and party fire and civil division. We are not exhilarated by the
cheerfulness, the polish, the fine manners of Bolingbroke, for Burke
had an anxious conscience, and was earnest and intent that the good
should triumph. And yet Burke is among the greatest of those who have
wrought marvels in the prose of our English tongue.

The influence of Burke on the publicists of the generation after the
Revolution was much less considerable than might have been expected.
In Germany, where there has been so much excellent writing about
_Staatswissenschaft_, with such poverty and darkness in the wisdom of
practical politics, there is a long list of writers who have drawn
their inspiration from Burke. In France, publicists of the sentimental
school, like Chateaubriand, and the politico-ecclesiastical school,
like De Maistre, fashioned a track of their own. In England Burke made
a deep mark on contemporary opinion during the last years of his life,
and then his influence underwent a certain eclipse. The official Whigs
considered him a renegade and a heresiarch, who had committed the
deadly sin of breaking up the party; and they never mentioned his
name without bitterness. To men like Godwin, the author of _Political
Justice_, Burke was as antichrist. Bentham and James Mill thought of
him as a declaimer who lived upon applause, and who, as one of them
says, was for protecting everything old, not because it was good
but because it existed. In one quarter only did he exert a profound
influence. His maxim that men might employ their sagacity in
discovering the latent wisdom which underlies general prejudices and
old institutions, instead of exploding them, inspired Coleridge, as
I have already said; and the Coleridgian school are Burke's direct
descendants, whenever they deal with the significance and the
relations of Church and State. But they connected these views so
closely with their views in metaphysics and theology, that the
association with Burke was effectually disguised.

The only English writer of that age whom we can name along with
Burke in the literature of enduring power, is Wordsworth, that great
representative in another and a higher field, and with many rare
elements added that were all his own of those harmonising and
conciliatory forces and ideas that make man's destiny easier to him,
through piety in its oldest and best sense; through reverence for
the past, for duty, for institutions. He was born in the year of the