speculative history are agreed, there came a time in the eighteenth
century when theological controversy was turned into political
controversy. Innovators left the question about the truth of
Christianity, and busied themselves with questions about the ends
and means of governments. The appearance of Burke's _Vindication
of Natural Society_ coincides in time with the beginning of this
important transformation. Burke foresaw from the first what, if
rationalism were allowed to run an unimpeded course, would be the
really great business of the second halt of his century.

If in his first book Burke showed how alive he was to the profound
movement of the time, in the second he dealt with one of the most
serious of its more superficial interests. The essay on the Sublime
and Beautiful fell in with a set of topics on which the curiosity of
the better minds of the age, alike in France, England, and Germany,
was fully stirred. In England the essay has been ordinarily slighted;
it has perhaps been overshadowed by its author's fame in weightier
matters. The nearest approach to a full and serious treatment of its
main positions is to be found in Dugald Stewart's lectures. The
great rhetorical art-critic of our own day refers to it in words of
disparagement, and in truth it has none of the flummery of modern
criticism. It is a piece of hard thinking, and it has the distinction
of having interested and stimulated Lessing, the author of _Laoköon_
(1766), by far the most definitely valuable of all the contributions
to aesthetic thought in an age which was not poor in them. Lessing was
so struck with the _Inquiry_ that he set about a translation of it,
and the correspondence between him and Moses Mendelssohn on the
questions which Burke had raised contains the germs of the doctrine as
to poetry and painting which _Laoköon_ afterwards made so famous. Its
influence on Lessing and on Kant was such as to justify the German