a gigantic difficulty. Yet all these qualifications recede before
Burke's amazing power of expanding particulars into universals, and of
associating the accidents of a transient discussion with the essential
properties of some permanent Law in policy, or abstract Truth in morals.
His genius looked through the local to the universal; in the temporal
perceived the eternal; and while facing the features of the Individual,
was enabled to contemplate the attributes of a Race. (Cicero, in many
respects a counterpart of Burke, both in statesmanship and oratory,
appears to recognise what is here expressed when he says:--"Plerique duo
genera ad dicendum dederunt; UNUM DE CERTA DEFINITAQUE CAUSA, quales
sunt quae in litibus, quae in deliberationibus versantur;--alterum, quod
appellant omnes fere scriptores, explicat nemo, INFINITAM GENERIS SINE
TEMPORE, ET SINE PERSONA quaestionem."--"De Orat." lib. ii. cap. 15.)
Hence his speeches are virtual prophecies; and his writings a storehouse
of pregnant axioms and predictive enunciations, as limitless in their
range as they are undying in duration. In one word, no speeches
delivered in the English Parliament, are so likely to be eternalized as
Burke's, because he has combined with his treatment of some especial
case or contingency before him, the assertion of immutable Principles,
which can be detached from what is local and national, and thus made to
stand forth alone in all the naked grandeur of their truth and their
tendency. Let us be permitted to investigate this topic a little
further. If, then, what Quintilian asserted of the Roman orator may be
applied to our own British Cicero,--"Ille se profecisse sciat, cui
Cicero valde placebit;" and if, moreover, this pre-eminence be chiefly
discovered in Burke's instinctive grasp of that moral essence which is
incorporated with all questions of political Science, and social
Ethics--from WHENCE came this diviner energy of his Genius? No believer
in Christian revelation will hesitate to appropriate, even to this
subject, the apostolic axiom, "EVERY good gift, and EVERY perfect gift