The threatened ruin of Europe awakened Burke from this reverie at the tomb of his son. He required strong stimulants, and in the French Revolution, and the shock of nations, he found them. He now put the trumpet to his lips, and
"Blew a blast so loud and dread,
Were ne'er prophetic sounds so full of woe."
His appeal pierced to the heart of the nation. England had never succumbed, but an indefatigable faction had played every art of quackery to set her faculties asleep, with the appearance of having her eyes more open than ever. Whiggism, by its tricks, was mesmerising the common sense of the country. From this adventitious torpor Burke recalled her to her natural temperament, restored sight to her eyes, taught her to resume the sword, and sent her forth to commence that career of victory which was consummated in the Tuilleries.
His advocacy of the Popish question was one of his romances. Popery was his "Jane Shore," fainting and feeble, wandering through the highways with those delicate limbs which had once been arrayed in silk and velvet, and soliciting the "charity of all good Christians" to her fallen condition. His nature was chivalric, and he at once unsheathed his sword for so affecting a specimen of penitence and pauperism; but he soon recovered from this hazardous compassion, and left the pilgrim to fitter protectors. But if he had lived till our day, what would Burke have thought of his delusion now? with what self-ridicule must he not have looked upon the burlesque grievances and the profitable privations? what an instructive lesson must not his powerful scorn of charlatanry have given to us, on the display of the whole system of sleight-of-hand, the popular cups and balls, the low dexterity and the rabble plunder? or, to sum all in one word, the reduction of all the claims, the rights, and the efforts of a party pronouncing itself national, to the collection of an annual tribute; the whole huge and rattling machinery of popular agitation, grinding simply for the "rint." How would this lion of the desert, shaking the forest with his roar, have looked on Jackoo, going round, shaking the penny box! Woe be to Jackoo if he had come within reach of his talons!
The volumes, of which we have given an account altogether too brief and too rapid for their importance, deserve to be studied, as containing some of the richest transcripts of the richest mind of England. Letters from various eminent persons diversify them, but the staple is Burke. If their style seldom rises to the elated ardour and buoyant strength of his speeches and pamphlets, they exhibit all his wisdom; they display the entire depth of that current which public difficulties and obstructions swelled into a cataract. We have the image of Burke reposing, but still we have all the proportion, all the dignity, and all the colossal grandeur of the form, ruling senates, and marshaling the mind of nations for the greatest of their fields.
Various notes illustrate the volumes, and the edition does every credit to Lord Fitzwilliam and General Bourke.