Page:Letters, speeches and tracts on Irish affairs.djvu/12

 indeed, and a loss for which no conversance [sic] with contemporary prose literature can make up, any more than conversance with contemporary poetry could make up to is for unacquaintance with Shakespeare and Milton. In both cases the unacquaintance shuts us out from great sources of English life, thought, and language, and from the capital records of its history and development, and leaves us in consequence very imperfect and fragmentary Englishmen.) It can hardly be said that this inattention to our prose classics is due to their being continued in collections made up of many volumes,—collections dear and inaccessible. Their remaining buried in such collections,—a fate so unlike that which has been Rousseau's in Prance, or Lessing's in Germany,—is rather the result of our inattention than its cause. While they are so buried, however, they are in truth almost inaccessible to the general public, and all occasions for rescuing and exhibiting representative specimens of them should be welcomed and used.

Such an occasion offers itself, for Burke, in the interest about Ireland which the present state of that country compels even the most unwilling Englishman to feel. Our neglected classic is by birth an Irishman; he knows Ireland and its history thoroughly. "I have studied it," he most truly says, "with more care than is common." He is the greatest of our political thinkers and writers. But his political thinking and writing has more value on some subjects than on others; the value is at its highest when the subject is Ireland. The writ-