Perhaps such a passage as this ought to be described less as reflection than as imagination—­moral, historic, conservative imagination—­in which order, social continuity, and the endless projection of past into present, and of present into future, are clothed with the sanctity of an inner shrine.  We may think that a fox-hunting duke and a racing marquis were very poor centres round which to group these high emotions.  But Burke had no puny sentimentalism, and none of the mere literary or romantic conservatism of men like Chateaubriand.  He lived in the real world, and not in a false dream of some past world that had never been.  He saw that the sporting squires of his party were as much the representatives of ancestral force and quality as in older days were long lines of Claudii and Valerii.  His conservative doctrine was a profound instinct, in part political, but in greater part moral.  The accidental roughness of the symbol did not touch him, for the symbol was glorified by the sincerity of his faith and the compass of his imagination.

With these ideas strong within him, in 1773 Burke made a journey to France.  It was almost as though the solemn hierophant of some mystic Egyptian temple should have found himself amid the brilliant chatter of a band of reckless, keen-tongued disputants of the garden or the porch at Athens.  His only son had just finished a successful school-course at Westminster, and was now entered a student at Christ Church.  He was still too young for the university, and Burke thought that a year could not be more profitably spent than in forming his tongue to foreign languages.  The boy was placed at Auxerre, in the house of the business agent of the Bishop of Auxerre.  From the Bishop he received many kindnesses, to be amply repaid in after years when the Bishop came in his old age, an exile and a beggar, to England.

While in Paris, Burke did all that he could to instruct himself as to what was going on in French society.  If he had not the dazzling reception which had greeted Hume in 1764, at least he had ample opportunities of acquainting himself with the prevailing ideas of the time in more than one of the social camps into which Paris was then divided.  Madame du Deffand tells the Duchess of Choiseul that though he speaks French extremely ill, everybody felt that he would be infinitely agreeable if he could more easily make himself understood.  He followed French well enough as a listener, and went every day to the courts to hear the barristers and watch the procedure.  Madame du Deffand showed him all possible attention, and her friends eagerly seconded her.  She invited him to supper parties, where he met the Count de Broglie, the agent of the king’s secret diplomacy; Caraccioli, successor of nimble-witted Galiani, the secretary from Naples; and other notabilities of the high world.  He supped with the Duchess of Luxembourg, and heard a reading of La Harpe’s Barmecides.  It was high treason in this circle to frequent the