methods throughout are suited to declamation and oratory. He lacks the ease and
delicacy that we are accustomed to look for in the best prose writers, and
occasionally one feels the justice of Johnson's stricture, that "he sometimes
talked partly from ostentation", or of Hazlitt's criticism that he seemed to be
"perpetually calling the speaker out to dance a minuet with him before he
begins."

There may be passages here and there that warrant such censure. Burke is
certainly ornate, and at times he is extremely self-conscious, but the dominant
quality of his style, and the one which forever contradicts the idea of mere
showiness, is passion. In his method of approaching a subject, he may be, and
perhaps is, rather tedious, but when once he has come to the matter really in
hand, he is no longer the rhetorician, dealing in fine phrases, but the great
seer, clothing his thoughts in words suitable and becoming. The most magnificent
passages in his writings--the Conciliation is rich in them--owe their charm and
effectiveness to this emotional capacity. They were evidently written in moments
of absolute abandonment to feeling--in moments when he was absorbed in the
contemplation of some great truth, made luminous by his own unrivalled powers.

Closely allied to this intensity of passion, is a splendid imaginative quality.
Few writers of English prose have such command of figurative expression. It must
be said, however, that Burke was not entirely free from the faults which
generally accompany an excessive use of figures. Like other great masters of a
decorative style, he frequently becomes pompous and grandiloquent. His thought,
too, is obscured, where we would expect great clearness of statement,
accompanied by a dignified simplicity; and occasionally we feel that he forgets
his subject in an anxious effort to make an impression. Though there are
passages in his writings that justify such observations, they are few in number,
when compared with those which are really masterpieces of their kind.