There can be no doubt how severe had been the tension.  Yet the performance to which Burke now applied himself is one of the gravest and most reasonable of all his compositions.  He felt it necessary to vindicate the fundamental consistency between his present and his past.  We have no difficulty in imagining the abuse to which he was exposed from those whose abuse gave him pain.  In a country governed by party, a politician who quits the allies of a lifetime must expect to pay the penalty.  The Whig papers told him that he was expected to surrender his seat in Parliament.  They imputed to him all sorts of sinister motives.  His name was introduced into ironical toasts.  For a whole year there was scarcely a member of his former party who did not stand aloof from him.  Windham, when the feeling was at its height, sent word to a host that he would rather not meet Burke at dinner.  Dr. Parr, though he thought Mr. Burke the greatest man upon earth, declared himself most indignantly and most fixedly on the side of Mr. Sheridan and Mr. Fox.  The Duke of Portland, though always described as strongly and fondly attached to him, and Gilbert Elliot, who thought that Burke was right in his views on the Revolution, and right in expressing them, still could not forgive the open catastrophe, and for many months all the old habits of intimacy among them were entirely broken off.

Burke did not bend to the storm.  He went down to Margate, and there finished the Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs.  Meanwhile he despatched his son to Coblenz to give advice to the royalist exiles, who were then mainly in the hands of Calonne, one of the very worst of the ministers whom Louis XVI. had tried between his dismissal of Turgot in 1774, and the meeting of the States-General in 1789.  This measure was taken at the request of Calonne, who had visited Burke at Margate.  The English Government did not disapprove of it, though they naturally declined to invest either young Burke or any one else with authority from themselves.  As little came of the mission as might have been expected from the frivolous, unmanly, and enraged spirit of those to whom it was addressed.

In August (1791), while Richard Burke was at Coblenz, the Appeal was published.  This was the last piece that Burke wrote on the Revolution, in which there is any pretence of measure, sobriety, and calm judgment in face of a formidable and perplexing crisis.  Henceforth it is not political philosophy, but the minatory exhortation of a prophet.  We deal no longer with principles and ideas, but with a partisan denunciation of particular acts, and a partisan incitement to a given practical policy.  We may appreciate the policy as we choose, but our appreciation of Burke as a thinker and a contributor to political wisdom is at an end.  He is now only Demosthenes thundering against Philip, or Cicero shrieking against Mark Antony.