all men living for his fierce tenacity in the impeachment of Warren Hastings.  The king said to everybody who came near him that the book was a good book, a very good book, and every gentleman ought to read it.  The universities began to think of offering the scarlet gown of their most honourable degree to the assailant of Price and the Dissenters.  The great army of the indolent good, the people who lead excellent lives and never use their reason, took violent alarm.  The timorous, the weak-minded, the bigoted, were suddenly awakened to a sense of what they owed to themselves.  Burke gave them the key which enabled them to interpret the Revolution in harmony with their usual ideas and their temperament.

Reaction quickly rose to a high pitch.  One preacher in a parish church in the neighbourhood of London celebrated the anniversary of the restoration of King Charles II. by a sermon, in which the pains of eternal damnation were confidently promised to political disaffection.  Romilly, mentioning to a friend that the Reflections had got into a fourteenth edition, wondered whether Burke was not rather ashamed of his success.  It is when we come to the rank and file of reaction, that we find it hard to forgive the man of genius who made himself the organ of their selfishness, their timidity, and their blindness.  We know, alas, that the parts of his writings on French affairs to which they would fly, were not likely to be the parts which calm men now read with sympathy, but the scoldings, the screamings, the unworthy vituperation with which, especially in the latest of them, he attacked everybody who took part in the Revolution, from Condorcet and Lafayette down to Marat and Couthon.  It was the feet of clay that they adored in their image, and not the head of fine gold and the breasts and the arms of silver.

On the continent of Europe the excitement was as great among the ruling classes as it was at home.  Mirabeau, who had made Burke’s acquaintance some years before in England, and even been his guest at Beaconsfield, now made the Reflections the text of more than one tremendous philippic.  Louis XVI. is said to have translated the book into French with his own hand.  Catherine of Russia, Voltaire’s adored Semiramis of the North, the benefactress of Diderot, the ready helper of the philosophic party, pressed her congratulations on the great pontiff of the old order, who now thundered anathema against the philosophers and all their works.

It is important to remember the stage which the Revolution had reached, when Burke was composing his attack upon it.  The year 1790 was precisely the time when the hopes of the best men in France shone most brightly, and seemed most reasonable.  There had been disorders, and Paris still had ferocity in her mien.  But Robespierre was an obscure figure on the back benches of the Assembly.  Nobody had ever heard of Danton.  The name of Republic had never been so much as whispered.