The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 05 (of 12)Burke, Edmund
History
The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 05 (of 12)
Burke, Edmund
Great Britain -- Politics and government -- 1760-1820; Political science -- Early works to 1800
Why will they not let me remain in obscurity and inaction? Are they
apprehensive, that, if an atom of me remains, the sect has something to
fear? Must I be annihilated, lest, like old John Zisca's, my skin might
be made into a drum, to animate Europe to eternal battle against a
tyranny that threatens to overwhelm all Europe and all the human race?
My Lord, it is a subject of awful meditation. Before this of France,
the annals of all time have not furnished an instance of a _complete_
revolution. That revolution seems to have extended even to the
constitution of the mind of man. It has this of wonderful in it, that it
resembles what Lord Verulam says of the operations of Nature: It was
perfect, not only in its elements and principles, but in all its members
and its organs, from the very beginning. The moral scheme of France
furnishes the only pattern ever known which they who admire will
_instantly_ resemble. It is, indeed, an inexhaustible repertory of one
kind of examples. In my wretched condition, though hardly to be classed
with the living, I am not safe from them. They have tigers to fall upon
animated strength; they have hyenas to prey upon carcasses. The national
menagerie is collected by the first physiologists of the time; and it is
defective in no description of savage nature. They pursue even such as
me into the obscurest retreats, and haul them before their revolutionary
tribunals. Neither sex, nor age, nor the sanctuary of the tomb, is
sacred to them. They have so determined a hatred to all privileged
orders, that they deny even to the departed the sad immunities of the
grave. They are not wholly without an object. Their turpitude purveys to
their malice; and they unplumb the dead for bullets to assassinate the
living. If all revolutionists were not proof against all caution, I
should recommend it to their consideration, that no persons were ever
known in history, either sacred or profane, to vex the sepulchre, and by
their sorceries to call up the prophetic dead, with any other event than
the prediction of their own disastrous fate.--"Leave me, oh, leave me to
repose!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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