the rest, he has credit in every candid mind. He ought not to apprehend, that his raising fences about popular privileges this day, will infer that he ought, on the next, to concur with those who would pull down the throne: because on the next he defends the throne, it ought not to be supposed that he has abandoned the rights of the people.

A man who, among various objects of his equal regard, is secure of some, and full of anxiety for the fate of others, is apt to go to much greater lengths in his preference of the objects of his immediate solicitude than Mr. Burke has ever done. A man so circumstanced often seems to undervalue, to vilify, almost to reprobate and disown those that are out of danger. This is the voice of nature and truth, and not of inconsistency and false pretence. The danger of any thing very dear to us removes, for the moment, every other affection from the mind. When Priam had his whole thoughts employed on the body of his Hector, he repels with indignation, and drives from him

with a thousand reproaches, his surviving sons, who with an officious piety crowded about him to offer their assistance. A good critic (there is no better than Mr. Fox) would say, that this is a master-stroke, and marks a deep understanding of nature in the father of poetry. He would despise a Zoilus, who would conclude from this passage that Homer meant to represent this man of affliction as hating or being indifferent and cold in his affections to the poor reliques of his house, or that he preferred a dead carcase to his living children.'

This pamphlet was chiefly written in the month of July, while Burke and his family were at Margate. During that period, he scemed totally unemployed; his mornings were mostly spent in walking about the fields, and especially towards the North Foreland, whence he used to take great pleasure in viewing the ships; the evenings, in easy and familiar intercourse with many of the Margate visitors, in the libraries, or at the rooms. He there, as indeed, on every

occasion, attended church regularly. He was devoutly attentive to the prayers, and also to the sermons, if the preachers kept within their sphere of moral and religious instruction; but when they departed from their official business, he could not always refrain from testifying his disapprobation. At this time there happened to be at Margate a popular preacher from the vicinity of London. That gentleman, like the Grecian. declaimer who undertook to lecture before Hannibal on the art of war, delivered, in the presence of Burke, in Margate church, a long political sermon. Burke manifested an impatience which was observed by the whole congregation. He several times stood up, and took his hat, as if he expected that the, discourse was about to end, and afterwards sat down with visible marks of disappointment and dissatisfaction. This probably arose from his dislike to political sermons, as that one was not worse than discourses in general are by persons of common abilities, who speak flippantly on subjects beyond their reach, His disapprobation of

such sermons he strongly testified in the following passage in his REFLEXIONS:

• POLITICS AND THE PULPIT are terms that have little agreement. No sound ought to be heard in the church but the healing voice of Christian charity. The cause of liberty and civil government gains as little as that of religion by this confusion of duties. Those who quit their proper cha racter, to assume what does not belong to them, are, for the greater part, ignorant both of the character they leave, and of the character they assume. Wholly unacquainted' with the world in which they are so fond of meddling, and inexperienced in all its af-" fairs, on which they pronounce with so much confidence, they have nothing of politics but the passions they excite. Surely' the church is a' place where one day's TRUCE ought to be allowed to the dissensions and animosities of mankind.

Although the Appeal' very ably contrasted the doctrines of the old Whigs with those of Paine and other writers, supported

and disseminated by the new; and the work was distinguished for closeness of reasoning and regularity of method, as well as for energy and depth of observation; it was not equally read with his preceding perform ances on the subject.

At the time that Burke was adding a strong redoubt to the fortress which he had raised, the fabric underwent an attack so vigorous and so ably conducted as must have overthrown it, had not the foundation been laid very deep, and the superstructure consisted of the most massy and well disposed materials. In summer, 1791, Mackintosh's VINDICIE GALLICE was published. Other writers, in attacking Burke's REFLEXIONS, had mixed subjects foreign to that work; had charged the author with a dereliction of former opinions, and some of them had imputed either unworthy or frivolous motives. Mr. Mackintosh, rejecting every irrelative question, proceeds to the main object. Having studied Burke's writings and conduct, and investigated their principles, B b

VOL. II.