He melts with tenderness for those only who touch him by the
remotest relation, and then, without one natural pang, casts away, as a
sort of offal and excrement, the spawn of his disgustful amours, and
sends his children to the hospital of foundlings. The bear loves, licks,
and forms her young, but bears are not philosophers."
This was Burke's opinion of the only contemporary who can be said to
rival him in fervid and sustained eloquence, to surpass him in grace and
persuasiveness of style. Perhaps we should have been more thankful to him
if he had left us instead a record of those "proceedings almost from day
to day" which he had such "good opportunities of knowing," but it
probably never entered his head that posterity might care as much about
the doings of the citizen of Geneva as about the sayings of even a
British Right Honorable. Vanity eludes recognition by its victims in more
shapes, and more pleasing, than any other passion, and perhaps had Mr.
Burke been able imaginatively to translate Swiss Jean Jacques into Irish
Edmund, he would have found no juster equivalent for the obnoxious
trisyllable than "righteous self-esteem." For Burke was himself also, in
the subtler sense of the word, a sentimentalist, that is, a man who took
what would now be called an aesthetic view of morals and politics.
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