produce or to maintain the marvel of a coherent society.  We are reminded of a professor who, in the fantastic days of geology, explained the Pyramids of Egypt to be the remains of a volcanic eruption, which had forced its way upwards by a slow and stately motion; the hieroglyphs were crystalline formations; and the shaft of the great Pyramid was the air-hole of a volcano.  De Maistre preferred a similar explanation of the monstrous structures of modern society.  The hand of man could never have reared, and could never uphold them.  If we cannot say that Burke laboured in constant travail with the same perplexity, it is at least true that he was keenly alive to it, and that one of the reasons why he dreaded to see a finger laid upon a single stone of a single political edifice, was his consciousness that he saw no answer to the perpetual enigma how any of these edifices had ever been built, and how the passion, violence, and waywardness of the natural man had ever been persuaded to bow their necks to the strong yoke of a common social discipline.  Never was mysticism more unseasonable; never was an hour when men needed more carefully to remember Burke’s own wise practical precept, when he was talking about the British rule in India, that we must throw a sacred veil over the beginnings of government.  Many woes might perhaps have been saved to Europe, if Burke had applied this maxim to the government of the new France.

Much has always been said about the inconsistency between Burke’s enmity to the Revolution and his enmity to Lord North in one set of circumstances, and to Warren Hastings in another.  The pamphleteers of the day made selections from the speeches and tracts of his happier time, and the seeming contrast had its effect.  More candid opponents admitted then, as all competent persons admit now, that the inconsistency was merely verbal and superficial.  Watson, the Bishop of Llandaff, was only one of many who observed very early that this was the unmistakable temper of Burke’s mind.  “I admired, as everybody did,” he said, “the talents, but not the principles of Mr. Burke; his opposition to the Clerical Petition [for relaxation of subscription, 1772], first excited my suspicion of his being a High Churchman in religion, and a Tory, perhaps an aristocratic Tory, in the state.”  Burke had indeed never been anything else than a conservative.  He was like Falkland, who had bitterly assailed Strafford and Finch on the same principles on which, after the outbreak of the civil war, he consented to be secretary of state to King Charles.  Coleridge is borne out by a hundred passages, when he says that in Burke’s writings at the beginning of the American Revolution and in those at the beginning of the French Revolution, the principles are the same and the deductions are the same; the practical inferences are almost opposite in the one case from those drawn in the other, yet in both equally legitimate.  It would be better to say that they would have been equally legitimate,