A History of English Literature

in Parliament to his only son, whose death soon followed to prostrate him;
and the successes of the French plunged him into feverish anxiety. After
again pouring out a flood of passionate eloquence in four letters entitled
'Thoughts on the Prospect of a Regicide Peace' (with France) he died in
1797.
We have already indicated many of the sources of Burke's power as a speaker
and writer, but others remain to be mentioned. Not least important are his
faculties of logical arrangement and lucid statement. He was the first
Englishman to exemplify with supreme skill all the technical devices of
exposition and argument--a very careful ordering of ideas according to a
plan made clear, but not too conspicuous, to the hearer or reader; the use
of summaries, topic sentences, connectives; and all the others. In style he
had made himself an instinctive master of rhythmical balance, with
something, as contrasted with nineteenth century writing, of eighteenth
century formality. Yet he is much more varied, flexible, and fluent than
Johnson or Gibbon, with much greater variety of sentence forms and with far
more color, figurativeness and picturesqueness of phrase. In his most
eloquent and sympathetic passages he is a thorough poet, splendidly
imaginative and dramatic. J. R. Greene in his 'History of England' has well
spoken of 'the characteristics of his oratory--its passionate ardor, its
poetic fancy, its amazing prodigality of resources; the dazzling succession
in which irony, pathos, invective, tenderness, the most brilliant word
pictures, the coolest argument, followed each other.' Fundamental, lastly,
in Burke's power, is his philosophic insight, his faculty of correlating
facts and penetrating below this surface, of viewing events in the light of
their abstract principles, their causes and their inevitable results.
In spite of all this, in the majority of cases Burke was not a successful
speaker. The overwhelming logic and feeling of his speech 'On the Nabob of
Arcot's Debts' produced so little effect at its delivery that the ministers
against whom it was directed did not even think necessary to answer it. One
of Burke's contemporaries has recorded that he left the Parliament house
(crawling under the benches to avoid Burke's notice) in order to escape
hearing one of his speeches which when it was published he read with the
most intense interest. In the latter part of his life Burke was even called
'the dinner-bell of the House' because his rising to speak was a signal for
a general exodus of the other members. The reasons for this seeming paradox
are apparently to be sought in something deeper than the mere prejudice of
Burke's opponents. He was prolix, but, chiefly, he was undignified in
appearance and manner and lacked a good delivery. It was only when the
sympathy or interest of his hearers enabled them to forget these things
that they were swept away by the force of his reason or the contagion of
his wit or his emotion. On such occasions, as in his first speech in the
impeachment of Hastings, he was irresistible.
From what has now been said it must be evident that while Burke's
temperament and mind were truly classical in some of their qualities, as in
his devotion to order and established institutions, and in the clearness of
his thought and style, and while in both spirit and style he manifests a
regard for decorum and formality which connects him with the
pseudo-classicists, nevertheless he shared to at least as great a degree in
those qualities of emotion and enthusiasm which the pseudo-classic writers
generally lacked and which were to distinguish the romantic writers of the
nineteenth century. How the romantic movement had begun, long before Burke
came to maturity, and how it had made its way even in the midst of the
pseudo-classical period, we may now consider.
THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT. The reaction which was bound to accompany the