Such especially was the opinion of the Analytical reviewers, who had great influence among numerous classes of British subjects; and the following contrast between Burke and Paine exhibits the prominent features of the sentiments and opinions which in the last ten years of the eighteenth century had such a powerful effect on the literature of our country. “Each of them interests our feelings, but in a different manner; elegant and declamatory, Mr. Burke seduces us along by the charms of his eloquence: plain, but forcible, Mr. Paine carries us away with him by the invincible energy of truth and sense. Fanciful and excursive, Mr. Burke delights the imagination by the beauty of his metaphors, and the splendour of his ornaments; while his opponent holds our judgment captive by the native vigour of his arguments, the originality of his sentiments, and the pointedness of his remarks. Mr. Burke is the polished and playful courtier, who dances in his chains; Mr. Paine is the stern republican, who exults in his liberty, and treats with equal freedom the monarch and the peasant. In a word, without subscribing implicitly to every principle which our author advances, we cannot in justice withhold this testimony to the work before us, that it is one of the most curious, original, and interesting publications, which the singular vicissitudes of modern politics have produced. Independent of its value as a polemical work, it is truly excellent and useful in an historical view. In it the springs and sources of the French revolution are traced with the acuteness and perspicacity of a Tacitus; his information bears its authority upon the face of it, and almost convinces by the weight of its internal evidence.” Such notions disseminated among great numbers that were totally incapable of judging, produced very general impression. “Nobility, (it was said,) is an institution that could only be reconciled to a state of barbarism. It is a distinction equally impolitic and immoral, worthy of the times of ignorance and of rapine, which gave it birth; is a violation of the rights of that part of the nation that is deprived of it; and as equality becomes a _stimulus_ towards distinction, so on the other hand this is the radical vice of a goverment, and the source of a variety of evils. It is impossible that there should be any uncommon instances of virtue in a state, when recompences belong exclusively to a certain class of society, and when it costs them no more to obtain these, than the _trouble of being born_. Amongst this list of privileged persons, virtues, talents, and genius, must of course be much less frequent than in the other classes, since without the possession of any of these qualities, they who belong to it are still honoured and rewarded. Those who profit by this absurd subversion of principles, and those who lose by this unjust distribution of favours, which seem to have grown into a right, cannot have any other than