Selections from the Speeches and Writings | Page 7

revered, and consulted, not only as the greatest
of English orators, but as the profoundest teacher of political Science. It
was not that he despised the arrangement of facts, or overlooked the
minutiae of detail; on the contrary, as may be proved by his speeches
on "economical reform," and Warren Hastings; in these respects his
research was boundless, and his industry inexhaustible. Moreover, he
was quite alive to the claims of a crisis, and with the coolness and calm
of a practical statesman, knew how to confront a sudden emergency,
and to contend with a gigantic difficulty. Yet all these qualifications
recede before Burke's amazing power of expanding particulars into
universals, and of associating the accidents of a transient discussion
with the essential properties of some permanent Law in policy, or
abstract Truth in morals. His genius looked through the local to the
universal; in the temporal perceived the eternal; and while facing the
features of the Individual, was enabled to contemplate the attributes of
a Race. (Cicero, in many respects a counterpart of Burke, both in

statesmanship and oratory, appears to recognise what is here expressed
when he says:--"Plerique duo genera ad dicendum dederunt; UNUM
DE CERTA DEFINITAQUE CAUSA, quales sunt quae in litibus, quae
in deliberationibus versantur;--alterum, quod appellant omnes fere
scriptores, explicat nemo, INFINITAM GENERIS SINE TEMPORE,
ET SINE PERSONA quaestionem."--"De Orat." lib. ii. cap. 15.) Hence
his speeches are virtual prophecies; and his writings a storehouse of
pregnant axioms and predictive enunciations, as limitless in their range
as they are undying in duration. In one word, no speeches delivered in
the English Parliament, are so likely to be eternalized as Burke's,
because he has combined with his treatment of some especial case or
contingency before him, the assertion of immutable Principles, which
can be detached from what is local and national, and thus made to stand
forth alone in all the naked grandeur of their truth and their tendency.
Let us be permitted to investigate this topic a little further. If, then,
what Quintilian asserted of the Roman orator may be applied to our
own British Cicero,--"Ille se profecisse sciat, cui Cicero valde
placebit;" and if, moreover, this pre-eminence be chiefly discovered in
Burke's instinctive grasp of that moral essence which is incorporated
with all questions of political Science, and social Ethics--from
WHENCE came this diviner energy of his Genius? No believer in
Christian revelation will hesitate to appropriate, even to this subject, the
apostolic axiom, "EVERY good gift, and EVERY perfect gift is from
above." But while we subscribe with reverential sincerity to this
announcement, it is equally true, that the Infinite Inspirer of all good
adjusts His secret energies by certain laws, and condescends to work by
analogous means. Bearing this in mind, we venture to think Burke's gift
of almost prescient insight into the recesses of our common nature, and
his consummate faculty of instructing the Future through the medium
of the Present,--were partly derived from the elevation of his sentiments,
and the purity of his private life. (The action and reaction maintained
between our moral and intellectual elements is but remotely discussed
by Quintilian in his "Institutes." But still, in more than one passage, he
most impressively declares, that mental proficiency is greatly retarded
by perversity of heart and will. For instance, on one occasion we find
him speaking thus:--"Nihil enim est tam occupatum, tam multiforme,
tot ac tam variis affectibus concisum, atque laceratum, quam mala ac

improba mens. Quis inter haec, literis, aut ulli bonae arti, locus? Non
hercle magis quam frugibus, in terra sentibus ac rubis
occupata."--"Nothing is so flurried and agitated, so self?contradictory,
or so violently rent and shattered by conflicting passions, as a bad heart.
In the distractions which it produces, what room is there for the
cultivation of letters, or the pursuits of any honourable art? Assuredly,
no more than there is for the growth of corn in a field overrun with
thorns and brambles.") It would be unwise to draw invidious
comparisons, but no student of the period in which Burke was in
Parliament, can deny that, compared with SOME of his illustrious
contemporaries, he was indeed a model of what reason and conscience
alike approve in all the relative duties and personal conduct of a man,
when beheld in his domestic career. It is, indeed, a source of deep
thankfulness, the admirer of Burke's genius in public, has no reason to
blush for his character in private; and that when we have listened to his
matchless oratory upon the arena of the House of Commons, we have
not to mourn over dissipation, impurity, and depravity amid the circles
of private history. Our theory, then, is, that beyond what his distinctive
genius inspired, Burke's wondrous power of enunciating everlasting
principles and of associating the loftiest abstractions of wisdom