lone. He had long ceased, in fact, to have any hold
over the House of Commons. The eloquence which had vied with that of
Chatham during the discussions on the Stamp Act had become distasteful
to the bulk of its members. The length of his speeches, the profound and
philosophical character of his argument, the splendour and often the
extravagance of his illustrations, his passionate earnestness, his want
of temper and discretion, wearied and perplexed the squires and
merchants about him. He was known nowadays as "the dinner-bell of the
House," so rapidly did its benches thin at his rising. For a time his
energies found scope in the impeachment of Hastings; and the grandeur of
his appeals to the justice of England hushed detraction. But with the
close of the impeachment his repute had again fallen; and the approach
of old age, for he was now past sixty, seemed to counsel retirement from
an assembly where he stood unpopular and alone. But age and
disappointment and loneliness were forgotten as Burke saw rising across
the Channel the embodiment of all that he hated--a Revolution founded on
scorn of the past, and threatening with ruin the whole social fabric
which the past had reared; the ordered structure of classes and ranks
crumbling before a doctrine of social equality; a State rudely
demolished and reconstituted; a Church and a Nobility swept away in a
night. Against the enthusiasm of what he rightly saw to be a new
political religion he resolved to rouse the enthusiasm of the old. He
was at once a great orator and a great writer; and now that the House
was deaf to his voice, he appealed to the country by his pen. The
"Reflections on the French Revolution" which he published in October
1790 not only denounced the acts of rashness and violence which sullied
the great change that France had wrought, but the very principles from
which the change had sprung. Burke's deep sense of the need of social
order, of the value of that continuity in human affairs "without which
men would become like flies in a summer," blinded him to all but the
faith in mere rebellion and the yet sillier faith in mere novelty which
disguised a real nobleness of aim and temper even in the most ardent of
the revolutionists. He would see no abuses in the past, now that it had
fallen, or anything but the ruin of society in the future. He preached a
crusade against men whom he regarded as the foes of religion and
civilization, and called on the armies of Eu