and comparatively slight miscarriage of French revolutionary institutions.”  This is, as a statement of fact, not at all correct.  Lord Chatham detected what he believed to be the mischievous Conservatism in Burke’s constitutional doctrines at the very outset.  So did the Constitutional Society detect it.  So did Mrs. Macaulay, Bishop Watson, and many other people.  The story of Burke’s inconsistency is, of course, as old as Sheridan.  Hazlitt declared that the Burke of 1770 and the Burke of 1790 were not merely opposite persons, but deadly enemies.  Mr. Buckle, who is full of veneration for the early writings, but who dislikes the later ones, gets over the difficulty by insisting that Burke actually went out of his mind after 1789.  We should have expected a subtler judgment from Sir Henry Maine.  Burke belonged from first to last to the great historic and positive school, of which the founder was Montesquieu.  Its whole method, principle, and sentiment, all animated him with equal force whether he was defending the secular pomps of Oude or the sanctity of Benares, the absolutism of Versailles, or the free and ancient Parliament at Westminster.[1]

[Footnote 1:  It is satisfactory to have the authority of Mr. Lecky on the same side. England in the Eighteenth Century, vol. iii. chap. ix. p. 209.]

Versailles reminds us of a singular overstatement by Sir Henry Maine of the blindness of the privileged classes in France to the approach of the Revolution.  He speaks as if Lord Chesterfield’s famous passage were the only anticipation of the coming danger.  There is at least one utterance of Louis XV. himself, which shows that he did not expect things to last much beyond his time.  D’Argenson, in the very year of Chesterfield’s prophecy, pronounced that a revolution was inevitable, and he even went so close to the mark as to hint that it would arise on the first occasion when it should be necessary to convoke the States General.  Rousseau, in a page of the Confessions, not only divined a speedy revolution, but enumerated the operative causes of it with real precision.  There Is a striking prediction In Voltaire, and another in Mercier de la Riviere.  Other names might be quoted to the same effect, including Maria Theresa, who described the ruined condition of the French monarchy, and only hoped that the ruin might not overtake her daughter.  The mischief was not so much that the privileged classes were blind as that they were selfish, stubborn, helpless, and reckless.  The point is not very important in itself, but it is characteristic of a very questionable way of reading human history.  Sir Henry Maine’s readiness to treat revolutions as due to erroneous abstract ideas naturally inclines him to take too narrow a view both of the preparation in circumstances, and of the preparation in the minds of observant onlookers.