poignant wit, but descending often to abuse and even scurrility; he is apt moreover to carry an attack too far, as well as strain the application of a principle; to slay the slain, or turn the reader's contempt into pity.

As in the various kinds of writing, so in the different styles, he had an almost universal excellence, one only being deficient, the plain and unadorned. Not but that he could, in unfolding a doctrine or pursuing a narrative, write for a little with admirable simplicity and propriety; only he could not sustain this self-denial; his brilliant imagination and well-stored memory soon broke through the restraint. But in all other styles, passages without end occur of the highest order-epigram-pathos -metaphor in profusion, chequered with more didactic and sober diction. Nor are his purely figurative passages the finest even as figured writing; he is best when the metaphor is subdued, mixed as it were with plainer matter to flavour it, and used not by itself, and for its own sake, but giving point to a more useful instrument, made of more ordinary material; or at the most, flung off by the heat of composition, like sparks from a working engine, not fire-works for mere display. Speaking of the authors of the Declaration of Right, he calls them those whose 'penetrating style has engraved in our ordinances and in our hearts, the words and spirit of that immortal law.'-(Reflections on the French Revolution). So discoursing of the imitations of natural magnitude by artifice and skill-'A true artist should put 'a generous deceit on the spectators, and effect the noblest de'signs by easy methods.'-(Sublime and Beautiful, Part II. §. 10.) When pleasure is over we relapse into indifference, or rather we fall into a soft tranquillity, which is tinged with the able colour of the former sensation.'-(Ibid. Part. I. §. 3.) Every age has its own manners, and its politics dependent on them; and the same attempts will not be made against a 'constitution fully formed and matured, that were used to destroy it in the cradle, or resist its growth during its infancy.' (Thoughts on the Causes of the present Discontents.) • Faction ' will make its cries resound through the nation, as if the whole were in an uproar.'-(Ibid.) In works of a serious nature, upon the affairs of real life, as political discourses and orations, figurative style should hardly ever go beyond this. But a strict and close metaphor or simile may be allowed, provided it be most sparingly used, and never deviate from the subject matter, so as to make it disappear in the ornament. The judgment is for the greater part employed in throwing stumbling blocks in the way of the imagination, (says Mr Burke,) in dissipating the scenes of its enchantment, and in tying us down to the

agree

'disagreeable yoke of our reason.'-(Discourses on Taste.) He has here at once expressed figuratively the principle we are laying down, and illustrated our remark by the temperance of his metaphors, which, though mixed, do not offend, because they come so near mere figurative language that they may be regarded, like the last set of examples, rather as forms of expression than tropes. A great deal of the furniture of ancient tyran'ny is worn to rags; the rest is entirely out of fashion.'(Thoughts on the Discontents.) A most apt illustration of his important position, that we ought to be as jealous of little encroachments, now the chief sources of danger, as our ancestors were of Ship Money and the Forest Laws. A species of men, (speak'ing of one constant and baneful effect of grievances,) to whom a state of order would become a sentence of obscurity, are 'nourished into a dangerous magnitude by the heat of intestine 'disturbances; and it is no wonder that, by a sort of sinister piety, they cherish, in return, those disorders which are the 'parents of all their consequence.'-(Ibid.) We have not, (says he of the English Church establishment,) relegated religion to obscure municipalities or rustic villages-No! we will have her to exalt her mitred front in courts and parlia'ments.'-(Reflections on the French Revolution.) But if these should seem so temperate as hardly to be separate figures, the celebrated comparison of the Queen of France, though going to the verge of chaste style, hardly passes it. And surely, never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more ' delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move inglittering like the morning star, full of life, and splendour, • and joy.'-(Ibid.)

All his writings, but especially his later ones, abound in examples of the abuse of this style, in which, unlike those we have been dwelling upon with unmixed admiration, the subject is lost sight of, and the figure usurps its place, almost as much as in Homer's longer similes, and is oftentimes pursued, not merely with extravagance and violence, but into details that offend by their coarseness, as well as their strained connexion with the matter in question. The comparison of a noble adversary to the whale, in which the grantee of the crown is altogether forgotten, and the fish alone remains; of one Republican ruler to a cannibal in his den, where he paints him as having actually devoured a king and suffering from indigestion; of another, to a retailer of dresses, in which character the nature of constitutions is forgotten in that of millinery,-are instances too well known to be further dwelt upon; and they were the produce, not of the 'audacity of youth,' but of the last year of his life. It must,

At

however, be confessed, that he was at all times somewhat tainted with what Johnson imputes to Swift, a proneness to revolve 'ideas from which other minds shrink with disgust.' least he must be allowed to have often mistaken violence and grossness for vigour. The anodyne draught of oblivion, thus drugged, is well calculated to preserve a galling wakefulness, ' and to feed the living ulcer of a corroding memory. Thus to 'administer the opiate potion of animosity, powdered with all the 'ingredients of scorn and contempt,' &c.-(Reflections on the French Revolution.) They are not repelled through a fastidious delicacy at the stench of their arrogance and presumption, from a medicinal attention to their mental blotches and running sores.'-(Ibid.) Those bodies, which, when full of life and beauty, lay in their arms, and were their joy and comfort, when dead and putrid, became but the more loathsome from remembrance of former endearments.'(Thoughts.) The vital powers, wasted in an unequal struggle, are pushed back upon themselves, and fester to gangrene, to death; and instead of what was but just now the delight of the creation, there will be cast out in the face of 'the sun, a bloated, putrid, noisome carcase, full of stench and 'poison, an offence, a horror, a lesson to the world.' (Speech on the Nabob's Delts.) Some passages are not fit to be cited, and could not now be tolerated in either house of Parliament, for the indecency of their allusions—as in the Regency debates, and the attack upon lawyers on the Impeachment continuation. But the finest of his speeches, which we have just quoted from, though it does not go so far from propriety, falls not much within its bounds. Of Mr Dundas he says With six great chop'ping bastards, (Reports of Secret Committee,) each as lusty " as an infant Hercules, this delicate creature blushes at the 'sight of his new bridegroom, assumes a virgin delicacy; or, to use a more fit, as well as a more poetical comparison, the person 'so squeamish, so timid, so trembling, lest the winds of heaven 'should visit too roughly, is expanded to broad sunshine, ex'posed like the sow of imperial augury, lying in the mud with 'all the prodigies of her fertility about her, as evidence of her delicate amour.'-(Ibid.)

It is another characteristic of this great writer, that the unlimited abundance of his stores makes him profuse in their expenditure: Never content with one view of a subject, or one manner of handling it, he for the most part lavishes his whole resources upon the discussion of each point. In controversy this is emphatically the case. Indeed, nothing is more remarkable than the variety of ways in which he makes his approaches

to any position he would master. After reconnoitring it with skill and boldness, if not with perfect accuracy, he manœuvres with infinite address, and arrays a most imposing force of general principles mustered from all parts, and pointed, sometimes violently enough, in one direction. He now moves on with the composed air, the even, dignified pace of the historian; and unfolds his facts in a narrative so easy, and yet so correct, that you plainly perceive he wanted only the dismissal of other pursuits to have rivalled Livy or Hume. But soon this advance is interrupted, and he stops to display his powers of descriptionwhen the boldness of his design is only matched by the brilliancy of his colouring. He then skirmishes for a space, and puts in motion all the lighter arms of wit-sometimes not unmingled with drollery-sometimes bordering upon farce. His main battery is now opened, and a tempest bursts forth, of every weapon of attack-invective-abuse-irony-sarcasm-simile, drawn out to allegory-allusion-quotation-fable-parable-anathema. The heavy artillery of powerful declamation, and the conflict of close argument alone are wanting; but of this the garrison is not always aware; his noise is oftentimes mistaken for the thunder of true eloquence; the number of his movements distracts, and the variety of his missiles annoys the adversary; a panic spreads, and he carries his point, as if he had actually made a practicable breach; nor is it discovered till after the smoke and confusion is over, that the citadel remains untouched.

Every one of Mr Burke's works that is of any importance, presents, though in different degrees, these features to the view

from the most chaste and temperate, his Thoughts on the Discontents, to the least faultless and severe-his richer and more ornate, as well as vehement tracts upon revolutionary politics-his letters on the Regicide Peace, and Defence of his Pension. His speeches differ not at all from his pamphlets; these are written speeches, or those are spoken dissertations, according as any one is over studious of method and closeness in a book, or of case and nature in an oration. The principal defects which we have hinted at are a serious derogation from merit of the highest order in both kinds of composition. But in his spoken eloquence, the failure which it is known attended him for a great part of his Parliamentary life, is not to be explained by the mere absence of what alone he wanted to equal the greatest of orators.

In fact, he was deficient in judgment; he regarded not the degree of interest felt by his audience in the topics which deeply occupied himself; and seldom knew when he had said enough

on those which affected them as well as him. He was admirable in exposition; in truth, he delighted to give instruction both when speaking and conversing, and in this he was unrivalled. Quis in sententiis argutior? in docendo edisserendoque subtilior?' Mr Fox might well avow, without a compliment, that he had learnt more from him alone than from all other men and authors. But if any one thing is proved by unvarying experience of popular assemblies, it is, that an excellent dissertation makes a very bad speech. The speaker is not the only person actively engaged while a great oration is pronouncing; the audience have their share; they must be excited, and for this purpose constantly appealed to as recognised persons of the drama. The didactic orator (if, as has been said of the poet, it be not a contradiction in terms) has it all to himself; the hearer is merely passive; and the consequence is, he soon ceases to be a listener, and if he can, even to be a spectator. Mr Burke was essentially didactic, except when the violence of his invective carried him away, and then he offended the correct taste of the House of Commons, by going beyond the occasion, and by descending to coarseness. When he argued, it was by unfolding large views, and seizing upon analogies too remote, and drawing distinctions too fine for hearers,' or, at the best, by a body of statements, lucid, certainly, and diversified with flower and fruit, and lighted up with pleasantry, but almost always in excess, and overdone in these qualities as well as in its own substance. He had little power of hard stringent reasoning, as we have more than once remarked; and his declamation was addressed to the head, as from the head it proceeded, learned, fanciful, ingenious, but not impassioned. Of him, as a combatant, we may say what Aristotle did of the old philosophers, when he compared them to unskilful boxers, who hit round about, and

*

*The charge of coarseness, or rather of vulgarity of language, has, to the astonishment of all who knew him, and understood pure idiomatic English, been made against Mr Windham, but only by persons unacquainted with both. To him might nearly be applied the beautiful sketch of Crassus by M. Tullius- Quo,' says he, nihil statuo 'fieri potuisse perfectius. Erat summa gravitas, erat cum gravitate 'junctus, facetiarum et urbanitatis oratorius, non scurrilis lepos. La'tine loquendi accurata, et sine molestiâ diligens elegantia―in disse' rendo mira explicatio; cum de jure civili, cum de æquo et bono disputaretur argumentorum et similitudinum copia.' Let not the reader reject even the latter features, those certainly of an advocate; at least let him first read Mr W.'s Speech on the Law of Evidence, in the Duke of York's case.