Coming directly to an estimate of Burke from the purely literary point of view, it must be borne in mind that the greater part of his writings was prepared for an audience.  Like Macaulay, his prevailing style suggests the speaker, and his methods throughout are suited to declamation and oratory.  He lacks the ease and delicacy that we are accustomed to look for in the best prose writers, and occasionally one feels the justice of Johnson’s stricture, that “he sometimes talked partly from ostentation”, or of Hazlitt’s criticism that he seemed to be “perpetually calling the speaker out to dance a minuet with him before he begins.”

There may be passages here and there that warrant such censure.  Burke is certainly ornate, and at times he is extremely self-conscious, but the dominant quality of his style, and the one which forever contradicts the idea of mere showiness, is passion.  In his method of approaching a subject, he may be, and perhaps is, rather tedious, but when once he has come to the matter really in hand, he is no longer the rhetorician, dealing in fine phrases, but the great seer, clothing his thoughts in words suitable and becoming.  The most magnificent passages in his writings—­the Conciliation is rich in them—­owe their charm and effectiveness to this emotional capacity.  They were evidently written in moments of absolute abandonment to feeling—­in moments when he was absorbed in the contemplation of some great truth, made luminous by his own unrivalled powers.

Closely allied to this intensity of passion, is a splendid imaginative quality.  Few writers of English prose have such command of figurative expression.  It must be said, however, that Burke was not entirely free from the faults which generally accompany an excessive use of figures.  Like other great masters of a decorative style, he frequently becomes pompous and grandiloquent.  His thought, too, is obscured, where we would expect great clearness of statement, accompanied by a dignified simplicity; and occasionally we feel that he forgets his subject in an anxious effort to make an impression.  Though there are passages in his writings that justify such observations, they are few in number, when compared with those which are really masterpieces of their kind.

Some great crisis, or threatening state of affairs, seems to furnish the necessary condition for the exercise of a great mind, and Burke is never so effective as when thoroughly aroused.  His imagination needed the chastening which only a great moment or critical situation could give.  Two of his greatest speeches—­Conciliation, and Impeachment of Warren Hastings—­were delivered under the restraining effect of such circumstances, and in each the figurative expression is subdued and not less beautiful in itself than, appropriate for the occasion.