discovering the latent wisdom which underlies general prejudices and old institutions, instead of exploding them, inspired Coleridge, as I have already said; and the Coleridgian school are Burke’s direct descendants, whenever they deal with the significance and the relations of Church and State.  But they connected these views so closely with their views in metaphysics and theology, that the association with Burke was effectually disguised.

The only English writer of that age whom we can name along with Burke in the literature of enduring power, is Wordsworth, that great representative in another and a higher field, and with many rare elements added that were all his own of those harmonising and conciliatory forces and ideas that make man’s destiny easier to him, through piety in its oldest and best sense; through reverence for the past, for duty, for institutions.  He was born in the year of the Present Discontents (1770), and when Burke wrote the Reflections, Wordsworth was standing, with France “on the top of golden hours,” listening with delight among the ruins of the Bastille, or on the banks of the Loire, to “the homeless sound of joy that was in the sky.”  When France lost faith and freedom, and Napoleon had built his throne on their grave, he began to see those strong elements which for Burke had all his life been the true and fast foundation of the social world.  Wide as is the difference between an oratorical and a declamatory mind like Burke’s, and the least oratorical of all poets, yet under this difference of form and temper there is a striking likeness in spirit.  There was the same energetic feeling about moral ideas, the same frame of counsel and prudence, the same love for the slowness of time, the same slight account held of mere intellectual knowledge, and even the same ruling sympathy with that side of the character of Englishmen which Burke exulted in, as “their awe of kings and reverence for priests,” “their sullen resistance of innovation” “their unalterable perseverance in the wisdom of prejudice.”

The conservative movement in England ran on for many years in the ecclesiastical channel rather than among questions where Burke’s writings might have been brought to bear.  On the political side the most active minds, both in practice and theory, worked out the principles of liberalism, and they did so on a plan and by methods from which Burke’s utilitarian liberalism and his historic conservatism were equally remote.  There are many signs around us that this epoch is for the moment at an end.  The historic method, fitting in with certain dominant conceptions in the region of natural science, is bringing men round to a way of looking at society for which Burke’s maxims are exactly suited; and it seems probable that he will be more frequently and more seriously referred to within the next twenty years than he has been within the whole of the last eighty.

THE END