one of the orator’s brilliant days, he replied, “he did not think a man of genius could speak for two hours without saying something by which he would have been electrified.”  We are only sorry, at this distance of time, for one thing in these Lectures—­the tone and spirit in which they seemed to have been composed and to be delivered.  If all that body of opinions and principles of which the orator read his recantation was unfounded, and there was an end of all those views and hopes that pointed to future improvement, it was not a matter of triumph or exultation to the lecturer or any body else, to the young or the old, the wise or the foolish; on the contrary, it was a subject of regret, of slow, reluctant, painful admission—­

  “Of lamentation loud heard through the rueful air.”

The immediate occasion of this sudden and violent change in Sir James’s views and opinions was attributed to a personal interview which he had had a little before his death with Mr. Burke, at his house at Beaconsfield.  In the latter end of the year 1796, appeared the Regicide Peace, from the pen of the great apostate from liberty and betrayer of his species into the hands of those who claimed it as their property by divine right—­a work imposing, solid in many respects, abounding in facts and admirable reasoning, and in which all flashy ornaments were laid aside for a testamentary gravity, (the eloquence of despair resembling the throes and heaving and muttered threats of an earthquake, rather than the loud thunder-bolt)—­and soon after came out a criticism on it in The Monthly Review, doing justice to the author and the style, and combating the inferences with force and at much length; but with candour and with respect, amounting to deference.  It was new to Mr. Burke not to be called names by persons of the opposite party; it was an additional triumph to him to be spoken well of, to be loaded with well-earned praise by the author of the Vindiciae Gallicae.  It was a testimony from an old, a powerful, and an admired antagonist.[B] He sent an invitation to the writer to come and see him; and in the course of three days’ animated discussion of such subjects, Mr. Mackintosh became a convert not merely to the graces and gravity of Mr. Burke’s style, but to the liberality of his views, and the solidity of his opinions.—­The Lincoln’s-Inn Lectures were the fruit of this interview:  such is the influence exercised by men of genius and imaginative power over those who have nothing to oppose to their unforeseen flashes of thought and invention, but the dry, cold, formal deductions of the understanding.  Our politician had time, during a few years of absence from his native country, and while the din of war and the cries of party-spirit “were lost over a wide and unhearing ocean,” to recover from his surprise and from a temporary alienation of mind; and to return in spirit, and in the mild and mellowed maturity of age, to the principles and attachments of his early life.