EDMUND BURKE.

After the Portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds.

URKE never ceased to look like a schoolboy. None of his pictures suggest his transcendent genius, but in the forehead and eyes, this by Reynolds has something of the qualities which made him the greatest orator of modern times.

of his hearers; some of the ladies "swooned away"; and Hastings himself, though he had protested his innocence, was utterly overwhelmed. "For half an hour," he said afterwards, in describing the scene, "I looked on the orator in a reverie of wonder, and actually thought myself the most culpable man on earth.”

That the ability to produce this profound impression on others was not merely intellectual but constitutional with Burke, we know from his defense of himself when his 'Reflections on the French Revolution' alienated many who had been his friends,-among them Philip Francis, who, seeing the proof sheets of the work, tried to dissuade Burke from publishing it.

Speaking of Marie Antoinette, Burke had written the memorable comparison: "And surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like the morning star, full of life and splendor and joy."

When Francis called this a piece of foppery, asking Burke if Marie Antoinette were not a jade, a mere Messalina, Burke replied indignantly: "I know nothing of your Messalinas. Am I obliged to prove judicially the virtues of those I see suffering every kind of wrong?

I tell you again that the recollection of the manner in which I saw the Queen of France in 1774 and the contrast between that brilliancy, splendor, and beauty, with the prostrate homage of a nation to her, and the abominable scene of 1789, which I was describing, did draw tears from me and wetted the paper. Those tears came again into my eyes almost as often as I looked at the description. They may again. You do not believe this fact nor that these are my real feelings, but that the whole is affected or, as you express it, 'downright foppery.' My friend, I tell you it is truth and that it is true and will be true when you and I are no more, and will exist as long as men with their natural feelings shall exist."

Undoubtedly it was this deep emotional earnestness which gave Burke's magnificent intellect its effectiveness. We can see what this effectiveness means and how completely it depends on his sympathies when we undertake to read those speeches where, without being "keyed up" to his highest nervous possibilities, he is using his intellect merely. Such passages are frequent in his speeches; often when he is reasoning well and consecutively, they are prosy; and sometimes when he is relaxed after the strain of intellectual and emotional exaltation, they are dull. Reading them and searching for the secret of the power which has gone out from them and left them thus lifeless, we see that it is the same which controlled Burke when he wetted his paper with tears for Marie Antoinette. No man who attains the sublime as often as he did can keep his

position of costly eminence, and in his reactions he must pay the price for it Burke paid in acquiring habits through which he won the ability to make the most wonderful speeches ever made in England, and joined with it a more extraordinary faculty for emptying benches under the sound of his voice than any other great orator had ever demonstrated. This seems largely due to his very greatness. His own intellectual strength made him forget the intellectual weaknesses of others. Standing unwearied before people of ordinary minds, pouring out not one oration, a perfect whole, but one after another, each dealing with some thought which, for the time, mastered him, each with its own perfection of art, its own rapid development of thought, he could not carry his audience with him, because he alone had the intellectual strength to keep the thread of the argument so as to be able to join the splendid parts into an intelligible and concordant whole. His speeches at the trial of Hastings are as Homeric in quantity as in quality. Few will even attempt to keep the connection from their beginning to the end. But no one could be so obtuse as to miss the point of the fiery periods in which his immortal indignation blazed out against Hastings and conquest as a commercial method, when he came to describe the atrocities of Debi Sing.

Burke was born in Dublin, January 12th, 1729 N. S.,- the second of the fifteen children of an Irish attorney, most of whom were delicate and died young. Burke himself was never strong, and the great results he achieved were in spite of physical weakness. His education which received its greatest impetus at Trinity College, Dublin, never ceased during his lifetime. He seems to have had one of those peculiar minds which retain in mature life the childish ability to learn easily, the puerile habit, so soon lost and with most never regained, of welcoming information regardless of the quarter it comes from.

Burke's biography is the history of the most important period in modern politics. It would be presumption to attempt it here. It is enough to add that when he died, July 9th, 1797, he left a world which his genius and his sympathy for the suffering he saw everywhere around him had made more fit for his successor, when he comes to pay with his own emotion the price of the sympathy every great mind feels as the secret of its ability to champion the weak and to win the battles of helplessness against power. But his successor has not yet come nor do those who would welcome him most, expect him soon. W. V. B.

As the most nearly adequate introduction possible for Burke's unapproachable oration of February 18th and 19th, 1788, opening the charge of bribery against Hastings, Macaulay's description of the trial is subjoined.