carried the judgment of England with him. One of the three or four greatest
movements in modern history, the French Revolution exercised a profound
influence on English thought and literature, and we must devote a few words
to its causes and progress. During the two centuries while England had been
steadily winning her way to constitutional government, France had past more
and more completely under the control of a cynically tyrannical despotism
and a cynically corrupt and cruel feudal aristocracy. [Footnote: The
conditions are vividly pictured in Dickens' 'Tale of Two Cities' and
Carlyle's 'French Revolution.'] For a generation, radical French
philosophers had been opposing to the actual misery of the peasants the
ideal of the natural right of all men to life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness, and at last in 1789 the people, headed by the lawyers and
thinkers of the middle class, arose in furious determination, swept away
their oppressors, and after three years established a republic. The
outbreak of the Revolution was hailed by English liberals with enthusiasm
as the commencement of an era of social justice; but as it grew in violence
and at length declared itself the enemy of all monarchy and of religion,
their attitude changed; and in 1793 the execution of the French king and
queen and the atrocities of the Reign of Terror united all but the radicals
in support of the war against France in which England joined with the other
European countries. During the twenty years of struggle that followed the
portentous figure of Napoleon soon appeared, though only as Burke was
dying, and to oppose and finally to suppress him became the duty of all
Englishmen, a duty not only to their country but to humanity.

At the outbreak of the Revolution Burke was already sixty, and the
inevitable tendency of his mind was away from the enthusiastic liberalism
which had so strongly moved him in behalf of the Americans and the Hindoos.
At the very outset he viewed the Revolution with distrust, and this
distrust soon changed to the most violent opposition. Of actual conditions