Burke (Volume 2); Reflections on the Revolution in France. 1881 (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: its awakenment. We may trace a similar vein of feeling, stimulated by the same revolutionary agencies, though in a later stage, in the poems of the philosophical and ' well-languaged' Daniel. The faculty of looking on an institution on many sides enabled Daniel to point out 'How pow'rs are thought to wrong, that wrongs debar." Daniel had trained himself in an instructive school, in the preparation and composition of his History of the Civil Wars. Like Burke, he was of opinion that political wisdom was not to be obtained a priori. The statesman must study ' The sure records of books, in which we find The tenure of our state, how it was held By all our ancestors, and in what kind We hold the same, and likewise how in th" end This frail possession of felicity Shall to our late posterity descend By the same patent of like destiny. In them we find that nothing can accrue To man, and his condition, that is new '.' It is an apt illustration of Burke's vehement contention that Englishmen will never consent to abandon the sense of national continuity. The English nation is emphatically an old nation: it proceeds on the assumption that there is nothing new under the sun. It is always disposed to criticise severely any one who labours, as Warburton says, under that epidemic distemper of idle men, the idea of instructing and informing, the world. The heart of men, and the greater heart of associated bodies of men, has been radically the same in all ages. In the laws of life we cannot hope for much additional illumination: new lights in general turn out to be old illusions. There is no unexplored terra australis, whether of morality or political science. The great principles of government and the ideas of liberty 'were understood long before we were born, altogether as well as th...