they had never shown in the
hour of imminent ruin, will find Burke's judgment full of error and
mischief. Those, on the contrary, who think that the nation which was on
the very eve of surrendering itself to the Napoleonic absolutism was not in
a hopeful humour for peace and the European order, will believe that
Burke's protests were as perspicacious as they were powerful, and that
anything which chilled the energy of the war was as fatal as he declared it
to be.

When the third and most impressive of these astonishing productions came
into the hands of the public, the writer was no more. Burke died on the 8th
of July 1797. Fox, who with all his faults was never wanting in a fine and
generous sensibility, proposed that there should be a public funeral, and
that the body should lie among the illustrious dead in Westminster Abbey.
Burke, however, had left strict injunctions that his burial should be
private; and he was laid in the little church at Beaconsfield. It was the
year of Campo Formio. So a black whirl and torment of rapine, violence and
fraud was encircling the Western world, as a life went out which,
notwithstanding some eccentricities [v.04 p.0835] and some aberrations, had
made great tides in human destiny very luminous.

(J. MO.)

AUTHORITIES.--Of the _Collected Works_, there are two main editions--the
quarto and the octavo. (1) Quarto, in eight volumes, begun in 1792, under
the editorship of Dr F. Lawrence; vols. i.-iii. were published in 1792;
vols. iv.-viii., edited by Dr Walter King, sometime bishop of Rochester,
were completed in 1827. (2) Octavo in sixteen volumes. This was begun at
Burke's death, also by Drs Lawrence and King; vols. i.-viii. were published
in 1803 and reissued in 1808, when Dr Lawrence died; vols. ix.-xii. were
published in 1813 and the remaining four vols. in 1827. A new edition of
vols. i.-viii. was published in 1823 and the contents