confer on those who approach it in a just spirit and with the true gift.  The influence of literature on Burke lay partly in the direction of emancipation from the mechanical formulae of practical politics; partly in the association which it engendered, in a powerful understanding like his, between politics and the moral forces of the world, and between political maxims and the old and great sentences of morals; partly in drawing him, even when resting his case on prudence and expediency, to appeal to the widest and highest sympathies; partly, and more than all, in opening his thoughts to the many conditions, possibilities, and “varieties of untried being” in human character and situation, and so giving an incomparable flexibility to his methods of political approach.

This flexibility is not to be found in his manner and composition.  That derives its immense power from other sources; from passion, intensity, imagination, size, truth, cogency of logical reason.  If any one has imbued himself with that exacting love of delicacy, measure, and taste in expression, which was until our own day a sacred tradition of the French, then he will not like Burke.  Those who insist on charm, on winningness in style, on subtle harmonies and exquisite suggestion, are disappointed in Burke; they even find him stiff and over-coloured.  And there are blemishes of this kind.  His banter is nearly always ungainly, his wit blunt, as Johnson said of it, and very often unseasonable.  We feel that Johnson must have been right in declaring that though Burke was always in search of pleasantries, he never made a good joke in his life.  As is usual with a man who has not true humour, Burke is also without true pathos.  The thought of wrong or misery moved him less to pity for the victim than to anger against the cause.  Then, there are some gratuitous and unredeemed vulgarities; some images whose barbarity makes us shudder, of creeping ascarides and inexpugnable tapeworms.  But it is the mere foppery of literature to suffer ourselves to be long detained by specks like these.

The varieties of Burke’s literary or rhetorical method are very striking.  It is almost incredible that the superb imaginative amplification of the description of Hyder Ali’s descent upon the Carnatic should be from the same pen as the grave, simple, unadorned Address to the King (1777), where each sentence falls on the ear with the accent of some golden-tongued oracle of the wise gods.  His stride is the stride of a giant, from the sentimental beauty of the picture of Marie Antoinette at Versailles, or the red horror of the tale of Debi Sing in Rungpore, to the learning, positiveness, and cool judicial mastery of the Report on the Lords’ Journals (1794), which Philip Francis, no mean judge, declared on the whole to be the “most eminent and extraordinary” of all his productions.  Even in the coolest and dryest of his pieces, there is the mark of greatness, of grasp, of comprehension.  In all its varieties