a force that might shake the whole fabric of civil society itself.  In France, as all students of its speculative history are agreed, there came a time in the eighteenth century when theological controversy was turned into political controversy.  Innovators left the question about the truth of Christianity, and busied themselves with questions about the ends and means of governments.  The appearance of Burke’s Vindication of Natural Society coincides in time with the beginning of this important transformation.  Burke foresaw from the first what, if rationalism were allowed to run an unimpeded course, would be the really great business of the second halt of his century.

If in his first book Burke showed how alive he was to the profound movement of the time, in the second he dealt with one of the most serious of its more superficial interests.  The essay on the Sublime and Beautiful fell in with a set of topics on which the curiosity of the better minds of the age, alike in France, England, and Germany, was fully stirred.  In England the essay has been ordinarily slighted; it has perhaps been overshadowed by its author’s fame in weightier matters.  The nearest approach to a full and serious treatment of its main positions is to be found in Dugald Stewart’s lectures.  The great rhetorical art-critic of our own day refers to it in words of disparagement, and in truth it has none of the flummery of modern criticism.  It is a piece of hard thinking, and it has the distinction of having interested and stimulated Lessing, the author of Laokoeon (1766), by far the most definitely valuable of all the contributions to aesthetic thought in an age which was not poor in them.  Lessing was so struck with the Inquiry that he set about a translation of it, and the correspondence between him and Moses Mendelssohn on the questions which Burke had raised contains the germs of the doctrine as to poetry and painting which Laokoeon afterwards made so famous.  Its influence on Lessing and on Kant was such as to justify the German historian of the literature of the century in bestowing on it the coveted epithet of epoch-making.

The book is full of crudities.  We feel the worse side of the eighteenth century when Burke tells us that a thirst for Variety in architecture is sure to leave very little true taste; or that an air of robustness and strength is very prejudicial to beauty; or that sad fuscous colours are indispensable for sublimity.  Many of the sections, again, are little more than expanded definitions from the dictionary.  Any tyro may now be shocked at such a proposition as that beauty acts by relaxing the solids of the whole system.  But at least one signal merit remains to the Inquiry.  It was a vigorous enlargement of the principle, which Addison had not long before timidly illustrated, that critics of art seek its principles in the wrong place, so long as they limit their search to poems, pictures, engravings, statues,