blimity. Many of the sections,
again, are little more than expanded definitions from the dictionary.
Any tyro may now be shocked at such a proposition as that beauty acts
by relaxing the solids of the whole system. But at least one signal
merit remains to the _Inquiry_. It was a vigorous enlargement of the
principle, which Addison had not long before timidly illustrated, that
critics of art seek its principles in the wrong place, so long as
they limit their search to poems, pictures, engravings, statues, and
buildings, instead of first arranging the sentiments and faculties in
man to which art makes its appeal. Addison's treatment was slight and
merely literary; Burke dealt boldly with his subject on the base of
the most scientific psychology that was then within his reach. To
approach it on the psychological side at all was to make a distinct
and remarkable advance in the method of the inquiry which he had taken
in hand.

CHAPTER II

IN IRELAND--PARLIAMENT--BEACONSFIELD

Burke was thirty years old before he approached even the threshold of
the arena in which he was destined to be so great a figure. He had
made a mark in literature, and it was to literature rather than to
public affairs that his ambition turned. He had naturally become
acquainted with the brother-authors who haunted the coffee-houses in
Fleet Street; and Burke, along with his father-in-law, Dr. Nugent,
was one of the first members of the immortal club where Johnson did
conversational battle with all comers. We shall, in a later chapter,
have something to say on Burke's friendships with the followers of
his first profession, and on the active sympathy with which he helped
those who were struggling into authorship. Meanwhile, the fragments
that remain of his own attempts in this direction are no considerable
contributions. His _Hints for an Essay on the Drama_ are jejune and
infertile, when compared with the vigorous and original thought of
Diderot and Lessing at about the same period. He wrote an Account of
the European Settlements in America. His _Abridgment of the History of
England_ comes down no further than to the reign of John. A much more
important undertaking than his history of the past was his design for
a yearly chronicle of the present. The _Annual Register_ began to
appear in 1759. Dodsley, the bookseller of Pall Mall, provided the
sinews of war, and he gave Burke a hundred pounds a year for his
survey of the great events which w