pamphlet on the Revolution as they are still discussing Bishop Butler’s Analogy, the answer is that in one case as in the other the questions at issue are still unsettled, and that Burke offers in their highest and most comprehensive form all the considerations that belong to one side of the dispute.  He was not of those, of whom Coleridge said that they proceeded with much solemnity to solve the riddle of the French Revolution by anecdotes.  He suspended it in the same light of great social ideas and wide principles, in which its authors and champions professed to represent it.  Unhappily he advanced from criticism to practical exhortation, in our opinion the most mischievous and indefensible that has ever been pressed by any statesman on any nation.  But the force of the criticism remains, its foresight remains, its commemoration of valuable elements of life which men were forgetting, its discernment of the limitations of things, its sense of the awful emergencies of the problem.  When our grandchildren have made up their minds, once for all, as to the merits of the social transformation which dawned on Europe in 1789, then Burke’s Reflections will become a mere literary antiquity, and not before.

From the very beginning Burke looked upon the proceedings in France with distrust.  He had not a moment of enthusiasm or sympathy of which to repent.  When the news reached England that the insurgents of Paris had stormed the Bastille, Fox exclaimed with exultation, how much it was the greatest event that had ever happened in the world, how much the best.  Is it an infirmity to wish for an instant that some such phrase of generous hope had escaped from Burke; that he had for a day or an hour undergone that fine illusion which was lighted up in the spirits of men like Wordsworth and Coleridge?  Those great poets, who were destined one day to preach even a wiser and a loftier conservatism than his own, have told us what they felt—­

  When France in wrath her giant limbs upreared,
  And with that oath, which smote air, earth, and sea,
  Stamped her strong foot, and said she would be free.

Burke from the first espied the looming shadow of a catastrophe.  In August he wrote to Lord Charlemont that the events in France had something paradoxical and mysterious about them; that the outbreak of the old Parisian ferocity might be no more than a sudden explosion, but if it should happen to be character rather than accident, then the people would need a strong hand like that of their former masters to coerce them; that all depended upon the French having wise heads among them, and upon these wise heads, if such there were, acquiring an authority to match their wisdom.  There is nothing here but a calm and sagacious suspense of judgment.  It soon appeared that the old Parisian ferocity was still alive.  In the events of October 1789, when the mob of Paris marched out to Versailles and marched back again with