of Berlin and Paris for the lips of the people. It was to the honour of Burke, that in his youth, and in the midst of a general delusion of all who constituted the leaders of public taste, he should sacredly discern where the truth lay, and manfully come forth armed in its cause. Nominally adopting the tenets of Bolingbroke, he pushed them on to practical absurdity. Applying to society the modes of argument which the infidel had applied to religion, he shewed that it justified absurdities against which common sense revolts, and crimes against which the common safety arms itself; that the plea which might serve to overthrow religion, would be equally forcible against the existence of all order, and that the perfection of the infidel system would reason mankind into the uselessness of a government, as rapidly as into the burden of a religion.

every sort of virtue was foreign and unnatural to the mind of man.

"The first accounts which we have of mankind are but so many accounts of their butcheries. All empires have been cemented in blood; and in these early ages, when the race of mankind began first to form themselves into parties and combinations, the first effects of the combination, and indeed the end for which it seems purposely formed and best calculated, was their mutual destruction. All ancient history is dark and uncertain. One thing, however, is clear: There were conquerors and conquests in those days, and consequently all that devastation by which they are formed, and all that oppression by which they are maintained. We know little of Sesostris, but that he led out of Egypt an army of above 700,000 men; that he overran the Mediterranean coast as far as Colchis; that in some places he met but little resistance, and of course shed not a great deal of blood, but that he found in others a people who knew the value of their liberties, and sold them dear. Whoever considers the army which this conqueror headed, the space he traversed, and the opposition he frequently met, with the natural accidents of sickness, and the dearth and badness of provision to which he must have been subject in the variety of climates and countries his march lay through—if he knows any thing, he must know that even the conqueror's army must have suffered greatly. It will be far from excess to suppose that one-half was lost in the expedition. If this was the state of the victorious, the vanquished must have had a much heavier loss, as the greatest slaughter is always in the flight; and great carnage did in those times and countries ever attend the first rage of conquest. It will therefore be very reasonable to allow on their account as much as, added to the losses of the conquerors, may amount to a million of deaths. And then we shall see this conqueror, the oldest whom we have on record, opening the scene by the destruction of at least one million of his species, unprovoked but by his ambition, without any motivés but pride, cruelty, and madness, and without any benefit to himself, (for Justin expressly tells us he did not

In a passage, which seems to come glowing from the pen of Bolingbroke in his hour of triumph, his young antagonist thus happily at once seizes the sounding amplification of his style, and ridicules the philosophical folly of his argument: "In looking over any state, to form a judgment on it, it presents itself in two lights, the external and the internal. The first, that relation which it bears in point of enmity or friendship to other states. The second, that relation which its component parts, the governors and the governed, bear to each other. * * * * The glaring side of all national history is enmity. The only actions on which we have seen, and always will see all of them intent, are such as tend to the destruction of one another. 'War,' says Machiavel, 'ought to be the only study of a prince;' and by a prince he means every sort of state, however constituted. He ought,' says this great political doctor, to consider peace only as a breathing time, which gives him leisure to contrive, and furnishes ability to execute military plans.' A meditation on the conduct of political societies made old Hobbes imagine that war was the state of nature; and truly, if a man judged of the individuals of our race by their conduct when united and packed into nations and kingdoms, he might imagine that

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the sceptic, who rejects religion on account of the casual evils connected with its progress, the religious wars fomented by human passions, the corrupted practices of venal priests, the tyranny of jealous persecutors, the guilty artifice, or the blinding superstition. If the essential good is to be rejected for the sake of the accidental evil, then must civilisation be cast away as well as religion; but if the great stock of human good which religion bequeaths to mankind, the immeasurable consolations, the high motives, the pure guides, the noble and perpetual stimulants reaching through all the depths of the human race, and reaching through them all undebased by human guilt, and maintaining the connexion of man through all his grades with Deity, are to weigh heavier in the balance than the mere abuses of religion by man, then let us acknowledge that the infidel is not simply weak, but criminal, that he shuts his eyes against argument, and that he is convicted of folly by all that remains to him of reason. The concluding fragment of this essay is curious, as an evidence of the early period at which Burke had matured his pen. The style is no longer the flowing and figurative declamation of Bolingbroke, it is Burke, as he stood before the world in the latest days of his triumph over the atheistic and revolutionary impulses of Europe; calm and dignified, clothed in the garb of that philosophic melancholy which impressed his practical wisdom so powerfully upon the general heart.

are withdrawn, one after another, and the cool light of reason, at the setting of our life, shews us what a false splendour played upon those objects of our more sanguine seasons."

This tract is remarkable for its declaration of opinions on the right side, when it was the pride of every man who pretended to literature, to be in the wrong. But it is scarcely less remarkable, as actually forming the model of much of that revolutionary writing, which so recklessly laboured to inflame the popular passions, on the first burst of the French insurgency. Burke, in his ridicule, had prepared an armoury for Paine in his profligate seriousness. The contemptuous flights of the great orator had pointed the way for the Jacobin to ascend to the assault of all that we were accustomed to reverence and value. The evils brought upon man by feeble government, misjudging law, ministerial weaknesses, and national prejudices, were eagerly adopted by the champions of overthrow, as irrefragable arguments against the altar and the throne; and Burke must have seen with surprise, or increased ridicule, the arrows which he had shot out in sport, and for the mere trial of his boyish strength, gravely gathered up, and fitted to the Jacobin string, to be used against the noblest and most essential institutions of the empire.

The essay attracted considerable notice. Chesterfield and Warburton were said to have regarded it for a while as an authentic work of the infidel lord. The opinion prevailed so far, that Mallet, who, as the residuary legatee of his blasphemies, thought himself the legitimate defender of his fame, volunteered a public disclaimer on the subject, and the critics were thenceforth left to wonder on whose shoulders the mantle of the noble personage had fallen. Still Burke was unheard of, but his second performance was destined to do justice to his ability. In the same year was published the Treatise on the Sublime and Beautiful. No work of its period so suddenly sprang into popularity. The purity, vigour, and grace of its language, the clearness of its conceptions, and its bold soarings into the metaphysic clouds, which, dark and confused as they had

rendered all former efforts, were, by the flashes of Burke's fine imagination, turned into brightness and grandeur, attracted universal praise. Its author was looked for among the leading veterans of literature. To the public astonishment, he was found to be an obscure student of 26, utterly unknown, or known only by having attempted a canvass for a Scotch professorship, and having failed. He now began to be felt in society. The reputation of his book preceded him, and he gradually became on a footing of acquaintance, if not altogether of intimacy, with the more remarkable names of the day connected with life and literature; Pulteney, Earl of Bath, Markham, soon after Archbishop of York, Reynolds, Soame Jenyns, Lord Littleton, Warburton, Hume, and John

son.

This was a distinction which implied very striking merits in so young a man, unassisted by rank or opulence, and with the original sin of being an Irishman, a formidable disqualification in the higher circles of England fifty years ago. This treatise had been the pioneer to his storming of the sullen rampart of English formality. But to have not only climbed there, but made good his lodgment, evidently implies personal merits of no ordinary kind. Togoodhumoured and cordial manners, to singular extent and variety of knowledge, he added great force and elegance of conversation. Johnson's, even the fastidious Johnson's, opinion of him, is well known, as placing him already in the very highest of intellectual companionship.-"Burke is an extraordinary man, his stream of talk is perpetual." Another of his dicta was, " Burke's talk is the ebullition of his mind; he does not talk from a desire of distinction, but because his mind is full."-" Burke is the only man whose common conversation corresponds with the general fame which he has in the world. Take up whatever topic you please, he is ready to meet you." In another instance, where some one had been paying himself the tribute due to his memorable powers, he again gave the palm to his friend. "Burke, sir, is such a man, that if you met him for the first time in the street, where you were stopped by a drove of oxen, and you and he stepped aside

for shelter but for five minutes, he'd talk to you in such a manner, that when you parted, you would say,— that is an extraordinary man. Now, you may be long enough with me without finding anything extraordinary."

A portion of this fortunate quality must be attributed to his fondness for general study, and the vigorous memory by which he retained all that he had acquired. But a much larger portion must be due to that salient and glowing power of thought, that vivid mental seizure, by which all his knowledge became a member of his mind; by which every new acquisition resolved itself into an increase, not of his intellectual burden, but of the essential activity and strength of his faculties. He had a great assimilating mind. Johnson's often-recorded expression, "that no man of sense would meet Mr Burke by accident under a gateway, to avoid a shower, without being convinced that he was the first man in England," found a striking illustration, a few years after, in the testimony of an utter stranger. Burke, in passing through Litchfield, had gone with a friend to look at the cathedral, while his horses were changing. One of the clergy, seeing two gentlemen somewhat at a loss in this vast building, politely volunteered as their cicerone. The conversation flowed, and he was speedily struck with surprise at the knowledge and brilliancy of one of the strangers. In his subsequent account of the adventure to some friends, who met him hastening along the street, "I have been conversing," said he, "for this half hour, with a man of the most extraordinary powers of mind, and extent of information, which it has ever been my fortune to meet, and I am now going to the inn to ascertain, if possible, who the stranger is." That stranger had completely overlaid the cicerone, even in his local knowledge. On every topic which came before them, whether the architecture, history, remains, income, learning of the ancient ornaments of the chapter, persecutions, lives, and achievements, the stranger was boundless in anecdote and illustration. The clergyman's surprise was fully accounted for, by being told at the inn that this singular companion was Mr

Burke, and the general regret of all to whom he mentioned the circumstance, was, that the name had not been known in time for them to have taken advantage of so high a gratification.

rature, the head of the chief literary institution of Ireland, and of every other institution tending to promote the good of the country. Though living much on the Continent, and in England in early life, and long associated with all that was eminent in rank and talents in Great Britain, he generously and honestly fixed his residence on his native soil, turbulent as it was, remote from all the scenes congenial to his habits, perplexed with furious party, and beggared by long misrule. For this determination, he seems to have had no other ground than a sense of duty. And he had his reward. No man in Ireland was reverenced with such true and unequivocal public honour. In all the warfare of party, no shaft ever struck his pure and lofty crest. Old connexions, and the custom of the time, which made every man of independent fortune enter public life on the side of opposition, designated him a Whig. But no man less bowed to partisanship, no man more clearly washed the stains of faction from his hands, no man was farther from the insanity of revolution. With gentle, but manly firmness, he repelled popularity, from the moment when it demanded his principles as its purchase. With generous, but indignant scorn, he raised up his voice equally against the insidious zeal which would substitute an affected love of country for a sense of duty; and the insurrectionary rage which would cast off the mild dominion of England, for the lust of democracy at home. He finally experienced the fate of all men of honour thrown into the midst of factions. His directness was a tacit reproach on their obliquity; his simple honour was felt to be a libel on their ostentatious hypocrisy. He had been elected by the national acclamation, to the command of the Irish Volunteers, a selfraised army of 50,000 men. He had conducted this powerful and perilous force through an anxious time, without collision with the government, or with the people. But, when French principles began to infest its ranks, he remonstrated; the remonstrance was retorted in a threat of the loss of his popularity. He embraced the alternative of a man of honour, and resigned. But the resignation was fatal to the success of his

But, for three years more, this memorable man was confined to the struggles of private life. He was still actively, though obscurely, employed in writing or editing a History of the European Settlements in America, in seven heavy volumes, which obtained but slight public notice; laying the foundations for a History of England, which never reached beyond a few sheets; and establishing and editing, in 1758, in conjunction with Dodsley, the Annual Register. In this work, the genius of the author is in disguise. We look in vain for the fire, the fancy, which seemed to be constituent features of his authorship. And one of the most remarkable features of the whole performance, is the strong self-denial to which the philosopher and the orator had already learned to tame down the ardour and animation of his mind. But the work was judiciously conceived: it came forth at a time when the public required something more than a chronicler of the passing day; and, like all works which fill up a chasm in public curiosity, it succeeded to a remarkable extent. Five or six editions of the earlier volumes were rapidly received. But income from such sources must be precarious. He had married, had a son; he had hitherto made no advance in an actual provision for life; and a few years more of the natural toils which beset a man left to his own exertions for the support of a family, would probably have driven him to America, his old and favourite speculation against the frowns of fortune in Europe. At length the life for which he was made, the stirring and elevated interests of political and parliamentary distinction, appeared to open before him. He owed this change to an Irishman, the Earl of Charlemont. Ireland still remembers the name of that estimable person with gratitude. A narrow fortune, and humble talents, did not prevent him from being a great public benefactor. He was the encourager of every scheme for national advantage, the patron of lite