The essay has few illuminating ideas, but a great deal of Johnsonian rhetoric, which make its periods tiresome, notwithstanding our admiration for the brilliancy of its author.  More significant is one of Burke’s first essays, A Philosophical Inquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, which is sometimes read in order to show the contrast in style with Addison’s Spectator essays on the “Pleasures of the Imagination.”

Burke’s best known speeches, “On Conciliation with America,” “American Taxation,” and the “Impeachment of Warren Hastings,” are still much studied in our schools as models of English prose; and this fact tends to give them an exaggerated literary importance.  Viewed purely as literature, they have faults enough; and the first of these, so characteristic of the Classic Age, is that they abound in fine rhetoric but lack simplicity.[199] In a strict sense, these eloquent speeches are not literature, to delight the reader and to suggest ideas, but studies in rhetoric and in mental concentration.  All this, however, is on the surface.  A careful study of any of these three famous speeches reveals certain admirable qualities which account for the important place they are given in the study of English.  First, as showing the stateliness and the rhetorical power of our language, these speeches are almost unrivaled.  Second, though Burke speaks in prose, he is essentially a poet, whose imagery, like that of Milton’s prose works, is more remarkable than that of many of our writers of verse.  He speaks in figures, images, symbols; and the musical cadence of his sentences reflects the influence of his wide reading of poetry.  Not only in figurative expression, but much more in spirit, he belongs with the poets of the revival.  At times his language is pseudo-classic, reflecting the influence of Johnson and his school; but his thought is always romantic; he is governed by ideal rather than by practical interests, and a profound sympathy for humanity is perhaps his most marked characteristic.

Third, the supreme object of these orations, so different from the majority of political speeches, is not to win approval or to gain votes, but to establish the truth.  Like our own Lincoln, Burke had a superb faith in the compelling power of the truth, a faith in men also, who, if the history of our race means anything, will not willingly follow a lie.  The methods of these two great leaders are strikingly similar in this respect, that each repeats his idea in many ways, presenting the truth from different view points, so that it will appeal to men of widely different experiences.  Otherwise the two men are in marked contrast.  The uneducated Lincoln speaks in simple, homely words, draws his illustrations from the farm, and often adds a humorous story, so apt and “telling” that his hearers can never forget the point of his argument.  The scholarly Burke speaks in ornate, majestic periods, and searches all history and all literature for his illustrations.  His wealth of imagery and allusions, together with his rare combination of poetic and logical reasoning, make these orations remarkable, entirely apart from their subject and purpose.