Meanwhile the great rhetorical fabric gradually arose.  Burke revised, erased, moderated, strengthened, emphasised, wrote and re-wrote with indefatigable industry.  With the manuscript constantly under his eyes, he lingered busily, pen in hand, over paragraphs and phrases, antitheses and apophthegms.  The Reflections was no superb improvisation.  Its composition recalls Palma Giovine’s account of the mighty Titian’s way of working; how the master made his preparations with resolute strokes of a heavily-laden brush, and then turned his picture to the wall, and by and by resumed again, and then again and again, redressing, adjusting, modelling the light with a rub of his finger, or dabbing a spot of dark colour into some corner with a touch of his thumb, and finally working all his smirches, contrasts, abruptnesses, into the glorious harmony that we know.  Burke was so unwearied in this insatiable correction and alteration that the printer found it necessary, instead of making the changes marked upon the proof-sheets, to set up the whole in type afresh.  The work was upon the easel for exactly a year.  It was November (1790) before the result came into the hands of the public.  It was a small octavo of three hundred and fifty-six pages, in contents rather less than twice the present volume, bound in an unlettered wrapper of gray paper, and sold for five shillings.  In less than twelve months it reached its eleventh edition, and it has been computed that not many short of thirty thousand copies were sold within the next six years.

The first curiosity had languished in the course of the long delay, but it was revived in its strongest force when the book itself appeared.  A remarkable effect instantly followed.  Before the Reflections was published the predominant sentiment in England had been one of mixed astonishment and sympathy.  Pitt had expressed this common mood both in the House of Commons and in private.  It was impossible for England not to be amazed at the uprising of a nation whom they had been accustomed to think of as willing slaves, and it was impossible for her, when the scene did not happen to be the American colonies or Ireland, not to profess good wishes for the cause of emancipation all over the world.  Apart from the natural admiration of a free people for a neighbour struggling to be free, England saw no reason to lament a blow to a sovereign and a government who had interfered on the side of her insurgent colonies.  To this easy state of mind Burke’s book put an immediate end.  At once, as contemporaries assure us, it divided the nation into two parties.  On both sides it precipitated opinion.  With a long-resounding blast on his golden trumpet Burke had unfurled a new flag, and half the nation hurried to rally to it—­that half which had scouted his views on America, which had bitterly disliked his plan of Economic Reform, which had mocked his ideas on religious toleration, and which a moment before had hated and reviled him beyond