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EDMUND BURKE.

THERE is much in the oratory of Edmund Burke to suggest the amplitude of mind and the power and scope of intellectual grasp that characterized Shakespeare. He surveyed every subject as if standing on an eminence and taking a view of it in all its relations, however complex and remote. United with this remarkable comprehensiveness was also a subtlety of intellect that enabled him to penetrate the most complicated relations and unravel the most perplexed intricacies. Why? Whence? For what end? With what results? were the questions that his mind seemed always to be striving to answer. The special objects to which he applied himself were the workings of political institutions, the principles of wise legislation, and the sources of national security

and advancement.

Rerum cognoscere causas,

to know the causes of things-in all the multiform relations of organized society, was the constant end of his striving. More than any other one that has written in English he was a political philosopher. But he was far more than that. He had a memory of extraordinary grasp and tenacity; and this, united with a tireless industry, gave him an affluence of knowledge that has rarely been equalled. He had the fancy of a poet, and his imagination surveyed the whole range of human experience for illustrations with which to enrich the train of his thought.

For the purposes of legislative persuasion many of Burke's qualities were a hindrance rather than a help. His course of reasoning was often too, elaborate to be carried in the mind of the hearer. His exuberant fancy constantly tempted him into illustrative excursions that led the hearer too far away from the march of the argument. The one thing which he always found it difficult to do was to restrain

the exuberance of his genius. He could not be straightforward and unadorned. He carried his wealth with him and displayed it on all occasions. Mr. Matthew Arnold has very happily characterized this feature of his mind. as "Asiatic." "He is the only man," said Johnson, "whose common conversation corresponds with the general fame which he has in the world. No man of sense could meet Burke by accident under a gateway to avoid a shower without being convinced that he was the first man in England."

It is not singular that these characteristics were often thought to be oppressive. In the House of Commons he sometimes poured forth the wealth of his knowledge for hour after hour till the members were burdened and driven out of the House in sheer self-defence. This peculiarity was well described by the satirist who said:

"He went on refining,

And thought of convincing when they thought of dining.”

Erskine, during the delivery of the speech

on "Conciliation with America," crept out of the House behind the benches on his hands and knees, and yet afterward wrote that he thought the speech the most remarkable one of ancient or modern times.

But this vast superabundance, this superfluity of riches, so oppressive to the ear of the hearer, must ever be a source of pleasure and profit to the thoughtful reader. It is safe to say that there is no other oratory of any language or time that yields so rich a return to the thoughtful efforts of the genuine student. What Fox said. to members of Parliament in regard to the speech on the "Nabob of Arcot's debts," may be appropriately said with perhaps even greater emphasis to American students in regard to either of the speeches on American affairs: "Let gentlemen read this speech by day and meditate on it by night: let them peruse it again and again, study it, imprint it on their minds, impress it on their hearts." After all that has been written, the student can nowhere find a more correct and comprehensive account

of the causes of the American Revolution than in the speeches on Taxation and Conciliation. Burke's education had given him peculiar qualifications for discussing American affairs. These qualifications were both general and special. At the age of fourteen he entered Trinity College in his native city of Dublin, where he remained six years, performing not only his regular college duties, but carrying on a very elaborate course of study of his own devising. He not only read a greater part of the poets and orators of antiquity, but he also devoted himself to philosophy in such a way that his mind took that peculiar bent which made him ultimately what has been called "the philosophical orator" of the language. In 1750, when he was twenty, he began the study of law at the Middle Temple, in London. But his law studies were not congenial to him; and his great energies, therefore, were chiefly devoted to the study of what would now be called Political Science. It was at this period that he acquired that habit which never deserted

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