t his ideas were at the service of an epoch of
concentration, not of an epoch of expansion; it is his characteristic
that he so lived by ideas, and had such a source of them welling up
within him, that he could float even an epoch of concentration and
English Tory politics with them. It does not hurt him that Dr. Price[31]
and the Liberals were enraged with him; it does not even hurt him that
George the Third and the Tories were enchanted with him. His greatness
is that he lived in a world which neither English Liberalism nor English
Toryism is apt to enter;--the world of ideas, not the world of
catchwords and party habits. So far is it from being really true of him
that he "to party gave up what was meant for mankind,"[32] that at the
very end of his fierce struggle with the French Revolution, after all
his invectives against its false pretensions, hollowness, and madness,
with his sincere convictions of its mischievousness, he can close a
memorandum on the best means of combating it, some of the last pages he
ever wrote,--the _Thoughts on French Affairs_, in December 1791,--with
these striking words:--

"The evil is stated, in my opinion, as it exists. The remedy must be
where power, wisdom, and information, I hope, are more united with good
intentions than they can be with me. I have done with this subject, I
believe, forever. It has given me many anxious moments for the last two
years. _If a great change is to be made in human affairs, the minds of
men will be fitted to it; the general opinions and feelings will draw
that way. Every fear, every hope will forward it: and then they who
persist in opposing this mighty current in human affairs, will appear
rather to resist the decrees of Providence itself, than the mere designs
of men. They will not be resolute and firm, but perverse and
obstinate._"

That return of Burke upon himself has always seemed to me one of the
finest things in English literature, or indeed in any literature. That
is what I call living by ideas: when one side of a question has long had
your earnest support, when all your feelings are engaged, when you hear
all round you no language but one, when your party talks this language
like a steam-engine and can imagine no other,--still to be able to
think, still to be irresistibly carried, if so it be, by the current of
thought to the opposite side of the question, and, like Balaam,[33] to
be unable to speak anything _but what the Lord has put in your