scription. Like all the other arts which address themselves to the passions and the imagination, rather than to the intellect, its effects may be felt and conceived, but cannot be easily described; or, at least, must be described chiefly by examples. For the most part, his style is verbose and declamatory; abounding in lavish description and profuse amplification. Sometimes, however, there is in it a fervid intensity which no writer has ever surpassed. But in general, his periods exhibit rather the flowing rotundity of Cicero than the stern sententiousness of Demosthenes. The leading excellences of his declamation are, an inexhaustible affluence; unequaled vigor and versatility; an extraordinary power of raising up agitation and alarm; and perhaps a more absolute mastery over language than any other man ever possessed. There is often an awful mysteriousness about his language: a sort of divine afflatus, which gives to his denunciations the air of prophecy, and to his aphorisms the appearance of inspired truth. His principal defects are, a general want of simplicity, and, consequently, of genuine pathos; a constant tendency to extravagance and exaggeration; an occasional coarseness which sets all delicacy and taste at defiance; and, lastly, a surfeiting exuberance, which formerly wearied the patience of his auditors, and would frequently exhaust his readers, if they did not happily possess the power of resting as often as they pleased. The excess to which he carried this love of redundancy may serve to explain a phenomenon which of ten perplexes the retired student of modern eloquence. He learns with astonishment, on reading the records of the time, that Fox, Pitt, and other eminent orators of the day, were listened to in the House of Commons with far greater applause and attention than Burke; though, when he deliberately reads their published speeches, he perceives that they are no more to be compared with the effusions of that mighty genius, than the speeches of Isocrates are to be classed with the orations of Demosthenes. It so happened, however, that in his later years Burke was generally heard with weariness and impatience; not that he was much more prolix than Fox, but, instead of producing that impression of reality and since.. rity which that great orator never failed to raise, he always excited the idea that he was rather laboring a case, than pouring forth the convictions of his own mind. In the common acceptation of the phrase, Burke could not be called a learned man. He was more properly a man of knowledge than of learning. The native force which impelled him forward was too impetuous to allow him to pause long on his career to master the acquisitions of feebler intellects who had gone before him. Very learned men are seldom found among the highest class of minds. Burke was well informed, and sometimes even curiously informed, on all general topics, but technically proficient in few or none. His quotations from the classics, though in general felicitous, are all gathered in the common highways of literature. There is, however, one striking peculiarity in his mode of quotation which cannot fail to force itself on the attention, and is strongly characteristic of the fervor of his composition. When the heat of his subject forces upon him the recollection of some well-known passage, he instantly pours it forth in his own words, with far greater force than the original, and without the least reference to the author or his work. He gives the impression of being unable to pause in his vivid career for so trifling an object as the formality of quotation. This has a powerful and delightful effect on the mind of the classical reader, An instance or two will sufficiently explain what is here said. Thus, in his first letter on the regicide peace, he says, "Out of the tomb fastidious delicacy at the stench of Every one can immediately see how these well-known phrases of Virgil and Terence are here incorporated into the composition of Burke, without the useless formality of literal quotation. I shall conclude these remarks with a few extracts from such portions of the writings of Burke as appear to be most expressive of the peculiar and extraordinary character of his thoughts and style. The necessary limits of an essay of this kind will, of course, oblige me to confine these extracts to a very few passages, and these so curtailed as to exhibit very imperfectly the objects for which they were selected. But those who feel their curiosity excited may easily extend their researches. The following observations are taken from that wonderful production, the Reflections on the Revolution in France a work which contains a greater and more valuable body of political philosophy than any single book that I have ever perused. Indigested and desultory it certainly is; abounding in exaggerations, and not free from misrepresentations; but replete with the soundest and most sublime lessons of wisdom. "The men of light and leading in England, would think that those do not believe in religion, who do not take care that it should be preached to the poor. But as they know that charity is not confined to any one description, but ought to apply itself to all men who have wants; they are not deprived of a due and anxious sensation of pity to the distresses of the miserable great. They are not repelled, through a "The English people are satisfied, that to the great, the consolations of religion are as necessary as its instructions. They, too, are among the unhappy. They feel personal and domestic sorrow. In these they have no privilege; but are subject to pay their full contingent to all contributions levied on mortality. They want the sovereign balm under their gnawing cares and anxieties, which, being less conversant about the limited wants of animal life, range without limit, and are diversified by infinite combinations in the wild and unbounded regions of imagination. Some charitable dole is wanting to these, our often very unhappy brethren, to fill the gloomy void that reigns in minds which have nothing on earth to hope or fear; something to relieve in the killing languor and over-labored lassitude of those who have nothing to do something to create an appetite to existence in the palled satiety which attends on all pleasures which may be bought, when Nature is not left to her own process, where even desire is anticipated, and, therefore, fruition defeated by meditated schemes and contrivances of delight; and no interval or obstacle is interposed be tween the wish and the accom- marks that sublimity cannot consist plishment." with exactness. "If a certain comet," he says, "had met the earth in some (I forget what) sign,"who does not see, that if he had stopped, in the headlong career of his eloquence, to name the sign with technical precision, the fervor of the passage would have been greatly damped? This passage affords a specimen of many of the leading attributes of Burke's character and manner as a writer, his striking intermixture of impressive and affecting eloquence with deep philosophy and recondite ethics; his boundless affusion of metaphors and allusions, which scorns to turn out of its way even though it should encounter in its progress the most coarse, and even nauseous, imagery; his admirable selection of words; and, above all, the sense of awe and authority which it is sure to call up in the minds of his readers. He often introduces a moral or political maxim, in so pointed and felicitous a style, as to strike the mind with instant conviction: "The effect of liberty to individuals is that they may do what they please we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk our congratulations." Perhaps a more sublime, more awful, more striking, or more applicable metaphor than the following, is not to be met with in any poet of ancient or modern times. He is alluding to the agitated state of the public mind in 1780. "Astronomers have supposed, that if a certain comet, whose path intersected the ecliptic, had met the earth in some (I forget what) sign, it would have whirled us along with it, in its eccentric course, into God knows what regions of heat and cold. Had the portentous comet of the rights of man,' (which from its horrid hair shakes pestilence and war, and with fear of change perplexes monarchs,) had that comet crossed upon us in that state of England, nothing human could have prevented our being irresistibly hurried, out of the highway of Heaven, into all the vices, crimes, horrors, and miseries of the French Revolution." The most trifling circumstances sometimes show the character of Burke's eloquence. Longinus re The following passage is in the best manner of his master, Johnson. Considering that Burke was a practical politician, the purity and soundness of his ethics are truly remarkable: "Angry friendship is sometimes as bad as calm enmity. For this reason, the cold neutrality of abstract justice is, to a good and clear cause, a more desirable thing than an affection liable to be any way disturbed. Taking in the whole view of life, it is more safe to live under the jurisdiction of severe, but steady reason, than under the empire of indulgent, but capricious passion."-Appeal, &c. I shall terminate these extracts by a passage from his first Letter on the Regicide Peace, which has been sometimes quoted as the finest in all the writings of Burke, and the greatest masterpiece of modern eloquence. It is, however, considerably enervated by its want of simplicity and condensation. 66 Deprived of the old government, deprived, in a manner, of all government, France, fallen as a monarchy, to common speculators might have appeared more likely to be an object of pity or insult, according to the disposition of the circumjacent powers, than to be the scourge and terror of them all; but out of the murdered monarchy of France has arisen a vast, unformed, tremendous spectre, in a far more terrific guise than any which ever yet have overpowered the imagination and subdued the fortitude of man. Going straight forward to its end, unappalled by peril, unchecked by remorse, despising all common maxims and all common means, that hideous phantom overpowered those who could not believe it was possible it could at all exist, except on the principles which habit, rather than nature, had persuaded them were necessary to their own particular welfare, and their own ordinary modes of action. But the constitution of any political being, as well as that of any physical being, ought to be known, before we can venture to say what is fit for its conservation, or what is the proper measure of its power. The poison of other states is the food of the new Republic. That bankruptcy, the very apprehension of which is one of the causes assigned for the fall of the monarchy, was the capital on which she opened her traffic with the world. "The Republic of Regicides, with an annihilated revenue, with defaced manufactures, with a ruined commerce, with an uncultivated and half-depopulated country, with a discontented, distressed, enslaved and famished people, passing with a rapid, eccentric, incalculable course, from the wildest anarchy to the sternest despotism, has actually conquered the finest parts of Europe; has distressed, disunited, deranged, and broke to pieces all the rest, and so subdued the minds of the rulers in every nation, that hardly any resource presents itself to them, except that of entitling themselves to a contemptuous mercy by a display of their imbecility and meanness. Their ambition is only to be admitted to a more favored class in the order of servitude under that domineering power." Of this admired passage, as of many others in Burke, it may be remarked, that the philosophy and the eloquence, which constitute its excellences, are mutually weakened by this strange admixture. The heated imagination is damped in its career by the sudden interposition of a profound maxim; and the philosophy itself, by this unnatural location, assumes the air of a rhetorical flourish or poetical exaggera tion. But these deformities, which would ruin an inferior writer, disappear, in the vastness of Burke's transcendant genius, as the mountainous irregularities on the globe disturb not the rotundity of that immense surface. We feel as if in the presence of a great master, whose powers it is not permitted us to question, and whose works we dare hardly venture to criticise. THE TEAR. BY A MODERN PYTHAGOREAN. I WAS led in a dream to the gate of the Upper Heaven, and I saw many sights on which I must be silent; and I heard many sweet sounds, like the voices of angels, hymning to their lyres. And the seraph Uriel was with me, for he is the regent of the sun, and the conductor of errant sojourners through the paths of Infinity. And the light of Heaven dazzled mine eyes long before I reached its glorious portal; and I must have sunk beneath its insufferable splendor, had not the angel shaded me with his ambrosial wings, and touched mine eyes with balm of amarant, which grows only in Heaven. And when he touched them with this balm, I felt them strengthened, and I could gaze undazzled on any part of the bright Kingdom save one; and I asked Uriel the cause of this surpassing light, and he said it was the light of the Sanctuary. And, lo! at the gate of Heaven stood a pedestal of jasper, and on this pedestal a vessel of pure sapphire, encircled with gold, and within this vessel lay a tear, which evaporated not in the light of Heaven, but remained the same foreAnd I said unto the angel, "Whence cometh this tear? "" And he answered," From the eye of an earth-born maiden, named Leila; if ver. thou wouldst know more of this tear, speak to it-it will answer thee." Then I marveled, saying, "Can a tear answer?"-"Yea," responded Uriel; "this tear is not as other tears,-it hath a spirit within it, and a Then, voice, for the sake of the maiden Leila by whom it was shed." methinks, I spoke to the tear, and a voice arose from its bed of sapphire in reply, Neither Mirth invoked me here, Bade me from my fountain start : Came athwart her loveliness, And I inclined my head while the voice was yet speaking; and it seemed to come from the drop within the vessel of sapphire-and I knew |