Thus the colossal genius of Burke stood before the world, in that war of elements, trampling the irreligion of France beneath his feet, like the Archangel thrusting Satan to his bottomless abyss. The spectacle was not lost. It was that beautiful and sublime exhibition of moral grandeur that quickened the noblest minds in Europe to imitative virtue, and produced the school of the Reaction. It was rather the spirit of British faith, and law, and loyalty, personified in him. The same spirit had been felt in France before: it had moulded the genius of Montesquieu, abstractly; but Burke was its mighty concrete, and he wrote himself like a photograph upon kindred intellect throughout the world. Before his day, the character of English liberty had been laboriously studied and mechanically learned; but he, as its living representative and embodiment, made himself the procreant author of an intellectual family. I fear you will regard this as a theory of my own, but I would not have ventured to say this on my mere surmise. One whose religion identifies him with Ultramontanism has made the acknowledgment before me. I refer to the English editor and translator of Schlegel's _Philosophy of History_. According to him, Schlegel at Vienna, and Goerres at Munich, were "the supreme oracles of _that illustrious school of liberal conservatives_, which numbered, besides those eminent Germans, a Baron von Haller in Switzerland, a Viscount de Bonald in France, a Count Henri de Merode in Belgium, and a Count de Maistre in Piedmont."[4] From the writings of these great men, in a greater or less degree, he augurs the future political regeneration of Europe; and yet, strongly warped as he is away from England, and towards Rome, as the source of all moral and national good, he does not conceal the fact that this splendid school of the Reaction was "founded by our great Burke." My hopes from the writings of these men are not so sanguine: but, so far as they are true to their original, they have been already of great service. They may hereafter be made still more powerful for good; and if, at the same time, the rising school of Conservatism, which begins to make itself felt in America, shall impart its wholesome influences to an off-shoot of England, so vast already, and of such grand importance to the future, then, and not till then, will be duly estimated the real greatness of those splendid services which Burke was created to perform, not for his country only, but for the human race.