way) are good things too; and, without them, liberty is not a benefit while it lasts, and is not likely to continue long. 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 congratulations, which may soon be turned into complaints. Prudence would dictate this in the place of separate, insulated, private men; but liberty, when men act in bodies, is power. Considerate people before they declare themselves (ie. their opinions) will observe the use which is made of power; and particularly of so trying a thing as new power in new persons, of whose principles, tempers, and dispositions, they have little or no experience, and in situations where those who appear the most stirring in the scene may possibly not be the real

movers.

5. THE ENGLISH CONSTITUTION.

(FROM THE SAME WORK.)

OUR political system is placed in a just correspondence and symmetry with the order of the world, and with the mode of existence decreed to a permanent body composed of transitory parts; wherein, by the disposition of a stupendous wisdom, moulding together the great mysterious incorporation of the human race, the whole "at one time" is never old, or middleage or young, but, in a condition of unchangeable constancy, moveson through the varied tenor of perpetual decay, fall, renovation and progression. Thus by preserving the method of nature in the conduct of the state, in what we improve we are never wholly new; in what we retain, we are never wholly obsolete. By adhering in this manner and on those principles to our forefathers, we are guided not by the superstition of antiquarians, but by the spirit of philosophic analogy. In this choice of inheritance we have given to our frame of polity the image of a relation in blood; binding up the constitution of our country with our dearest domestic ties; adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our family affections; keeping inseparable, and cherishing with the warmth of all their combined and mutually reflected charities,2 our state, our hearths, our sepulchres, and our altars.

(1) A permanent, &c. A striking expression, reminding us of a similar one, "central peace in the midst of endless agitation." The entire passage is a noble piece of composition.

(2) Charities. See note 1, p. 156.

Through the same plan of a conformity to nature in our artificial institutions, and by calling in the aid of her unerring and powerful instincts, to fortify the fallible and feeble contrivances of our reason, we have derived several other, and those no small benefits, from considering our liberties in the light of an inheritance. Always acting as if in the presence of canonised forefathers, the spirit of freedom, leading in itself to misrule and excess, is tempered with an awful gravity. This idea of a liberal (i.e. noble) descent inspires us with a sense of habitual native dignity, which prevents that upstart insolence, almost inevitably adhering to and disgracing those who are the first acquirers of any distinction. By this means our liberty 1 becomes a noble freedom.1 It carries an imposing and majestic aspect. It has a pedigree, and illustrating (illustrious) ancestors. It has its bearings and its ensigns-armorial. It has its gallery of portraits; its monumental inscriptions; its records, evidences, and titles. We procure reverence to our civil institutions on the principle upon which nature teaches us to revere individual men, on account of their age, and on account of those from whom they are descended. All your sophisters cannot produce anything better adapted to preserve a rational and manly freedom than the course that we have pursued, who have chosen our nature rather than our speculations, our breasts rather than our inventions, for the great conservatories and magazines of our rights and privileges.

6. THE AGE OF CHIVALRY IS GONE!

(FROM THE SAME WORK.)

It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France (Marie Antoinette), then the dauphiness, at Versailles; 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 in, glittering like the morning star, full of life, and splendour, and joy. Oh! what a revolution! and what a

(1) Liberty, freedom. In this passage Burke seems to exalt liberty into freedom as a higher degree of the saine quality. The distinction is, however, rarely main tained, and the two words are, by common usage, as nearly identical in meaning as possible.

(2) Your sophisters. These " Reflections" were in the form of a letter addressed to a gentleman in Paris.

heart must I have, to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love,1 that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; 2 little did I dream that I should live to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever. Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise is gone! It is gone,3 ,3 that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness.

This mixed system of opinion and sentiment had its origin in the ancient chivalry; and the principle, though varied in its appearance by the varying state of human affairs, subsisted and influenced through a long succession of generations, even to the time we live in. If it should ever be totally extinguished, the loss I fear will be great. It is this which has given its character to modern Europe. It is this which has distinguished it under all its forms of government, and distinguished it to its advantage, from the states of Asia, and possibly from those states which flourished in the most brilliant periods of the antique world. It was this which, without confounding ranks, had produced a noble equality, and handed it down through all the

(1) She added titles, &c., i.e. when she was saluted with veneration, as well as with enthusiastic, &c. "Added titles" is an unusual, perhaps unique, expression.

(2) In allusion to the rumour that the queen carried a dagger in her bosom for use against herself in any critical emergency. Burke had just before spoken of her as resolved "in the last extremity to save herself from the last disgrace," and to fall, like Lucretia, "by no ignoble hand."

(3) It is gone. The effect of employing this anticipatory clause, instead of cominencing with the subject, is particularly fine. Put" is gone" to the end, and you spoil the whole sentence.

gradations of social life. It was this opinion which mitigated kings into companions, and raised private men to be fellows with kings. Without force or opposition, it subdued the fierceness of pride and power; it obliged sovereigns to submit to the soft collar of social esteem, compelled stern authority to submit to elegance, and gave a dominating vanquisher of laws, to be subdued by manners.1

But now all is to be changed; all the pleasing allusions, which made power gentle and obedience liberal (noble), which harmonised the different shades of life, and which by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason; all the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off; all the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.

On this scheme of things a king is but a man, a queen is but a woman; a woman is but an animal, and an animal not of the highest order; all homage paid to the sex in general as such, and without distinct views, is to be regarded as romance and folly. Regicide, and parricide, and sacrilege, are but fictions of superstition, corrupting jurisprudence by destroying its simplicity. The murder of a king, or a queen, or a bishop, or a father, are only common homicide; and if the people are by any chance, or in any way gainers, by it, a sort of homicide much the most pardonable, and into which we ought not to make too severe a scrutiny.

On the scheme of this barbarous philosophy, which is the offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings, and which is as void of solid wisdom as it is destitute of all taste and elegance, laws are to be supported only by their own terrors, and by the concern which each individual may find in them, from his own private speculations, or can spare to them from his own private interests. In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows; nothing

(1) There is probably some misprint here, which must have escaped the author's notice. The phraseology as we find it, is impossible, though the meaning is easily seen. It may be thus paraphrased-"made him, who had proudly overthrown all laws, submit in his turn to the dominion of manners." Perhaps "gave "-which is the real difficulty-ought to be "made," though, in that case, the construction would still be awkward.

is left which engages the affections on the part of the commonwealth. On the principles of this mechanic philosophy' our institutions can never be embodied, if I may use the expression, in persons, so as to create in us love, veneration, admiration, or attachment. But that sort of reason which banishes the affections is incapable of filling their place; these public affections, combined with manners, are required sometimes as supplements, sometimes as correctives, always as aids, to law. The precept given by a wise man, as well as a great critic, for the construction of poems, is equally true as to states,-Non satis est pulchra esse poemata, dulcia sunto.2 There ought to be a system of manners in every nation which a well-formed mind would be disposed to relish. To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.

7. HENRY IV. OF FRANCE.

(FROM THE Same work.)

HENRY of Navarre was a resolute, active, and politic prince. He possessed indeed great humanity and mildness; but a humanity and mildness that never stood in the way of his interests. He never sought to be loved without putting himself first in a condition to be feared. He used soft language with determined conduct. He asserted and maintained his authority in the gross, and distributed his acts of concession only in the detail. He spent the income of his prerogative nobly; but he took care not to break in upon the capital; never abandoning for a moment any of the claims, which he made under the fundamental laws, nor sparing to shed the blood of those who opposed him, often in the field, sometimes upon the scaffold. Because he knew how to make his virtues respected by the ungrateful, he has merited the praises of those whom, if they had lived in his time, he would have shut up in the Bastile, and brought to punishment along with the regicides whom he hanged after he had famished Paris into surrender.

(1) Mechanic philosophy. This epithet "mechanic" is the key to the whole passage quoted above; mechanic, busy, low, as opposed to noble and high principled. He called it just before "barbarous," in opposition to "civilised" and "refined,"

(2) "It is not enough that poems should be beautiful, let them be musical as well."-Horace, De Arte Poetica.

(3) The subtle discrimination of this "character" deserves notice. Every word is effective in producing the end in view.