at the bare thought of depriving Old Sarum of parliamentary
representation.

These reasons account for Burke's exclusion, and jealous as we naturally
and properly are of genius being snubbed by mediocrity, my reading at all
events does not justify me in blaming any one but the Fates for the
circumstance that Burke was never a Secretary of State. And after all,
does it matter much what he was? Burke no doubt occasionally felt his
exclusion a little hard; but he is the victor who remains in possession
of the field; and Burke is now, for us and for all coming after us, in
such possession.

It now only remains for me, drawing upon my stock of assurance, to essay
the analysis of the essential elements of Burke's mental character, and I
therefore at once proceed to say that it was Burke's peculiarity and his
glory to apply the imagination of a poet of the first order to the facts
and the business of life. Arnold says of Sophocles:

'He saw life steadily, and saw it whole.'

Substitute for the word 'life' the words 'organised society,' and you get
a peep into Burke's mind. There was a catholicity about his gaze. He
knew how the whole world lived. Everything contributed to this: his vast
desultory reading; his education, neither wholly academical nor entirely
professional; his long years of apprenticeship in the service of
knowledge; his wanderings up and down the country; his vast
conversational powers; his enormous correspondence with all sorts of
people; his unfailing interest in all pursuits, trades, manufactures--all
helped to keep before him, like motes dancing in a sunbeam, the huge
organism of modern society, which requires for its existence and for its
development the maintenance of credit and of order. Burke's imagination
led him to look out over the whole land: the legislator devising new
laws, the judge expounding and enforcing old ones, the merchant
despatching his goods and extending his credit, the banker advancing the
money of his customers upon the credit of the merchant, the frugal man
slowly accumulating the store which is to support him in old age, the
ancient institutions of Church and University with their seemly
provisions for sound learning and true religion, the parson in his
pulpit, the poet pondering his rhymes, the farmer eyeing his crops, the
painter covering his canvases, the player educating the feelings. Burke
saw all this with the fancy of a poet, and dwelt on it with the eye of a