II

Yet, in the long run, the real weapon which defeated George was the ideas of Edmund Burke; for he gave to the political conflict its real place in philosophy.  There is no immortality save in ideas; and it was Burke who gave a permanent form to the debate in which he was the liberal protagonist.  His career is illustrative at once of the merits and defects of English politics in the eighteenth century.  The son of an Irish Protestant lawyer and a Catholic mother, he served, after learning what Trinity College, Dublin, could offer him, a long apprenticeship to politics in the upper part of Grub Street.  The story that he applied, along with Hume, for Adam Smith’s chair at Glasgow seems apocryphal; though the Dissertation on the Sublime and the Beautiful (1756) shows his singular fitness for the studies that Hutcheson had made the special possession of the Scottish school.  It was in Grub Street that he appears to have attained that amazing amount of varied yet profound knowledge which made him without equal in the House of Commons.  His earliest production was a Vindication of Natural Society (1756), written in the manner of Lord Bolingbroke, and successful enough in its imitative satire not only to deceive its immediate public, but also to become the basis of Godwin’s Political Justice.  After a vain attempt to serve in Ireland with “Single-Speech” Hamilton, he became the private secretary to Lord Rockingham, the leader of the one section of the Whig party to which an honorable record still remained.  That connection secured for him a seat in Parliament at the comparatively late age of thirty-six; and henceforward, until his death in 1797, he was among its leading members.  His intellectual pre-eminence, indeed, seems from the very outset to have been recognized on all hands; though he was still, in the eyes of the system, enough of an outsider to be given, in the short months during which he held office, the minor office of Paymaster-General, without a seat in the Cabinet.  The man of whom all England was the political pupil was denied without discussion a place at the council board.  Yet when Fox is little more than a memory of great lovableness and Pitt a marvellous youth of apt quotations, Burke has endured as the permanent manual of political wisdom without which statesmen are as sailors on an uncharted sea.

For it has been the singular good fortune of Burke not merely to obtain acceptance as the apostle of philosophic conservatism, but to give deep comfort to men of liberal temper.  He is, indeed, a singularly lovable figure.  “His stream of mind is perpetual,” said Johnson; and Goldsmith has told us how he wound his way into a subject like a serpent.  Macaulay thought him the greatest man since Milton, Lord Morley the “greatest master of civil wisdom in our tongue.”  “No English writer,” says Sir Leslie Stephen, “has received or has deserved more splendid panegyrics.”