a

good-natured creature; I know he loves me. But I hope, my dear, you have given orders for dinner. You need make no great preparations, neither; there are but three of us. Something elegant and little will do: a turbot, an ortolan, or "Or what do you think, my dear," interrupts the wife, 5 "of a nice, pretty bit of ox-cheek, piping hot, and dressed with a little of my own sauce?" "The very thing," replies he; " it will eat best with some smart bottled beer; but be sure to let 's have the sauce his grace was so fond of. I hate your immense loads of meat; that is country all over-extreme dis- 10 gusting to those who are in the least acquainted with high life."

66

By this time my curiosity began to abate and my appetite to increase; the company of fools may at first make us smile, but at last never fails of rendering us melancholy. I there- 15 fore pretended to recollect a prior engagement, and, after having shown my respects to the house by giving the old servant a piece of money at the door, I took my leave, Mr. Tibbs assuring me that dinner, if I stayed, would be ready at least in less than two hours.

20

Edmund Burke.

1729 (?)-1797.

ENGLAND AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.

(From Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790.)

DEAR SIR,

You are pleased to call again, and with some earnestness, for my thoughts on the late proceedings in France. I will not give you reason to imagine that I think my sentiments of 5 such value as to wish myself to be solicited about them. They are of too little consequence to be very anxiously either communicated or withheld. It was from attention to you, and to you only, that I hesitated at the time when you first desired to receive them. In the first letter I had the honor to write 10 to you, and which at length I send, I wrote neither for nor from any description of men; nor shall I in this. My errors, if any, are my own. My reputation alone is to answer for them.

You see, sir, by the long letter I have transmitted to you, 15 that, though I do most heartily wish that France may be animated by a spirit of rational liberty, and that I think you bound, in all honest policy, to provide a permanent body in which that spirit may reside and an effectual organ by which it may act, it is my misfortune to entertain great doubts con20 cerning several material points in your late transactions.

You imagined, when you wrote last, that I might possibly be reckoned among the approvers of certain proceedings in France, from the solemn public seal of sanction they have received from two clubs of gentlemen in London, called the 25 Constitutional Society and the Revolution Society.

I certainly have the honor to belong to more clubs than one in which the Constitution of this kingdom and the principles of the glorious Revolution are held in high reverence;

and I reckon myself among the most forward in my zeal for maintaining that Constitution and those principles in their utmost purity and vigor. It is because I do so that I think it necessary for me that there should be no mistake. Those who cultivate the memory of our Revolution, and those who 5 are attached to the Constitution of this kingdom, will take good care how they are involved with persons, who under the pretext of zeal towards the Revolution and Constitution, too frequently wander from their true principles and are ready on every occasion to depart from the firm but cautious and 10 deliberate spirit which produced the one and which presides in the other. Before I proceed to answer the more material particulars in your letter, I shall beg leave to give you such information as I have been able to obtain of the two clubs which have thought proper, as bodies, to interfere in the 15 concerns of France, first assuring you that I am not and that I have never been a member of either of those societies.

The first, calling itself the Constitutional Society, or Society for Constitutional Information, or by some such title, is, I believe, of seven or eight years' standing. The institution 20 of this society appears to be of a charitable, and so far of a laudable, nature: it was intended for the circulation, at the expense of the members, of many books which few others would be at the expense of buying, and which might lie on the hands of the booksellers, to the great loss of an useful body 25 of men. Whether the books so charitably circulated were ever as charitably read is more than I know. Possibly several of them have been exported to France, and, like goods not in request here, may with you have found a market. I have heard much talk of the lights to be drawn from books that 30 are sent from hence. What improvements they have had in their passage (as it is said some liquors are meliorated by crossing the sea) I cannot tell: but I never heard a man of common judgment or the least degree of information speak a word in praise of the greater part of the publications cir-35 culated by that society; nor have their proceedings been accounted, except by some of themselves, as of any serious consequence,

Your National Assembly seems to entertain much the same opinion that I do of this poor charitable club. As a nation you reserved the whole stock of your eloquent acknowledgments for the Revolution Society, when their fellows in the Consti5 tutional were in equity entitled to some share. Since you have selected the Revolution Society as the great object of your national thanks and praises, you will think me excusable in making its late conduct the subject of my observations. The National Assembly of France has given importance to 10 these gentlemen by adopting them; and they return the favor by acting as a committee in England for extending the principles of the National Assembly. Henceforward we must consider them as a kind of privileged persons, as no inconsiderable members in the diplomatic body. This is one among 15 the revolutions which have given splendor to obscurity, and distinction to undiscerned merit. Until very lately I do not recollect to have heard of this club. I am quite sure that it never occupied a moment of my thoughts, nor, I believe, those of any person out of their own set. I find, upon inquiry, that 20 on the anniversary of the Revolution in 1688 a club of dissenters, but of what denomination I know not, have long had the custom of hearing a sermon in one of their churches, and that afterwards they spent the day cheerfully, as other clubs do, at the tavern. But I never heard that any public 25 measure or political system, much less that the merits of the constitution of any foreign nation, had been the subject of a formal proceeding at their festivals, until, to my inexpressible surprise, I found them in a sort of public capacity, by a congratulatory address, giving an authoritative sanction 30 to the proceedings of the National Assembly in France.

In the ancient principles and conduct of the club, so far at least as they were declared, I see nothing to which I could take exception. I think it very probable that, for some purpose, new members may have entered among them; and that 35 some truly Christian politicians, who love to dispense benefits but are careful to conceal the hand which distributes the dole, may have made them the instruments of their pious designs. Whatever I may have reason to suspect concerning private

management, I shall speak of nothing as of a certainty but what is public.

For one I should be sorry to be thought, directly or indirectly, concerned in their proceedings. I certainly take my full share, along with the rest of the world, in my in-5 dividual and private capacity, in speculating on what has been done or is doing on the public stage, in any place ancient or modern, in the republic of Rome or the republic of Paris; but, having no general apostolical mission, being a citizen of a particular state, and being bound up, in a con- 10 siderable degree, by its public will, I should think it at least improper and irregular for me to open a formal public correspondence with the actual government of a foreign nation, without the express authority of the government under which I live.

15

I should be still more unwilling to enter into that correspondence under anything like an equivocal description, which to many, unacquainted with our usages, might make the address in which I joined appear as the act of persons in some sort of corporate capacity, acknowledged by the laws of this king-20 dom and authorized to speak the sense of some part of it. On account of the ambiguity and uncertainty of unauthorized general descriptions, and of the deceit which may be practised under them, and not from mere formality, the House of Commons would reject the most sneaking petition for the 25 most trifling object, under that mode of signature to which you have thrown open the folding-doors of your presence chamber and have ushered into your National Assembly, with as much ceremony and parade and with as great a bustle of applause as if you had been visited by the whole representa-30 tive majesty of the whole English nation. If what this society has thought proper to send forth had been a piece of argument, it would have signified little whose argument it was. It would be neither the more nor the less convincing on account of the party it came from. But this is only a 35 vote and resolution. It stands solely on authority; and in this case it is the mere authority of individuals, few of whom appear. Their signatures ought, in my opinion, to have been