Of all the events of his time, however, the Revolution of 1789 gave the chief exercise to his powers. Born in 1730, he was then at the zenith of his fame, in the full maturity of his massive yet acute intellect. Earl Russell's senile complaint in his life of Fox of “the wreck of his (Burke's) judgment” betrays only the dotage of his own. Advancing age had better fitted him for the contest. His mind had, as Macaulay truly says, bloomed late into flower, although the rhetoric of the essayist has caricatured the sterility of his youth. The giant trunk was now crowned with a luxuriant and graceful foliage, which added to its beauty, while it detracted nothing from its strength. The experience of “his long and laborious life,” the accumulated stores of his prodigious industry, furnished him with weapons of finest temper and irresistible force. Thus armed, stepping to the front as the champion of civilization and religion against the Giant Despair which had broken its bonds in Europe, it was with striking appropriateness that his friend, Sir Joshua Reynolds, applied to him, at the moment of his rupture with Fox and the opposition, the lines written under the engraving of 1790 from the portrait of 1775—lines in which Milton describes the faithful Abdiel striding forth, solitary, from amid the rebel host:
“So spake the fervent angel, but his zeal
None seconded: .....
...... Unmoved,
Unshaken, unseduced, unterrified,
His loyalty he kept, his love, his zeal;
Nor number nor example with him wrought
To move from truth, or change his constant mind,
Though single. From amidst forth he passed
Long way through hostile scorn, nor of violence feared aught;