because your reason may not be a good one, or because the person to whom it is addressed may not be able to comprehend it, or because _others_ may not be able to comprehend it. He who offers to go into the grounds of an acknowledged axiom, risks the unanimity of the company ‘by most admired disorder,’ as he who digs to the foundation of a building to shew its solidity, risks its falling. But a common-place is enshrined in its own unquestioned evidence, and constitutes its own immortal basis. Nature, it has been said, abhors a _vacuum_; and the House of Commons, it might be said, hates everything but a common-place!—Mr. Burke did not often shock the prejudices of the House: he endeavoured to _account for them_, to ‘lay the flattering unction’ of philosophy ‘to their souls.’ They could not endure him. Yet he did not attempt this by dry argument alone: he called to his aid the flowers of poetical fiction, and strewed the most dazzling colours of language over the Standing Orders of the House. It was a double offence to them—an aggravation of the encroachments of his genius. They would rather ‘hear a cat mew or an axle-tree grate,’ than hear a man talk philosophy by the hour— Not harsh and crabbed, as dull fools suppose, But musical as is Apollo’s lute, And a perpetual feast of nectar’d sweets, Where no crude surfeit reigns. He was emphatically called the _Dinner-Bell_. They went out by shoals when he began to speak. They coughed and shuffled him down. While he was uttering some of the finest observations (to speak in compass) that ever were delivered in that House, they walked out, not as the beasts came out of the ark, by twos and by threes, but in droves and companies of tens, of dozens, and scores! Oh! it is ‘the heaviest stone which melancholy can throw at a man,’ when you are in the middle of a delicate speculation to see ‘a robusteous, periwig-pated fellow’ deliberately take up his hat and walk out. But what effect could Burke’s finest observations be expected to have on the House of Commons in their corporate capacity? On the supposition that they were original, refined, comprehensive, his auditors had never heard, and assuredly they had never thought of them before: how then should they know that they were good or bad, till they had time to consider better of it, or till they were told what to think? In the mean time, their effect would be to stop the question: they were blanks in the debate: they could at best only be laid aside and left _ad referendum_. What would it signify if four or five persons, at the utmost, felt their full force and fascinating power the instant they were delivered? They would be utterly unintelligible to nine-tenths of the persons present, and their impression upon any particular individual, more knowing than the rest, would be involuntarily paralysed by the torpedo touch of the elbow of a country-gentleman or city-orator. There is a reaction in insensibility