Mr. John Morley's estimate of Burke is known to us all, and it is what might be expected. As a philosophical politician, and as a speculative writer in general, Burke, of course, pleases Mr. Morley by the positive tendencies of his mind. We are pleased to see that he assigns its due rank to the too often underrated Inquiry about the Sublime and Beautiful. But Mr. Morley has perhaps the fault which Sterne told his friend the Count belonged especially to the French; he is "too serious." Of course, Burke is a great man, and one must not cut jokes in a memoir of him--at least one must not if one can't. But it is quite certain Sydney Smith would have done it; and there are many ways in which a page may be lit up. Well worth notice, as an amusing touch, was that passage in the Inquiry in which Burke speaks deprecatingly of Bunyan, because he did not write like Virgil, and though the present work "is biographical rather than critical," we miss a number of amusing anecdotes. This may be the result of literary fastidiousness on Mr. Morley's part, but, if so, we submit that the fastidiousness is carried too far. There is a little story that some one (we forget the name at the moment) who had lost largely by investing in some West Indian property, alleged that he had been induced to invest by Burke's glowing descriptions of the country, and that Burke replied, "Ods boddikins! must one swear to the truth of a song?"--or in very similar language. Now this is really illustrative. We can by no means agree with Mr. Morley that Burke was free from the vicious tendencies of the rhetorician, not to say the rhetorical Celt. He had the Celtic leaning towards forlorn hopes, and the Celtic want of truthfulness. Of course, the Dr. Richard Price, who is so contemptuously treated in the "Reflections," was a much smaller man than Burke, but he had more love of truth and more capacity of adhering to principle in his little finger than Burke had in his whole nature. Mr. John Morley does his friendly and ingeniously reticent best for him; but students who reject the "positive" method (except as an auxiliary or a check) will persist in thinking that the painful tangles of the great man's life, and the blind alleys and other faults of his writings, were the result of his deficiency on the side of truthfulness. It will be doing anything but injustice to Burke, Mr. Morley, or the reader, if we call particular attention to p. 173 and so on to p. 177 inclusive. They give a bird's-eye view of the most important part of the subject; they contain instructive comparisons between Burke, Sir Thomas More, and Turgot: and they seem to us to contain large proof in small compass of what Mr. Morley will of course not admit--namely, Burke's want of love for the truth, and his incapacity for abstract speculation.