(Hours in a Library), and Bagehot. An elaborate edition of Crabbe was issued in 8 vols. with very fine plates in 1834, when George Crabbe's pious and sincere Memoir of his father (corrected by "Little Grange" FitzGerald) also appeared. A onevolume edition appeared in 1860. There are also Memoirs by T. E. Kebbel, Anthony Deane (Selections in Little Library), and Canon Ainger. Celebrations were held at Olney and Aldeburgh in 1900 and 1905 (see Times, September, 15, 1905).

CHAPTER X

POLITICS, PHILOSOPHY, NATURE, AND RELIGION

"Think of the common man's tiresome details of the weather which he has known in past years, and then recollect Gilbert White's account of his great frosts, his hot summers and his thunderstorms. Selborne was to him a kind of Robinson Crusoe's island, which comprehended within itself all his daily interest. It is an element in the rustic charm of the History that White's attention was perpetually fixed upon one narrow spot of English ground. His mind was a lens exquisite in definition, but of small field. . . There is a genius in the book a small thing perfectly done."-L. C. MIALL.

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Edmund Burke-Junius-Tom Paine-William Cobbett-Adam Smith-Gilbert White-Natural history-The open-air school -The attack and defence of ancient creeds and philosophies -Shaftesbury-Berkeley-Butler-Paley-Watson.

I

THERE is, as has been remarked, a certain unwillingness in the world to admit that the same man has excelled in various pursuits. Yet we find Erskine and Thurlow admitting that Burke had a profound knowledge of jurisprudence, and when Adam Smith came to London he was amazed to find to what extent Burke, by sheer force of deductive reasoning, had anticipated his own carefully constructed economic hypotheses.

Born in January, 1729, the son of a solicitor in Dublin, Edmund Burke was educated at Ballitore School under Abraham Shackleton, to whom he always professed deep obligations. The Shackletons in the days of his prosperity contributed to the "tail of Irish Paddies" which Burke's

Whig friends made fun of. In 1743 he became a student at Trinity College, Dublin, and in April, 1747, was entered at the Middle Temple, though he did not actually settle in London until 1750. Indifferent to law, he surrendered himself to a state of disponibilité universelle. He filled up his time by frequenting the theatre, studying logic and natural philosophy, and writing poetry. In 1751-3 he made instructive tours through England. The first literary production of Burke's that is preserved is his travesty 1 or reductio ad absurdum of Bolingbroke's plan for throwing ridicule upon established religion. "Show me," he says in his Vindication of Natural Society (1756), "one absurdity in religion and I will undertake to show you a hundred in political institutions and laws." In his next essay, The Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, Burke makes the first independent contribution in English to the treatment of æsthetics as a branch of philosophy, and crude though it was in many respects, his work stimulated its German translator Lessing in his great contribution to æsthetic thought, The Laokoon of 1766.

In 1759, under the auspices of the bookseller Dodsley, Burke began a yearly chronicle of events under the title of The Annual Register. He had already contributed chapters to an historical survey of our American Colonies, and had projected a History of England upon a liberal scale. In 1761 the marvellous aptitude which Burke had manifested as an orator and political thinker (in books and debating societies, mainly, hitherto) led to his appointment as secretary and brain commissary of that somewhat empty-headed politician known as Single-Speech Hamilton. Hamilton was egotistic and exacting. In return for £300 a year he wanted to absorb the whole time and talent of Burke. This was resented, and the connection 1 Bolingbroke's style is copied very closely.

was broken. Burke was now thirty-seven years of age, with a wife and child, but with no employment or means of income, for his pride had led him to resign an Irish pension. In a very short time, however, he obtained employment as private secretary to Rockingham, upon that statesman's taking office in 1765, and next year he entered Parliament for Wendover, and at once made his mark as a debater. In 1769, in his Observations on the Present State of the Nation, he defended the conduct of the Rockingham Ministry; but it is in his next piece, called Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770). in which he unfolds with an almost Oriental luxuriance of diction and similitude the iniquities of the double cabinet system (by which George III. sought to evade the reality of Parliamentary control), that we first catch the long swell of Burke's rolling periods. In his choice of words and rhythms of a swelling and stately sound, Burke shows his affinities with Dryden, the archpriest of modern English prose; in the wonderful balance of his clauses he shows the effect of a long study of Bolingbroke. But in the architectonics of his prose, in the manner in which he piles up effects and accumulates them by a process of elaborate metaphor and ornament, Burke is absolutely individual and original. Nor does he allow the colouring and decoration, in which his taste always inclined rather to the gorgeous, to overpower the impression of spontaneity. The fiery heat of the original impulse is always discernible as that of a generous nature "pouring out his mind on paper."

Nothing illustrates the prominent traits of Burke's mind better than his discourses on the American War. Speech on American Taxation (April, 1774), Speech on Conciliation with America (March, 1775), and Letters to the Sheriffs of Bristol (April, 1777)-here more clearly than elsewhere we perceive Burke's profound knowledge, un

biassed judgment, far-seeing sagacity, and rooted abhorrence of abstract politics. He is never tired of flinging his contempt at general maxims, abstruse points, and metaphysical subtleties. He has no patience with doctrinaire politicians who would prefer to see a country ruined rather than give up some pet theory they had fostered within the walls of their libraries. How impotent his eloquence was to mitigate the unfortunate policy of George III. and his Government, with the majority of English people at their back, is known to every one. Burke had the same enlightened views in regard to the government of Ireland, in regard to the English régime in India, and in regard to reform and the reduction of useless offices and extravagantly paid sinecure posts about the Court. In his Reflections upon the French Revolution (published November 1st, 1790), the anger caused by the spectacle of a nation trying to regenerate the present by turning upside down all the institutions which it had inherited from the past influences him to such an extent that his rhetoric loses some of its old suasive force, and Burke occasionally "sees red." But it is not just to refer to his attitude towards the Revolution and the quarrel in which this attitude involved him with his former associates as inconsistent with the tenets of his earlier political life and his championship of America. In the best sense of the word, apart from all party significance, Burke was always a Conservative, and the only respect in which his later writings differ from those of earlier date is that they display a mind much more alive than formerly to the dangers of popular illusions, and that they urge with everincreasing fervour the necessity for those restraining institutions which he always advocated as necessary to the preservation of civilised society.

The Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs was Burke's cogent vindication of himself from the charge of incon