t is the mere foppery of literature
to suffer ourselves to be long detained by specks like these.

The varieties of Burke's literary or rhetorical method are very
striking. It is almost incredible that the superb imaginative
amplification of the description of Hyder Ali's descent upon the
Carnatic should be from the same pen as the grave, simple, unadorned
_Address to the King_ (1777), where each sentence falls on the ear
with the accent of some golden-tongued oracle of the wise gods. His
stride is the stride of a giant, from the sentimental beauty of the
picture of Marie Antoinette at Versailles, or the red horror of the
tale of Debi Sing in Rungpore, to the learning, positiveness, and cool
judicial mastery of the _Report on the Lords' Journals_ (1794), which
Philip Francis, no mean judge, declared on the whole to be the "most
eminent and extraordinary" of all his productions. Even in the coolest
and dryest of his pieces, there is the mark of greatness, of grasp, of
comprehension. In all its varieties Burke's style is noble, earnest,
deep-flowing, because his sentiment was lofty and fervid, and went
with sincerity and ardent disciplined travail of judgment. Fox told
Francis Horner that Dryden's prose was Burke's great favourite, and
that Burke imitated him more than any one else. We may well believe
that he was attracted by Dryden's ease, his copiousness, his gaiety,
his manliness of style, but there can hardly have been any conscious
attempt at imitation. Their topics were too different. Burke had
the style of his subjects, the amplitude, the weightiness, the
laboriousness, the sense, the high flight, the grandeur, proper to a
man dealing with imperial themes, the freedom of nations, the justice
of rulers, the fortunes of great societies, the sacredness of law.
Burke will always be read with delight and edification, because in
the midst of discussions on the local and the accidental, he scatters
apophthegms that take us into the regions of lasting wisdom. In
the midst of the torrent of his most strenuous and passionate
deliverances, he suddenly rises aloof from his immediate subject, and
in all tranquillity reminds us of some permanent relation of things,
some enduring truth of human life or society. We do not hear the
organ tones of Milton, for faith and freedom had other notes in the
seventeenth century. There is none of the complacent and wise-browed
sagacity of Bacon, for Burke's were days of eager personal strife