The calculation of profit in all such wars is false.  On balancing the account of such wars, ten thousand hogsheads of sugar are purchased at ten thousand times their price—­the blood of man should never be shed but to redeem the blood of man.  It is well shed for our family, for our friends, for our God, for our country, for our kind.  The rest is vanity; the rest is crime.

Magnificent, truly!  But your ear has doubtless detected the blank verse—­three iambic lines:—­

     Are purchased at ten thousand times their price... 
     Be shed but to redeem the blood of man... 
     The rest is vanity; the rest is crime.

Again Burke catches your eye by rhetorical inversions:—­

     But too often different is rational conjecture from melancholy fact,

     Well is it known that ambition can creep as well as soar,

by repetitions:—­

Never, no never, did Nature say one thing and Wisdom say another ...  Algiers is not near; Algiers is not powerful; Algiers is not our neighbour; Algiers is not infectious.  Algiers, whatever it may be, is an old creation; and we have good data to calculate all the mischief to be apprehended from it.  When I find Algiers transferred to Calais, I will tell you what I think of that point—­

by quick staccato utterances, such as:—­

     And is this example nothing?  It is everything.  Example is the school
     of mankind, and they will learn at no other—­

or

     Our dignity?  That is gone.  I shall say no more about it.  Light lie
     the earth on the ashes of English pride!

I say that the eye or ear, caught by such tropes, must (if it be critical) recognise them at once as rhetoric, as the spoken word masquerading under guise of the written.  Burke may pretend to be seated, penning a letter to a worthy man who will read it in his slippers:  but actually Burke is up and pacing his library at Beaconsfield, now striding from fire-place to window with hands clasped under his coat tails, anon pausing to fling out an arm with some familiar accustomed gesture in a House of Commons that knows him no more, towards a Front Bench peopled by shades.  In fine the pretence is Cicero writing to Atticus, but the style is Cicero denouncing Catiline.

As such it is not for your imitation.  Burke happened to be a genius, with a swoop and range of mind, as of language to interpret it, with a gift to enchant, a power to strike and astound, which together make him, to my thinking, the man in our literature most nearly comparable with Shakespeare.  Others may be more to your taste; you may love others better:  but no other two leave you so hopeless of discovering how it is done.  Yet not for this reason only would I warn you against imitating either.  For like all great artists they accepted their conditions and wrought for them, and those conditions have changed.  When Jacques wished to recite to an Elizabethan audience that