Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 5.djvu/167

 BIRRELL

Independents, Baptists, and all those whom he called Constitutional Dissenters.

He has a fine passage somewhere about rust; for with all his passion for good government he dearly loved a little rust. In this phase of character he reminds one not a little of another great writer — whose death literature has still reason to deplore— George Eliot; who, in her love for old hedge-rows and barns and crumbling moss-grown walls, was a writer after Burke's own heart, whose novels he would have sat up all night to devour; for did he not deny with warmth Gibbon's statement that he had read all five volumes of "Evelina" in a day? "The thing is impossible," cried Burke; "they took me three days, doing nothing else." Now, "Evelina" is a good novel, but "Silas Marner" is a better.

Wordsworth has been called the High Priest of Nature. Burke may be called the High Priest of Order — a lover of settled ways, of justice, peace, and security. His writings are a store- house of wisdom, not the cheap shrewdness of the mere man of the world, but the noble, ani- mating wisdom of one who has the poet's heart as well as the statesman's brain.

Nobody is fit to govern this country who has not drunk deep at the springs of Burke. ' ' Have you read your Burke?" is at least as sensible a question to put to a parliamentary candidate, as to ask him whether he is a total abstainer or 143

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