and in his speeches and pamphlets so furious, that he lost his respect in the eyes of his opponents.

To allude now to his first great work, his Reflections. It is quite remarkable at what an early period the danger of the new opinions was stated by this philosophic statesman; here lies what, I think, must be considered as the great merit of his immortal production, his "Reflections on the Revolution of France." His work was an assertion of the old opinions, in opposition to the new, long before the nature of the new opinions had been duly, or even at all estimated by the world.

It was a warning proclaimed to France, to England, and to all mankind, of the delusive nature of these new opinions; of the folly, the injustice, and the danger of acting upon them in a manner so sweeping and precipitate. It must not be forgotten, that this admonition was not only given by Mr. Burke in his place in the House of Commons, in the beginning of the year 1790, but was given to the world in the work we are now alluding to so early as the close of the year 1790. Now this was not to be wise after the event, but to be wise in time, and before the event. Mr. Burke may not have foreseen the frightful energies which this great country of France was afterwards to display; he may have supposed that her patriots would so destroy all her sources of prosperity and strength as to annihilate her political consequence among the nations of Europe. He was often guilty of intemperate declamation, and in one of these moments of excitation he made prophecies of this kind; but such sallies and occasional tirades, the natural effusions of his ardent imagination and his sensitive temperament, must not deprive him of his merit; the merit of resisting in time the delusions and the enthusiasm of the new opinions. Observe the stage in the history of the Revolution at which France had arrived when Mr. Burke wrote. The scenes that excited so strongly his feelings and so alarmed his understanding were the violent measures, for instance, of the Constituent Assembly, and the scenes of the 5th and 6th of October, 1789; these were all. But we have had to witness also, in our review of the history, many dreadful events which, when Mr. Burke wrote, had as yet not happened—the offensive behaviour of the Legislative Assembly, the outrages of

the 20th of June, the attack of the Tuileries on the 10th of August, the massacres of September, and the trial and execution of the king. This is the point at which we are now ourselves arrived, at the opening of the year 1793. More than two years however before this period, Mr. Burke had not only thought and written, but had actually published to the world and addressed to a member of the Constituent Assembly his celebrated Reflections on the Revolution. No work ever excited so much attention, or has been more violently praised and censured. You will see, however, the merit I have attributed to it; a merit which it is indeed impossible for any one fully to comprehend who lived not at the time, but one surely of the most eminent nature that can be attributed to the writings of a statesman-the merit of being wise in time, of seeing through the delusions that are betraying the understandings of all around. And observe further, Mr. Burke's merit is not only that of a political prophet but of a moral prophet; the two were extremely intermingled ; they were, not a little, one and the same thing in this extraordinary crisis of the world. But I shall, at first, turn chiefly to those paragraphs which are of a political nature. Mark, then, the passages to which I shall allude; they show not only that, so early as the year 1790, he saw that the constitution which the patriots proposed could not possibly stand; but next, that the manner of their proceeding was totally mistaken; and lastly, that the new opinions themselves were not founded in nature and truth. On the whole, course in which

that the Revolution, if it journeyed on in the the popular party had instructed it to go, would ruin, not reform their country, and, if unchecked, ruin Europe also. It is near the close of the work that he objects to the constitution as proposed by La Fayette and his friends, and notices the mistakes that were made; and he concludes with affirming, that, if erected, it can hardly stand. Observe the manner in which he fixes upon the main points of the case, and pronounces upon them; a very few sentences will show you what I mean.

"Passing," he says (page 353), "to the National Assembly, we see a body, in its constitution, with every possible power, and no possible external control; without fundamental laws,

without established maxims, without respected rules of proceeding, which nothing can keep firm to any system whatsoever."

Again. "If possible," he says, "the next assembly (observe how prophetic is this paragraph) must be worse than the present. The present, by destroying and altering every thing, will leave to their successors apparently nothing popular to do; they will be roused by emulation and example to enterprises the boldest and most absurd. To suppose such an assembly sitting in perfect quietude is ridiculous."

Again. "Your all-sufficient legislators, in their hurry to do every thing at once, have forgot to constitute a senate (that is, a second assembly); never before this time was heard of a body politic composed of one legislative and active assembly and its executive officers, without such a council, something which might give a bias and steadiness, and preserve something like consistency in the proceedings of the state, which may hold a sort of middle place between the supreme power exercised by the people, or delegated from them, and the mere executive."

Again. "What have they done towards the formation of an executive power? For this they have chosen a degraded king; this, their first executive officer, is to be a machine without any sort of deliberative discretion in any one act of his functionary; at best, he is but a channel to convey to the National Assembly such matter as may import that body to know. The king of France is not the fountain of justice; he neither nominates the judges, nor has a negative; he originates no process, is without the power of suspension, mitigation, or pardon; nor is he more the fountain of honour than of justice all rewards, all distinctions, are in other hands; he has no generous interest that can excite him to action; at best, his conduct will be passive and defensive."

Again." In all other countries the office of ministers of state is of the highest dignity; in France it is full of peril and incapable of glory; and they are the only persons in the country who are incapable of a share in the national councils -what ministers! what councils! what a nation!"

These words, taken, for the sake of brevity, from different sentences, and the sentences taken from different passages,

will give you a faint, but for the present, I hope, sufficient notion of the general style of Mr. Burke's remarks on such important points as those he alludes to the nature of their popular assembly, the want of a second assembly, the office of the king, the situation of the ministers; on the whole, the nature of the executive and legislative powers existing in the constitution. He afterwards proceeds to comment upon the plans of the judicature, the finance, the constitution of the army. He did not foresee, it was impossible to foresee, the obedience which the French armies always paid to the decrees of the National Assembly, and their total indifference to the political changes in Paris; but he at last observes, " that, in the weakness of one kind of authority, and in the fluctuation of all, the officers of the army will remain for some time mutinous and full of faction, until some popular general, who understands the art of conciliating the soldiery, and who possesses the true spirit of command, shall draw the eyes of all men upon himself; armies will obey him on his personal account, and he will then be your master." The first part of this remark was illustrated in the instances of La Fayette and Dumourier, and the latter part in that of Buonaparte. In conclusion, he observes to his friend, "My sentiments may hereafter be of some use to you, in some future form which your commonwealth may take; in the present it can hardly remain; but before its final settlement it may be obliged to pass through great varieties of untried being,' and in all its transmigrations be purified by fire and blood."

What I have now done in the way of extract can only point out to you the places in Mr. Burke's work to which you are more particularly to direct your observation, nothing more; you see their spirit of prophecy, and surely of deliberative, comprehensive good sense; which in us mortals is the only foundation of any spirit of prophecy we can pretend to.

Mr. Burke, however, objected also to the whole style and manner of the proceedings of the patriotic party; and as he was here more opposed to the notions and feelings of all friends to freedom at the time, I shall quote from him more at length, and now give you more fully all that he says than I have hitherto done. His great doctrine is (it was very unpalatable at the time) that men should build upon old

foundations, not clear away the ground, to prepare it for new edifices; and he continually refers, as authority, to the patriots of our own country and to the British constitution.

"You might," says he, "if you pleased, have profited of our example, and have given to your recovered freedom a correspondent dignity. Your privileges, though discontinued, were not lost to memory. Your constitution, it is true, whilst you were out of possession, suffered waste and dilapidation; but you possessed in some parts the walls, and in all the foundations of a noble and venerable castle. You might have repaired those walls; you might have built on those old foundations. Your constitution was suspended before it was perfected; but you had the elements of a constitution very nearly as good as could be wished. In your old States you possessed that variety of parts corresponding with the various descriptions of which your community was happily composed; you had all that combination, and all that opposition of interests; you had that action and counteraction which, in the natural and in the political world, from the reciprocal struggle of discordant powers, draws out the harmony of the universe. These opposed and conflicting interests, which you considered as so great a blemish in your old and in our present constitution, interpose a salutary check to all precipitate resolutions; they render deliberation a matter not of choice, but of necessity; they make all change a subject of compromise, which naturally begets moderation; they produce temperaments, preventing the sore evil of harsh, crude, unqualified reformations, and rendering all the headlong exertions of arbitrary power, in the few or in the many, for ever impracticable. Through that diversity of members and interests, general liberty had as many securities as there were separate views in the several orders; whilst by pressing down the whole by the weight of a real monarchy, the separate parts would have been prevented from warping and starting from their allotted places. You had all these advantages in your ancient States; but you chose to act as if you had never been moulded into civil society, and had every thing to begin anew. You began ill, because you began by despising every thing that belonged to you. You set up your trade without a capital.. ... By following wise examples you would have