Then we may doubt whether there is any instance of an orator throwing his spell over a large audience, without frequent resort to the higher forms of commonplace.  Two of the greatest speeches of Burke’s time are supposed to have been Grattan’s on Tithes and Fox’s on the Westminster Scrutiny, and these were evidently full of the splendid commonplaces of the firstrate rhetorician.  Burke’s mind was not readily set to these tunes.  The emotion to which he commonly appealed was that too rare one, the love of wisdom; and he combined his thoughts and knowledge in propositions of wisdom so weighty and strong, that the minds of ordinary hearers were not on the instant prepared for them.

It is true that Burke’s speeches were not without effect of an indirect kind, for there is good evidence that at the time when Lord North’s ministry was tottering, Burke had risen to a position of the first eminence in Parliament.  When Boswell said to him that people would wonder how he could bring himself to take so much pains with his speeches, knowing with certainty that not one vote would be gained by them, Burke answered that it is very well worth while to take pains to speak well in Parliament; for if a man speaks well, he gradually establishes a certain reputation and consequence in the general opinion; and though an Act that has been ably opposed becomes law, yet in its progress it is softened and modified to meet objections whose force has never been acknowledged directly.  “Aye, sir,” Johnson broke in, “and there is a gratification of pride.  Though we cannot outvote them, we will out-argue them.”

Out-arguing is not perhaps the right word for most of Burke’s performances.  He is at heart thinking more of the subject itself than of those on whom it was his apparent business to impress a particular view of it.  He surrenders himself wholly to the matter, and follows up, though with a strong and close tread, all the excursions to which it may give rise in an elastic intelligence—­“motion,” as De Quincey says, “propagating motion, and life throwing off life.”  But then this exuberant way of thinking, this willingness to let the subject lead, is less apt in public discourse than it is in literature, and from this comes the literary quality of Burke’s speeches.

With all his hatred for the book-man in politics, Burke owed much of his own distinction to that generous richness and breadth of judgment which had been ripened in him by literature and his practice in it.  Like some other men in our history, he showed that books are a better preparation for statesmanship than early training in the subordinate posts and among the permanent officials of a public department.  There is no copiousness of literary reference in his works, such as over-abounded in civil and ecclesiastical publicists of the seventeenth century.  Nor can we truly say that there is much, though there is certainly some, of that tact, which literature is alleged to