* * * * * The next book Burke launched was the one we know best, "On the Sublime." The original bore the terrifying title, "A Philosophical Inquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas Concerning the Sublime and Beautiful." This book consists of one hundred seventeen chapters, each chapter dealing with some special phase of the subject. It is the most searching and complete analysis of an abstract theme of which I know. It sums the subject up like an essay by Herbert Spencer, and disposes of the case once and forever. It is so learned that only a sophomore could have written it, and we quite forgive the author when we are told that it was composed when he was nineteen. The book proved Burke's power to follow an idea to its lair, and its launching also launched the author upon the full tide of polite society. Goldsmith said, "We will lose him now," but Burke still stuck by his coffeehouse companions and used them as a pontoon to bridge the gulf 'twixt Bohemia and Piccadilly. In the meantime he had written a book for Dodsley on "English Settlements in North America," and this did Burke more good than any one else, as it caused him to focus his inquiring mind on the New World. After this man began to write on a subject, his intellect became luminous on the theme, and it was his forevermore. At routs and fetes and four-o'-clocks, Burke was sought as an authority on America. He had never been there--he had but promised himself that he would go--for a sick wife held him back. In the meantime he had seen every man of worth who had been to America, and had sucked the orange dry. Macaulay gives the idea when he describes Burke's speech at the Warren Hastings trial. Burke had never been to India; Macaulay had, but that is nothing. Says Macaulay: