IV.--'SECOND LETTER ON A REGICIDE PEACE' BY THE RIGHT HONOURABLE EDMUND BURKE (_I have found the selection of a suitable sample of Burke to be my most difficult task in this volume. All his writings, as I have pointed out in the general introduction, are, after a sort, pamphlets; and this of itself was an embarrassment. It was partly complicated and partly lessened by the fact that the form of his speeches naturally excluded them. Many of his other works--notably the _Thoughts on the Present Discontents_, the immortal _Reflections on the French Revolution_, and the _Appeal from the New Whigs to the Old_--were much too long for a scheme in which I have made it a rule to give in each case entire works or divisions of works. I at last reduced the suitable candidates to three--the _Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe_, that _To a Noble Lord_, and the present number of the _Letters on a Regicide Peace_. The first went as being to some extent identical in subject with the examples of another writer, Sydney Smith, which I had already resolved on giving; the second as being too much in the nature of a personal apologia. With the third, which I looked on at first with least favour, I have become increasingly well satisfied. It has not the gorgeous rhetoric of _The Letter to a Noble Lord_, the _Reflections_, and others. It has nothing so lively as the contrast between France and Algiers in its immediate predecessor. It may even seem, to those who have accustomed themselves to think of Burke wholly or mainly as a gorgeous rhetorician, rather tame as a whole. But if it does not soar, it never droops; it is admirably proportioned, admirably written, and admirably argued throughout, and it shows great knowledge and mastery of foreign politics--the point in which English statesmen have always been weakest. I may add that it seems to me a triumphant refutation of the charge--constantly brought against Burke not merely by extreme democrats, but by the usual advocate of the _juste milieu_,--that in his later years, and especially in these very Letters, he became a mere raving Gallophobe, with no sense of proportion or circumstance. For my part, I have read scores, probably hundreds, of books--English, French, and German--on the French Revolution; I have never read one that made Burke obsolete. Let it only be added that the author, who was born in 1730, was very near the end of his career--he died next year--when he wrote these letters, and that the peace proposals which he deprecated, and which he did not a little to avert, were dictated on the one side by the sobering down of the first Revolutionary fervour under the Directory; on the other by the persistent ill-success of the Allies, and the conflicts of interest and principle which had arisen among them._)