Magnificent, truly! But your ear has doubtless detected the blank verse—three iambic lines:—
Are purchased at ten thousand times their price …
Be shed but to redeem the blood of man …
The rest is vanity; the rest is crime.
Again Burke catches your eye by rhetorical inversions:—
But too often different is rational conjecture from melancholy fact.
Well is it known that ambition can creep as well as soar.
by repetitions:—
Never, no never, did Nature say one thing and Wisdom say another … Algiers is not near; Algiers is not powerful; Algiers is not our neighbour; Algiers is not infectious. Algiers, whatever it may be, is an old creation; and we have good data to calculate all the mischief to be apprehended from it. When I find Algiers transferred to Calais, I will tell you what I think of that point—
by quick staccato utterances, such as:—
And is this example nothing? It is everything. Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other—
or
Our dignity? That is gone. I shall say no more about it. Light lie the earth on the ashes of English pride!
I say that the eye or ear, caught by such tropes, must (if it be critical) recognise them at once as rhetoric, as the spoken word masquerading under guise of the written. Burke may pretend to be seated, penning a letter to a worthy man who will read it in his slippers: but actually Burke is up and pacing his library at Beaconsfield, now striding from fireplace to window with hands clasped under his coat tails, anon pausing to fling out an arm with some familiar accustomed gesture in a House of Commons that knows him no more, towards a Front Bench peopled by shades. In fine the pretence is Cicero writing to Atticus, but the style is Cicero denouncing Catiline.
As such it is not for your imitation. Burke happened to be a genius, with a swoop and range of mind, as of language to interpret it, with a gift to enchant, a power to strike and astound, which together make him, to my thinking, the man in our literature most nearly comparable with Shakespeare. Others may be more to your taste; you may love others better: but no other two leave you so hopeless of discovering how it is done. Yet not for this reason only would I warn you against imitating either. For like all great artists they accepted their conditions and wrought for them, and those conditions have changed. When Jacques wished to recite to an Elizabethan audience that
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players—
or Hamlet to soliloquise
To be, or not to be: that is the question—
the one did not stretch himself under a property oak, nor did the other cast himself back in a chair and dangle his legs. They both advanced boldly from the stage, down a narrow platform provided for such recitations and for that purpose built boldly forward into the auditorium, struck an attitude, declaimed the purple passage, and returned, covered with applause, to continue the action of the play. This was the theatrical convention; this the audience expected and understood; for this Shakespeare wrote. Similarly, though the device must have been wearing thin even in 1795–6, Burke cast a familiar epistle into language proper to be addressed to Mr. Speaker of the House of Commons. Shakespeare wrote, as Burke wrote, for his audience; and their glory is that they have outlasted the conditions they observed. Yet it was by observing them that they gained the world’s ear. Let us, who are less than they, beware of scorning to belong to our own time.
For my part I have a great hankering to see English Literature feeling back through these old modes to its origins. I think, for example, that if we studied to write verse that could really be sung, or if we were more studious to write prose that could be read aloud with pleasure to the ear, we should be opening the pores to the ancient sap; since the roots are always the roots, and we can only reinvigorate our growth through them.
Unhappily, however, I cannot preach this just yet; for we are aiming at practice, and at Cambridge (they tell me) while you speak well, you write less expertly. A contributor to The Cambridge Review, a fortnight ago, lamented this at length: so you will not set the aspersion down to me, nor blame me if these early lectures too officiously offer a kind of “First Aid”: that, while all the time eager to descant on the affinities of speech and writing, I dwell first on their differences; or that, in speaking of Burke, an author I adore only “on this side idolatry,” I first present him in some aspects for your avoidance. Similarly I adore the prose of Sir Thomas Browne, yet should no more commend it to you for instant imitation than I could encourage you to walk with a feather in your cap and a sword under your gown. Let us observe proprieties.
To return to Burke.—At his most flagrant, in these “Letters on the Regicide Peace,” he boldly raids Shakespeare. You are all, I doubt not, conversant with the Prologue to Henry the Fifth:—
O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention!
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!
Then should the warlike Harry, like himself,
Assume the port of Mars: and at his heels,
Leash’d in like hounds, should Famine, Sword and Fire
Crouch for employment.
Well, this passage Burke, assuming his correspondent
