Burke’s reputation as a thinker has suffered somewhat unjustly as a result of his refusal to square his tenets either with democracy or with its opposite.  It has been said that ideas were only of use to him so far as they were of polemical service, that the amazing fertility and acuteness of his mind worked only in a not too scrupulous determination to overwhelm his antagonists in the several arguments—­on India, or America, on Ireland or on France—­which made up his political career.  He was, said Carlyle, “vehement rather than earnest; a resplendent far-sighted rhetorician, rather than a deep and earnest thinker.”  The words as they stand would be a good description of a certain type of politician; they would fit, for instance, very well on Mr. Gladstone; but they do Burke less than justice.  He was an innovator in modern political thought, and his application of the historical method to the study of institutions is in its way a not less epoch-making achievement than Bacon’s application of the inductive method to science.  At a time when current political thought, led by Rousseau, was drawing its theories from the abstract conception of “natural rights” Burke was laying down that sounder and deeper notion of politics which has governed thinking in that department of knowledge since.  Besides this, he had face to face with the affairs of his own day, a far-sightedness and sagacity which kept him right where other men went wrong.  In a nation of the blind he saw the truth about the American colonies; he predicted with exactitude the culmination of the revolution in Napoleon.  Mere rhetorical vehemence cannot explain the earnestness with which in a day of diplomatic cynicism he preached the doctrine of an international morality as strict and as binding as the morality which exists between man and man.  Surest of all, we have the testimony, uninfluenced by the magic of language, of the men he met.  You could not, said Dr. Johnson, shelter with him in a shed for a few moments from the rain without saying, “This is an extraordinary man.”

His literary position depends chiefly on his amazing gift of expression, on a command of language unapproached by any writer of his time.  His eloquence (in writing not in speaking; he is said to have had a monotonous delivery) was no doubt at bottom a matter of race, but to his Irish readiness and flash and colour he added the strength of a full mind, fortified by a wonderful store of reading which a retentive and exact memory enabled him to bring instantly to bear on the subject in hand.  No writer before him, except Defoe, had such a wide knowledge of the technicalities of different men’s occupations, and of all sorts of the processes of daily business, nor could enlighten an abstract matter with such a wealth of luminous analogy.  It is this characteristic of his style which has led to the common comparison of his writing with Shakespeare’s; both seem to be preternaturally endowed with more information, to have a wider sweep