Burke’s style is noble, earnest, deep-flowing, because his sentiment was lofty and fervid, and went with sincerity and ardent disciplined travail of judgment.  Fox told Francis Horner that Dryden’s prose was Burke’s great favourite, and that Burke imitated him more than any one else.  We may well believe that he was attracted by Dryden’s ease, his copiousness, his gaiety, his manliness of style, but there can hardly have been any conscious attempt at imitation.  Their topics were too different.  Burke had the style of his subjects, the amplitude, the weightiness, the laboriousness, the sense, the high flight, the grandeur, proper to a man dealing with imperial themes, the freedom of nations, the justice of rulers, the fortunes of great societies, the sacredness of law.  Burke will always be read with delight and edification, because in the midst of discussions on the local and the accidental, he scatters apophthegms that take us into the regions of lasting wisdom.  In the midst of the torrent of his most strenuous and passionate deliverances, he suddenly rises aloof from his immediate subject, and in all tranquillity reminds us of some permanent relation of things, some enduring truth of human life or society.  We do not hear the organ tones of Milton, for faith and freedom had other notes in the seventeenth century.  There is none of the complacent and wise-browed sagacity of Bacon, for Burke’s were days of eager personal strife and party fire and civil division.  We are not exhilarated by the cheerfulness, the polish, the fine manners of Bolingbroke, for Burke had an anxious conscience, and was earnest and intent that the good should triumph.  And yet Burke is among the greatest of those who have wrought marvels in the prose of our English tongue.

The influence of Burke on the publicists of the generation after the Revolution was much less considerable than might have been expected.  In Germany, where there has been so much excellent writing about Staatswissenschaft, with such poverty and darkness in the wisdom of practical politics, there is a long list of writers who have drawn their inspiration from Burke.  In France, publicists of the sentimental school, like Chateaubriand, and the politico-ecclesiastical school, like De Maistre, fashioned a track of their own.  In England Burke made a deep mark on contemporary opinion during the last years of his life, and then his influence underwent a certain eclipse.  The official Whigs considered him a renegade and a heresiarch, who had committed the deadly sin of breaking up the party; and they never mentioned his name without bitterness.  To men like Godwin, the author of Political Justice, Burke was as antichrist.  Bentham and James Mill thought of him as a declaimer who lived upon applause, and who, as one of them says, was for protecting everything old, not because it was good but because it existed.  In one quarter only did he exert a profound influence.  His maxim that men might employ their sagacity in