knows
what it is), the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment
and heroic enterprise is gone!" and all this because the Quixot age of
chivalry nonsense is gone, what opinion can we form of his judgment, or
what regard can we pay to his facts? In the rhapsody of his imagination
he has discovered a world of wind mills, and his sorrows are that there
are no Quixots to attack them. But if the age of aristocracy, like that
of chivalry, should fall (and they had originally some connection) Mr.
Burke, the trumpeter of the Order, may continue his parody to the end,
and finish with exclaiming: "Othello's occupation's gone!"

Notwithstanding Mr. Burke's horrid paintings, when the French Revolution
is compared with the Revolutions of other countries, the astonishment
will be that it is marked with so few sacrifices; but this astonishment
will cease when we reflect that principles, and not persons, were the
meditated objects of destruction. The mind of the nation was acted
upon by a higher stimulus than what the consideration of persons could
inspire, and sought a higher conquest than could be produced by the
downfall of an enemy. Among the few who fell there do not appear to be
any that were intentionally singled out. They all of them had their fate
in the circumstances of the moment, and were not pursued with that long,
cold-blooded unabated revenge which pursued the unfortunate Scotch in
the affair of 1745.

Through the whole of Mr. Burke's book I do not observe that the Bastille
is mentioned more than once, and that with a kind of implication as if
he were sorry it was pulled down, and wished it were built up again. "We
have rebuilt Newgate," says he, "and tenanted the mansion; and we have
prisons almost as strong as the Bastille for those who dare to libel the
queens of France."*[2] As to what a madman like the person called Lord
George Gordon might say, and to whom Newgate is rather a bedlam than a
prison, it is unworthy a rational consideration. It was a madman that
libelled, and that is sufficient apology; and it afforded an opportunity
for confining him, which was the thing that was wished for. But certain
it is that Mr. Burke, who does not call himself a madman (whatever other
people may do), has libelled in the most unprovoked manner, and in
the grossest style of the most vulgar abuse, the whole representative
authority of France, and yet Mr. Burke takes his seat in the British
House of Commons! From his