To 1796 and 1797 belong the letters On a Regicide Peace. They were three in number, the third a fragment; but a fourth, which was really the first, was found among Burke's papers, and published in 1812. There can be no doubt that in these celebrated compositions, the imaginative fervour of which has dazzled many critics, there are signs enough of the decay of the author's physical powers. To many it is merely distressing to see this Chrysostom of the English language descending to scurrilities unworthy of a fishwife, and relinquishing all remnants of judgment, decorum, reason, and good sense in ravings about "sanguinary cannibals" and the tyrannies of a regicide jacobinism. Yet, to those who can stifle their sentiments of indignation and pity,-indignation at an injustice so extreme, and pity at the decay of such noble qualities of the heart, to read the Regicide Peace is one of the most fascinating of literary exercises. And there are more dignified phases, even in his anger :

6

"This business was not ended, because our dignity was wounded, or because our patience was worn out with contumely and scorn. We had not disgorged one particle of the nauseous dose with which we were so liberally crammed by the mountebanks of Paris, in order to drug and diet us into perfect tameness. No; we waited, till the morbid strength of our boulimia for their physic had exhausted the well-stored dispensary of their empiricism. It is impossible to guess at the term to which our forbearance would have extended. The Regicides were more fatigued with giving blows than the callous cheek of British Diplomacy was hurt in receiving them. They had no way left for getting rid of this mendicant perseverance but by sending for the Beadle, and forcibly driving our Embassy of shreds and patches,' with all its mumping cant, from the inhospitable door of Cannibal Castle. I think we might have found, before the rude hand of insolent office was on our shoulder, and the staff of usurped authority brandished over our heads, that contempt of the suppliant is not the best forwarder of a suit ; that national disgrace is not the high road to security, much less to power and greatness. Patience, indeed, strongly indicates the love of peace. But mere love does not always lead to enjoyment. It is the power of winning that palm that insures our wearing it. Virtues have their place, and out of their place they hardly deserve the name. They pass into the neighbouring vice. The patience of fortitude and the endurance of pusillanimity are things very different, as in their principle, so in their effects.”

XI

BURKE

373

The decline in Burke's case was moral-it was not intellectual, and to the very last he grew in power as an artificer of sonorous prose. The second of the letters on a Regicide Peace is much shorter than the others, and more decent in its effusion, and all its author's old acuteness will be marked in the study of the character of Louis XVI. Inveighing to the last against "that mother of all evil, the French Revolution," Burke passed away at Beaconsfield, not old, but worn out, on the 9th of July 1797. The total number of his separate publications is nearly sixty.

It is a matter of regret to the purely literary student that, as a writer, Burke is displayed at his best only in those works in which the sanity and probity which so eminently distinguished his character are clouded by his rabid prejudice against France. Hence it is that those who read only his masterpieces must carry away so vague and so distorted an idea of what it was in which the greatness of Burke consisted. In his youth Johnson, with his fine and generous discrimination, had said, "We who know Mr. Burke know that he will be one of the first men in the country." As his career developed, there is no doubt that he became the first man in the country, and it was when his powers as a statesman and an orator were at their zenith, and when his partial retirement gave him leisure for literary composition, that this strange madness of anger seized and convulsed him. We must, however, beware of exaggerating its mark on his work. It is true that it pervades his leading later writings, but much came from his pen, even when that excruciating robe of Nessus was wrapt around his spirit, that was calm and clear and noble.

study of Dryden's The resemblance

We learn that Burke was devoted to the prose, and resolutely endeavoured to imitate it. cannot be said to be very striking, except in the elaborate art of balancing and adjusting the parts of the sentence, so as to produce upon the ear the exact effect required. But in doing this, though Burke carried to a greater perfection than any one else except Gibbon what Dryden had been the first to invent, yet it cannot be said that Burke's rhetoric, which is always golden, and some

times jewelled and enamelled as well, has much superficial likeness to the strong uncoloured prose of Dryden. In the class of declamatory writers Burke stands easily first; his tracts and orations do not speak reflectively, with the still small voice which the cloistered student loves, but in resonant accents, so that even in the study their effect is completed to the imagination by cries. of defiance or rounds of applause from an unseen audience. It may be questioned whether books conceived and executed in this spirit can ever be held among the most precious possessions of the true lover of pure literature. But as illustrations of a wonderful public career, and as specimens of oratory at its loftiest pinnacle of success, they outshine all rivalry; and although it is probable that Burke, as a writer, has enjoyed his fullest panegyrics in the immediate past, the future can never be entirely disloyal to a publicist so chivalrous, so fervid, and so logical.

CHAPTER XII

CONCLUSION

WHEN we approach the close of the seventeenth century in English literature, we begin to be confronted by a practical difficulty. A door must be open or shut, and the chamber of our studies will hold but a limited number of forms or ideas at a single time. What is to be excluded, and what retained, becomes a burning question. In the early stages of civilisation, everything written takes its place as literature, but with the widening of the habit of penmanship there springs up an ever-increasing mass of script which is by no means to be treated as literary art. Even in the Elizabethan age there were two branches of written and published work which mainly passed outside the conception of literature, namely, theology and law. But still, throughout the seventeenth century, poetry remained the normal class of expression, while prose retained its conscious character as something which had to compete with poetry and share its graces. It is at the point where these graces of language are entirely subordinated (in the discussion of practical subjects) to exact statement of fact, that there arises a class of books which cannot be treated as literature, in spite of their importance as contributions to thought and knowledge. During the last quarter of the seventeenth century a spirited effort was made to chronicle the new observations of science in the best literary form of the age, but it could not be sustained. The reader has but to compare the Acetaria

of Evelyn and the Anti-Elixir of Boyle with any authoritative modern treatise on the cookery of cucumbers or the composition of alloys, to see how very much the absence of all literary elegance is of advantage in obtaining exact information upon practical subjects. Accordingly, the graces were tacitly and gradually excluded from all treatment of purely utilitarian problems and exact observations, and this exclusion divided the vast body of what was written into literature and non-literary matter.

We must, therefore, prepare ourselves, on approaching the year 1700, to find the history of English literature no longer identical with the history of English thought. There has recently been developed a tendency to go in the opposite direction, and instead of narrowing the field of study to enlarge it. It has been proposed to combine with an examination of English literature a survey of contemporary history and politics, science and learning, theology and speculation. Such a curriculum is fit only for an archangel, dowered with eyes "that run thro' all the heavens," and with a memory and a comprehension beyond a mortal span. No doubt a direct benefit in the exact study of any one province of knowledge is gained by a correct superficial acquaintance with all that is contiguous to it; but common sense and experience unite to show that with the increase of facts, and the minute subdivision of science, the field of any one particular study, to remain exact, must be rigidly narrowed. It is, therefore, I think, useful for the student of English literature, on reaching the eighteenth century, to make up his mind to the acceptance of a formula less extended than he has hitherto brought with him down from the Renaissance. He will so contract his field of study as to embrace only what may be contained within the denomination of belles-lettres in its widest sense, to the exclusion of whatever is purely technical or occasional.

It is difficult, no doubt, in practice, to draw any hard and fast line between what is and is not literature in this sense. In a rough kind of way we may see that while The Public Spirit of the Whigs and the Letter to a Noble Lord are inside, the Behaviour