Everything which rancour, prejudice, ignorance or
knowledge could suggest, is poured forth in the copious fury of near
four hundred pages. In the strain and on the plan Mr. Burke was writing,
he might have written on to as many thousands. When the tongue or the
pen is let loose in a frenzy of passion, it is the man, and not the
subject, that becomes exhausted.

Hitherto Mr. Burke has been mistaken and disappointed in the opinions
he had formed of the affairs of France; but such is the ingenuity of his
hope, or the malignancy of his despair, that it furnishes him with new
pretences to go on. There was a time when it was impossible to make Mr.
Burke believe there would be any Revolution in France. His opinion then
was, that the French had neither spirit to undertake it nor fortitude to
support it; and now that there is one, he seeks an escape by condemning
it.

Not sufficiently content with abusing the National Assembly, a great
part of his work is taken up with abusing Dr. Price (one of the
best-hearted men that lives) and the two societies in England known by
the name of the Revolution Society and the Society for Constitutional
Information.

Dr. Price had preached a sermon on the 4th of November, 1789, being
the anniversary of what is called in England the Revolution, which took
place 1688. Mr. Burke, speaking of this sermon, says: "The political
Divine proceeds dogmatically to assert, that by the principles of
the Revolution, the people of England have acquired three fundamental
rights:

1. To choose our own governors.

2. To cashier them for misconduct.

3. To frame a government for ourselves."

Dr. Price does not say that the right to do these things exists in this
or in that person, or in this or in that description of persons, but
that it exists in the whole; that it is a right resident in the nation.
Mr. Burke, on the contrary, denies that such a right exists in the
nation, either in whole or in part, or that it exists anywhere; and,
what is still more strange and marvellous, he says: "that the people
of England utterly disclaim such a right, and that they will resist
the practical assertion of it with their lives and fortunes." That men
should take up arms and spend their lives and fortunes, not to maintain
their rights, but to maintain they have not rights, is an entirely new
species of discovery, and suited to the paradoxical genius of Mr. Burke.

The method which Mr. Burke takes to prove that the peo