Lords, composed petitions for county
meetings, drafted resolutions, and plied them with information, ideas,
admonitions, and exhortations. Never before nor since has our country
seen so extraordinary a union of the clever and indefatigable
party-manager, with the reflective and philosophic habits of the
speculative publicist. It is much easier to make either absolutism or
democracy attractive than aristocracy; yet we see how consistent with
his deep moral conservatism was Burke's attachment to an aristocratic
party, when we read his exhortation to the Duke of Richmond to
remember that persons in his high station in life ought to have long
views. "You people," he writes to the Duke (November 17, 1772), "of
great families and hereditary trusts and fortunes are not like such as
I am, who, whatever we may be by the rapidity of our growth, and even
by the fruit we bear, and flatter ourselves that, while we creep on
the ground, we belly into melons that are exquisite for size and
flavour, yet still we are but annual plants that perish with our
season, and leave no sort of traces behind us. You, if you are what
you ought to be, are in my eye the great oaks that shade a country,
and perpetuate your benefits from generation to generation. The
immediate power of a Duke of Richmond, or a Marquis of Rockingham,
is not so much of moment; but if their conduct and example hand down
their principles to their successors, then their houses become the
public repositories and office of record for the constitution.... I do
not look upon your time or lives as lost, if in this sliding away from
the genuine spirit of the country, certain parties, if possible--if
not, the heads of certain families--should make it their business by
the whole course of their lives, principally by their example,
to mould into the very vital stamina of their descendants those
principles which ought to be transmitted pure and unmixed to
posterity."

Perhaps such a passage as this ought to be described less as
reflection than as imagination--moral, historic, conservative
imagination--in which order, social continuity, and the endless
projection of past into present, and of present into future, are
clothed with the sanctity of an inner shrine. We may think that a
fox-hunting duke and a racing marquis were very poor centres
round which to group these high emotions. But Burke had no puny
sentimentalism, and none of the mere literary or romantic conservatism
of men lik