Edmund Burke was born in 1730, and therefore was twenty-one years
younger than Dr. Johnson, and he survived him thirteen years. He was
a great prose writer, and although some of his speeches in Parliament
that have come down to us possess every quality of solid argument and
lofty eloquence, there must have been something lacking in his delivery
and voice, for he so frequently failed to rivet the attention of the
House, and so often addressed a steadily dwindling audience, that the
wits christened him "the dinner bell."
All men of letters, however, acknowledge Burke as a true master of a
very great style.
We see in him the first signs of a breaking away from the universal
restraint of the older writers, and of the surging up of expressed
emotion.
His splendid tribute to Marie Antoinette and his panegyric of the lost
age of chivalry are familiar to all students of English prose.
"It is now (1791) sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the Queen
of France, then the Dauphiness, at Versailles; 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 just began to move in
glittering like the morning star, full of life, and splendour, and
joy. Oh! what a revolution! and what a heart must I have, to
contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little
did I dream when she added titles of veneration to those of
enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be
obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in
that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to see
such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a
nation of men of honour and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand
swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look
that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry has gone.
That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and
the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever.
"Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to sex
and rank, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that
subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude
itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of
life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment
and heroic enterprise is gone!
"It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of
honour, which felt a stain like a wound; which inspired courage
while it mitigated ferocity; which ennobled whatever it touched,
and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its
grossness."
This is a splendid and world-famous passage well worth committing to
memory.
Your loving old
G.P.
13