It was during these months that he composed the Letters on a Regicide Peace, though the third and fourth of them were not published until after his death.  There have been those to whom these compositions appeared to be Burke’s masterpieces.  In fact they are deplorable.  They contain passages of fine philosophy and of skilful and plausible reasoning, but such passages only make us wonder how they come to be where they are.  The reader is in no humour for them.  In splendour of rhetoric, in fine images, in sustention, in irony, they surpass anything that Burke ever wrote, but of the qualities and principles that, far more than his rhetoric, have made Burke so admirable and so great—­of justice, of firm grasp of fact, of a reasonable sense of the probabilities of things—­there are only traces enough to light up the gulfs of empty words, reckless phrases, and senseless vituperations, that surge and boil around them.

It is with the same emotion of “grief and shame” with which Fox heard Burke argue against relief to Dissenters, that we hear him abusing the courts of law because they did not convict Hardy and Horne Tooke.  The pages against divorce and civil marriage, even granting that they point to the right judgment in these matters, express it with a vehemence that is irrational, and in the dialect, not of a statesman, but of an enraged Capucin.  The highly wrought passage in which Burke describes external aggrandisement as the original thought and the ultimate aim of the earlier statesmen of the Revolution, is no better than ingenious nonsense.  The whole performance rests on a gross and inexcusable anachronism.  There is a contemptuous refusal to discriminate between groups of men who were as different from one another as Oliver Cromwell was different from James Nayler, and between periods which were as unlike in all their conditions as the Athens of the Thirty Tyrants was unlike Athens after Thrasybulus had driven the Tyrants out.  He assumes that the men, the policy, the maxims of the French Government are the men, the policy, and the maxims of the handful of obscure miscreants who had hacked priests and nobles to pieces at the doors of the prisons four years before.  Carnot is to him merely “that sanguinary tyrant,” and the heroic Hoche becomes “that old practised assassin,” while the Prince of Wales, by the way, and the Duke of York are the hope and pride of nations.  To heap up that incessant iteration about thieves, murderers, housebreakers, assassins, bandits, bravoes with their hands dripping with blood and their maw gorged with property, desperate paramours, bombastical players, the refuse and rejected offal of strolling theatres, bloody buffoons, bloody felons—­all this was as unjust to hundreds of disinterested, honest, and patriotic men who were then earnestly striving to restore a true order and solid citizenship in France, as the foul-mouthed scurrility of an Irish Orangeman is unjust to millions of devout Catholics.