Englishmen, but Frenchmen like Diderot, and Germans like Lichtenberg, into amazement and ecstasy, are exactly those gifts which literary description can do least to reproduce.  Burke was one of his strongest admirers, and there was no more zealous attendant at the closing series of performances in which the great monarch of the stage abdicated his throne.  In the last pages that he wrote, Burke refers to his ever dear friend Garrick, dead nearly twenty years before, as the first of actors because he was the acutest observer of nature that he had ever known.  Then among men who pass for being more serious than players, Robertson was often in London society, and he attracted Burke by his largeness and breadth.  He sent a copy of his History of America, and Burke thanked him with many stately compliments for having employed philosophy to judge of manners, and from manners having drawn new resources of philosophy.  Gibbon was there, but the bystanders felt what was too crudely expressed by Mackintosh, that Gibbon might have been taken from a corner of Burke’s mind without ever being missed.  Though Burke and Gibbon constantly met, it is not likely that, until the Revolution, there was much intimacy between them, in spite of the respect which each of them might well have had for the vast knowledge of the other.  When the Decline and Fall was published, Burke read it as everybody else did; but he told Reynolds that he disliked the style, as very affected, mere frippery and tinsel.  Sir Joshua himself was neither a man of letters nor a keen politician; but he was full of literary ideas and interests, and he was among Burke’s warmest and most constant friends, following him with an admiration and reverence that even Johnson sometimes thought excessive.  The reader of Reynolds’s famous Discourses will probably share the wonder of his contemporaries, that a man whose time was so absorbed in the practice of his art, should have proved himself so excellent a master in the expression of some of its principles.  Burke was commonly credited with a large share in their composition, but the evidence goes no further than that Reynolds used to talk them over with him.  The friendship between the pair was full and unalloyed.  What Burke admired in the great artist was his sense and his morals, no less than his genius; and to a man of his fervid and excitable temper there was the most attractive of all charms in Sir Joshua’s placidity, gentleness, evenness, and the habit, as one of his friends described it, of being the same all the year round.  When Reynolds died in 1792, he appointed Burke one of his executors, and left him a legacy of two thousand pounds, besides cancelling a bond of the same amount.