The terms in which Mr. Burke, in treating of the French revo lution, has expressed the swellings of his heart against the mass of crime, pollution, and sacrilege, out of which it was born, and has since been maintained, has given offence to some persons of cool and dispassionate judgment, and a delicate ear for propriety. We confess ourselves to be less squeamish, and to be capable of hearing, without disgust, foul acts described by foul names. There is a callous moderation in treating cruelty, with which we are inclined to be more disgusted (speaking for ourselves) than with the red hot anger of outraged feeling. If no degree of detestation can be, excessive, we doubt whether any strength of language can be too great for the systematic horrors which ushered in and accompanied the bloody and unprincipled revolution of France. If the sallies of indignant feeling sometimes broke loose from the restraints of ordinary decorum, and indulged in an unmeasured phraseology, we do not concur with the polished writer of the Vindicia Gallicæ in thinking that a reason for stigmatizing Mr. Burke's "Reflections" as "inflammatory harangues against violence." Nor because a warm heart, and a rich imagination, were engaged on the side of compassion and justice, do we feel that "turbulent encomiums on humanity" was a phrase at all suited to the character of any part of that immortal work. Coldness is not always prudence, though it is perpetually assuming the title. If any thing could elicit mirth out of the subject to which we have been alluding, a temperate argument, arranged in a logical method, to prove that the butchery of priests, the unsparing massacre of age and infancy, executions without trial, and plunder under the name of confiscation, were wrong things, would have produced that effect.

If there is any real violence in the "Reflections" of Mr. Burke, we offer the infirmity which belongs to virtuous feeling as his apology; and the beauty, the verity, the excellence of his philoso phical and political reasoning, we propose by way of expiation Let the author of the Vindicia Gallica have also his excuse; and as we presume the best would naturally be that which he has made for himself, we will lay it before the reader, and let him judge of the merits, with the accusation and defence before him. "I have been accused by valuable friends of treating with ungenerous levity the misfortunes of the royal family of France. They will not, however, suppose me capable of deliberately violating the sacredness of misery in a palace or in a cottage; and I sincerely lament that I should have been betrayed into expressions which admitted that construction." Mr. Burke is accused, by the author of the Vindicia Gallicæ, of violence on the side of a mistaken humanity; the accuser is himself accused, even by his valuable friends, of sporting with the sacredness of misery. Let our readers say under which imputation they would choose to be

placed. The charge against the one is, that he felt too much; against the other, that he felt not at all, for the misery of the royal sufferers. For Mr. Burke's turbulence, if turbulence it must be called, we have nothing to say, but that as charity is said to cover a multitude of sins, we presume she will best excuse her own excesses. As to the author of the Vindicia, we recommend him to that mercy which he forgot in the case of others, and accept his own apology for what it is worth. It seems he did not mean what he said.

We cannot forbear having one word at parting, on the propriety of another charge brought against the "Reflections," viz. that they contain "homilies of moral and religious mysticism." We cannot help doubting whether the author of this charge is in the slightest degree acquainted with the homilies of our church-we doubt also whether he knows what he means by "moral mysticism." But what is designed by the phrase "religious mysticism," we may negatively infer from an opinion delivered by the same author in the last page but three of his book. Speaking of the majority of the advocates of the French revolution, he remarks, that "they were well known to be philosophers and friends of humanity, who were superior to the creed of any sect, and indifferent to the dogmas of any popular faith." What this grand independence of all creeds, this sovereign, self-satisfied security of mind, falsely called philosophy, really is, we can be at no loss to understand. Its high negative worth is not ill set forth in a poetical work, of which we have, in the first article of our sixth number, laid before our readers a pretty full examination. But we cannot conjecture to what part, passage, sentence, or line of the "Reflections," this objector means to attach the imputation of religious mysticism. The only religious matter we find in the whole volume is in the few pages which Mr. Burke has assigned to the consideration of the necessity, beauty, and advantage of a religious establishment, and of the inseparable connexion between church and state. Simple, indeed, must be the religion of that man, who is offended with the mysticism of an endeavour to point out the connexion between the civil and ecclesiastical parts of the constitution of England. What a monkish melancholy mystic poor Hooker must appear to such a man, and what must he think of the dreams of those wild enthusiasts, who connect spirit with body, eternity with time, a future state with the present, corruptible with incorruptible, dust with divinity. What must he think of that

Mysterious power!

Revealed yet unrevealed!. darkness in light!

See the third and fourth stanzas of the second canto.

Number in unity! our joy, or dread!
Triune, unutterable, unconceived,

Absconding, yet demonstrable, great GOD!

To some men all religion is mysticism, as all church discipline is priestcraft. The mere rejection of religion is the philosophy of those whose title to the dignity of free thinking consists in a bigoted unbelief. The truth is, that through the whole course of Mr. Burke's volume, we do not recollect that he introduces the mention of any of those parts of religion which are properly called mysterious. So much for the "homilies of religious mysticism" to be found in Mr. Burke's Reflections. Mr. Burke constructed an immortal edifice to be the mansion of sound philosophy, the habitation and home of exiled truth. The author of the Vindicia Gallicæ, being determined to consider it as a haunted house, has peopled it with mysterious beings, and midnight bugbears, the progeny of his own metaphysical brain.

Scelestæ hæ sunt ædes, impia est habitatio.

Quæ hic monstra fiunt, anno vix possum eloqui.

How deeply the mind of Mr. Burke, adverse to all visionary politics, all violent changes, and all practical invasions of liberty and property, was affected by the proceedings of the French revo lutionists, and impressed with the danger to be dreaded from the diffusion of their principles, was manifested by the extraordinary exertions of which he showed himself capable at a time of life, and in a state of infirmity, which dispense with the labours of the patriot, and usually put a period to active service. To stay the plague, he stood, like Phineas, between the living and the dead. The mortification of losing some of his political friends was unable to chill his ardour. He felt the difficulty and the danger increased by this accession to the enemy; but the reaction of his mind was equal to the pressure. His resources kept on a level with the emergency. And the history of man presents few grander spectacles than that of this distinguished person, oppressed with years, weakened by labour, separated from the most powerful of his former friends, with a bosom rent by domestic calamity, making head against a revolutionary frenzy, which had let loose the physical against the moral world, threatened the dissolution of all states and communities, and proffered its bloody embrace to the people of this island. On such a subject, in such an hour of peril, he could not brook what seemed to him an unprincipled forbearance in those, for the right use of whose abilities their country so imperiously called. Much less could he endure the studied eulogies pronounced by Mr. Fox and his adherents on what seemed to him so manifestly to threaten the safety of the British

empire. But to hear himself charged with having formerly held very different principles from those he then maintained; and to hear it alleged that the principles he then reprobated had been formerly learned from himself, was more than his ardent temper, wrought up to an extraordinary state of impressibility on the particular topic, and rendered, perhaps, somewhat more irritable by age and disappointment, could listen to with decorous patience. Some disparaging observations made by Mr. Fox on the "Reflections," it is said, had been conveyed to him. Putting all these things together, we are to consider how far they go in excuse of that renunciation of Mr. Fox as his friend, in which he persevered to the conclusion of his life. To say that he never forgave Mr. Fox, is an assertion unsupported by proof. He died, declaring a catholic forgiveness of all injuries and offences. And though we do not forget the boundless extent of the christian precept of forgiveness, yet we cannot consider that even christianity requires that we should live in harmony and society with those whose maxims and principles appear to us to militate against the repose of mankind.

That these separations, coöperating with the effect which had been produced by his excessive and unseemly violence in the prosecution of Mr. Hastings, greatly diminished his popularity and influence, is not to be denied. In the latter years of his life he found it difficult to detain the attention of the house. The pride of past service, and, perhaps, in some degree, the irritability of age, laid him open to the attacks of young men, who had known him only in those scenes in which the failure of temper had been mistaken for the decay of faculty. Urged to fury by the stings of flies, his high-mindedness sometimes forsook him, and he gave to his puny assailants an ungenerous triumph. He could not, as one of those great cattle, (to use his own simile,) repose beneath the shadow of the British oak, and chew the cud and be silent, despising the little, meager, hopping, though loud and troublesome, insects of the hour.

Retreating from a scene of exertion, in which his value was so ill appreciated, he set about proving to the world that old age had not impaired his faculty. How far he succeeded may be judged from the perusal of his different pamphlets on the French revolu tion. As Philopatris Varvicensis has seemed to consider himself deficient in justice to Mr. Fox, without adding to the catalogue of his excellencies the gift of prophecy, which, by a sort of qualify ing phrase, he calls "the faculty of presage; we challenge for Mr. Burke at least an equal share of this power of penetrating futurity. History, which is the register of the mortality of governments, had surely not withheld from Mr. Burke what she had communicated to Mr. Fox. And the peculiar cases which, in every

go

constitution of government, have a tendency to dissolution beyond the power of any stated remedy, were, we will venture to affirm, at least as well understood by Mr. Burke as by Mr. Fox. To be plain, in the part which Mr. Fox has acted in politics, or in his speeches in the senate, we can perceive none of this prophetic spirit. He was, by profession and practice, a determined party man, furiously bent on destroying the credit of those who kept the vernment in their hands, to the exclusion of him and his friends. And if he possessed the gift of prophecy, his talent at least was no mystery, since every man in the country might easily anticipate what Mr. Fox would predict as the result of every measure proposed by the government of which he made no part. And this Philopatris Varvicensis must know, canting apart, to be the amount of Mr. Fox's supernatural gift of presage concerning the atfairs of the country.

After saying thus much on the prophetic spirit attributed to Mr. Fox, we will not represent Mr. Burke as a soothsayer; but we will venture to affirm, that on the article of the revolution in France, and its probable issue, the predictions of Mr. Burke have been confirmed in a manner that bears extraordinary testimony to the strength and wisdom of his calculations. Mr. Fox, at the date of that event, which he hailed as so auspicious in its promises, was a young man in comparison of Mr. Burke; but the young man was dreaming dreams, while the old man was seeing visions. To the last hour of his life, these visions were expanding the mind of Mr. Burke, and his pen was employed in promulgating them. And when he was no longer able to dictate to the senate, we may class him at least with the Fabricii, the Curii, and the Coruncanii, et cæteri senes qui rempublicam consilio et auctoritate defendebant.

Sketches, Historical and Descriptive, of Louisiana. By Major Amos Stoddard, Member of U. S. M. P. S. and of the NewYork Historical Society. 8vo. pp. 488. Philadelphia, published by Mathew Carey. 1812.

[From the Eclectic Review, for August, 1813.]

Ir other indications of the national character would warrant us, we should be willing to impute it to a republican dislike of ostentation, that the Americans have hitherto made so little literary use of their originally immense territory, and of the vast addition to it in the recent acquisition of Louisiana. How different is the case among us, the people of monarchies. We see so much importance in a little of the earth of our dominions, and in the sub