vision to which we owe one of the most gorgeous pages in our literature—­Marie Antoinette, the young dauphiness, “decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in, glittering like the morning star, full of life and splendour and joy.”  The shadow was rapidly stealing on.  The year after Burke’s visit, the scene underwent a strange transformation.  The king died; the mistress was banished in luxurious exile; and the dauphiness became the ill-starred Queen of France.  Burke never forgot the emotions of the scene; they awoke in his imagination sixteen years after, when all was changed, and the awful contrast shook him with a passion that his eloquence has made immortal.

Madame du Deffand wrote to Horace Walpole that Burke had been so well received, that he ought to leave France excellently pleased with the country.  But it was not so.  His spirit was perturbed by what he had listened to.  He came away with small esteem for that busy fermentation of intellect in which his French friends most exulted, and for which they looked forward to the gratitude and admiration of posterity.  From the spot on which he stood there issued two mighty streams.  It was from the ideas of the Parisian Freethinkers, whom Burke so detested, that Jefferson, Franklin, and Henry drew those theories of human society which were so soon to find life in American Independence.  It was from the same ideas that later on that revolutionary tide surged forth, in which Burke saw no elements of a blessed fertility, but only a horrid torrent of red and desolating lava.  In 1773 there was a moment of strange repose in Western Europe, the little break of stillness that precedes the hurricane.  It was indeed the eve of a momentous epoch.  Before sixteen years were over, the American Republic had risen, like a new constellation into the firmament, and the French monarchy, of such antiquity and fame and high pre-eminence in European history, had been shattered to the dust.  We may not agree with Burke’s appreciation of the forces that were behind these vast convulsions.  But at least he saw, and saw with eyes of passionate alarm, that strong speculative forces were at work, which must violently prove the very bases of the great social superstructure, and might not improbably break them up for ever.

Almost immediately after his return from France, he sounded a shrill note of warning.  Some Methodists from Chatham had petitioned Parliament against a bill for the relief of Dissenters from subscription to the Articles.  Burke denounced the intolerance of the petitioners.  It is not the Dissenters, he cried, whom you have to fear, but the men who, “not contented with endeavouring to turn your eyes from the blaze and effulgence of light, by which life and immortality is so gloriously demonstrated by the Gospel, would even extinguish that faint glimmering of Nature, that only comfort supplied to ignorant man before this great illumination....  These are the people against whom you ought to aim the shaft