Whether Diogenes the Cynic was a true philosopher cannot easily be determined.  He has written nothing.  But the sayings of his which are handed down by others are lively, and may be easily and aptly applied on many occasions by those whose wit is not so perfect as their memory.  This Diogenes (as every one will recollect) was citizen of a little bleak town situated on the coast of the Euxine, and exposed to all the buffets of that inhospitable sea.  He lived at a great distance from those weather-beaten walls, in ease and indolence, and in the midst of literary leisure, when he was informed that his townsmen had condemned him to be banished from Sinope; he answered coolly, “And I condemn them to live in Sinope.”

The gentlemen of the party in which Mr. Burke has always acted, in passing upon him the sentence of retirement,[6] have done nothing more than to confirm the sentence which he had long before passed upon himself.  When that retreat was choice, which the tribunal of his peers inflict as punishment, it is plain he does not think their sentence intolerably severe.  Whether they, who are to continue in the Sinope which shortly he is to leave, will spend the long years, which I hope remain to them, in a manner more to their satisfaction than he shall slide down, in silence and obscurity, the slope of his declining days, is best known to Him who measures out years, and days, and fortunes.

The quality of the sentence does not, however, decide on the justice of it.  Angry friendship is sometimes as bad as calm enmity.  For this reason the cold neutrality of abstract justice is, to a good and clear cause, a more desirable thing than an affection liable to be any way disturbed.  When the trial is by friends, if the decision should happen to be favorable, the honor of the acquittal is lessened; if adverse, the condemnation is exceedingly embittered.  It is aggravated by coming from lips professing friendship, and pronouncing judgment with sorrow and reluctance.  Taking in the whole view of life, it is more safe to live under the jurisdiction of severe, but steady reason, than under the empire of indulgent, but capricious passion.  It is certainly well for Mr. Burke that there are impartial men in the world.  To them I address myself, pending the appeal which on his part is made from the living to the dead, from the modern Whigs to the ancient.

The gentlemen, who, in the name of the party, have passed sentence on Mr. Burke’s book, in the light of literary criticism, are judges above all challenge.  He did not, indeed, flatter himself that as a writer he could claim the approbation of men whose talents, in his judgment and in the public judgment, approach to prodigies, if ever such persons should be disposed to estimate the merit of a composition upon the standard of their own ability.