of nothing but the rights of man, and deliberately set as wide a gulf as ruin and bloodshed could make between themselves and every incident or institution in the history of their land.  The statesman who had once declared, and habitually proved, his preference for peace over even truth, who had all his life surrounded himself with a mental paradise of order and equilibrium, in a moment found himself confronted by the stupendous and awful spectre which a century of disorder had raised in its supreme hour.  It could not have been difficult for any one who had studied Burke’s character and career, to foretell all that now came to pass with him.

It was from an English, and not from a French point of view, that Burke was first drawn to write upon the Revolution.  The 4th of November was the anniversary of the landing of the Prince of Orange, and the first act in the Revolution of 1688.  The members of an association which called itself the Revolution Society, chiefly composed of Dissenters, but not without a mixture of Churchmen, including a few peers and a good many members of the House of Commons, met as usual to hear a sermon in commemoration of the glorious day.  Dr. Price was the preacher, and both in the morning sermon, and in the speeches which followed in the festivities of the afternoon, the French were held up to the loudest admiration, as having carried the principles of our own Revolution to a loftier height, and having opened boundless hopes to mankind.  By these harmless proceedings Burke’s anger and scorn were aroused to a pitch which must seem to us, as it seemed to not a few of his contemporaries, singularly out of all proportion to its cause.  Deeper things were doubtless in silent motion within him.  He set to work upon a denunciation of Price’s doctrines, with a velocity that reminds us of Aristotle’s comparison of anger to the over-hasty servant, who runs off with all speed before he has listened to half the message.  This was the origin of the Reflections.  The design grew as the writer went on.  His imagination took fire; his memory quickened a throng of impressive associations; his excited vision revealed to him a band of vain, petulant upstarts persecuting the ministers of a sacred religion, insulting a virtuous and innocent sovereign, and covering with humiliation the august daughter of the Caesars; his mind teemed with the sage maxims of the philosophy of things established, and the precepts of the gospel of order.  Every courier that crossed the Channel supplied new material to his contempt and his alarm.  He condemned the whole method and course of the French reforms.  His judgment was in suspense no more.  He no longer distrusted; he hated, despised, and began to dread.