These passages, it should be remembered, are taken from a speech in Parliament and from a letter written by Burke to his constituents in Bristol. He had no thought to make them permanent sentences of political philosophy. They were meant only to serve an immediate purpose in the advancement of contemporaneous policy. They were framed for the circumstances of the time. They speak out spontaneously amidst matter of the moment: and they could be matched everywhere throughout his pamphlets and public utterances. No other similar productions that I know of have this singular, and as it were inevitable, quality of permanency. They have emerged from the mass of political writings put forth in their time with their freshness untouched, their significance unobscured, their splendid vigor unabated. It is this that we marvel at, that they should remain modern and timely, purged of every element and seed of decay. The man who could do this must needs arrest our attention and challenge our inquiry. We wish to account for him as we should wish to penetrate the secrets of the human spirit and know the springs of genius. Of the public life of Burke we know all that we could wish. He became so prominent a figure in the great affairs of his day that even the casual observer cannot fail to discern the main facts of his career; while the close student can follow him year by year through every step of his service. But his private life was withdrawn from general scrutiny in an unusual degree. He manifested always a marked reserve about his individual and domestic affairs, deliberately, it would seem, shielding them from impertinent inquiry. He loved the privacy of life in a great city, where one may escape notice in the crowd and enjoy a grateful “freedom from remark and petty censure.” “Though I have the honor to represent Bristol,” he said to Boswell, “I should not like to live there; I should be obliged to be _so much upon my good behavior_. In London a man may live in splendid society at one time, and in frugal retirement at another, without animadversion. There, and there alone, a man’s house is truly his _castle_, in which he can be in perfect safety from intrusion whenever he pleases. I never shall forget how well this was expressed to me one day by Mr. Meynell: ‘The chief advantage of London,’ he said, ‘is, that a man is always _so near his burrow_.’” Burke took to his burrow often enough to pique our curiosity sorely. This singular, high-minded adventurer had some queer companions, we know: questionable fellows, whose life he shared, perhaps with a certain Bohemian relish, without sharing their morals or their works. It seems as incongruous that such wisdom and public spirit as breathe through his writings should have come to his thought in such company as that an exquisite idyll like Goldsmith’s “Vicar of Wakefield” should have been conceived and written in squalid garrets. But neither Burke nor Goldsmith had been born into such comradeships