a traditional story that Burke wrote it when he was only nineteen
years old. Both of these performances have in different degrees a
historic meaning, but neither of them would have survived to our own
day unless they had been associated with a name of power. A few
words will suffice to do justice to them here. And first as to the
_Vindication of Natural Society_. Its alternative title was, _A View
of the Miseries and Evils arising to Mankind from every Species of
Civil Society, in a Letter to Lord ----, by a late Noble Writer_.

Bolingbroke had died in 1751, and in 1754 his philosophical works
were posthumously given to the world by David Mallet, Dr. Johnson's
beggarly Scotchman, to whom Bolingbroke had left half-a-crown in his
will, for firing off a blunderbuss which he was afraid to fire
off himself. The world of letters had been keenly excited about
Bolingbroke. His busy and chequered career, his friendship with the
great wits of the previous generation, his splendid style, his bold
opinions, made him a dazzling figure. This was the late Noble Writer
whose opinions Burke intended to ridicule, by reducing them to an
absurdity in an exaggeration of Bolingbroke's own manner. As it
happened, the public did not readily perceive either the exaggeration
in the manner, or the satire in the matter. Excellent judges of style
made sure that the writing was really Bolingbroke's, and serious
critics of philosophy never doubted that the writer, whoever he was,
meant all that he said. We can hardly help agreeing with Godwin, when
he says that in Burke's treatise the evils of existing political
institutions, which had been described by Locke, are set forth more at
large, with incomparable force of reasoning and lustre of eloquence,
though the declared intention of the writer was to show that such
evils ought to be considered merely trivial. Years afterwards, Boswell
asked Johnson whether an imprudent publication by a certain friend of