Burke

Burke, by John Morley

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Burke, by John Morley This eBook is
for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net
Title: Burke
Author: John Morley
Release Date: July 17, 2004 [EBook #12922]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BURKE ***

Produced by Paul Murray, Josephine Paolucci and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team.

BURKE
BY
JOHN MORLEY
London

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1907
Printed 1888. Reprinted 1892, 1897, 1902, 1907
(A Library Edition, of the book published in the "English Men of
Letters Series)

NOTE
The present writer published a study on Burke some twenty years ago.
It was almost entirely critical, and in no sense a narrative. The volume
that is now submitted to my readers first appeared in the series of
English Men of Letters. It is biographical rather than critical, and not
more than about a score of pages have been reproduced in it from the
earlier book. Three pages have been inserted from an article on Burke
contributed by me to the new edition of the Encyclopoedia Britannica;
and I have to thank Messrs. Black for the great courtesy with which
they have allowed me to transcribe the passage here. These borrowings
from my former self, the reader will perhaps be willing to excuse, on
the old Greek principle that a man may once say a thing as he would
have it said, [Greek: dis de ouk endechetai]--he can hardly say it twice.
J.M.
1888.

CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
EARLY LIFE AND FIRST WRITINGS

CHAPTER II
IN IRELAND--PARLIAMENT--BEACONSFIELD
CHAPTER III
THE CONSTITUTIONAL STRUGGLE
CHAPTER IV
THE ROCKINGHAM PARTY--PARIS--ELECTION AT
BRISTOL--THE AMERICAN WAR
CHAPTER V
ECONOMICAL REFORM--BURKE IN OFFICE--FALL OF HIS
PARTY
CHAPTER VI
BURKE AND HIS FRIENDS
CHAPTER VII
THE NEW MINISTRY--WARREN HASTINGS--BURKE'S PUBLIC
POSITION
CHAPTER VIII
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
CHAPTER IX
BURKE AND HIS PARTY--PROGRESS OF THE
REVOLUTION--IRELAND--LAST YEARS
CHAPTER X

BURKE'S LITERARY CHARACTER

BURKE
CHAPTER I
EARLY LIFE, AND FIRST WRITINGS
It will soon be a hundred and twenty years since Burke first took his
seat, in the House of Commons, and it is eighty-five years since his
voice ceased to be heard there. Since his death, as during his life,
opinion as to the place to which he is entitled among the eminent men
of his country has touched every extreme. Tories have extolled him as
the saviour of Europe. Whigs have detested him as the destroyer of his
party. One undiscriminating panegyrist calls him the most profound
and comprehensive of political philosophers that has yet existed in the
world. Another and more distinguished writer insists that he is a
resplendent and far-seeing rhetorician, rather than a deep and subtle
thinker. A third tells us that his works cannot be too much our study, if
we mean either to understand or to maintain against its various enemies,
open and concealed, designing and mistaken, the singular constitution
of this fortunate island. A fourth, on the contrary, declares that it would
be hard to find a single leading principle or prevailing sentiment in one
half of these works, to which something extremely adverse cannot be
found in the other half. A fifth calls him one of the greatest men, and,
Bacon alone excepted, the greatest thinker, who ever devoted himself
to the practice of English politics. Yet, oddly enough, the author of the
fifth verdict will have it that this great man and great thinker was
actually out of his mind when he composed the pieces for which he has
been most widely admired and revered.
A sufficient interval has now passed to allow all the sediment of party
fanaticism to fall to the bottom. The circumstances of the world have
since Burke's time undergone variation enough to enable us to judge,
from many points of view, how far he was the splendid pamphleteer of
a faction, and how far he was a contributor to the universal stock of

enduring wisdom. Opinion is slowly, but without reaction, settling
down to the verdict that Burke is one of the abiding names in our
history, not because he either saved Europe or destroyed the Whig
party; but because he added to the permanent considerations of wise
political thought, and to the maxims of wise practice in great affairs,
and because he imprints himself upon us with a magnificence and
elevation of expression that places him among the highest masters of
literature, in one of its highest and most commanding senses. Those
who have acquired a love for abstract politics amid the almost
mathematical closeness and precision of Hobbes,