Millions daily bathed in the poisonous damps and destructive effluvia of lead, silver, copper, and arsenic, to say nothing of those other employments, those stations of wretchedness and contempt, in which civil society has placed the numerous _enfans perdus_ of her army.

Would any rational man submit to one of the most tolerable of these drudgeries, for all the artificial enjoyments which policy has made to result from them ?...

Indeed the blindness of one part of mankind co-operating with the frenzy and villainy of the other, has been the real builder of this respectable fabric of political society: and as the blindness of mankind has caused their slavery, in return their state of slavery is made a pretence for continuing them in a state of blindness; for the politician will tell you gravely that their life of servitude disqualifies the greater part of the race of man for a search of truth, and supplies them with no other than mean and insufficient ideas.

This is but too true; and this is one of the reasons for which I blame such institutions.
From the very beginning, therefore, Burke was drawn to the deepest of all the currents in the thought of the eighteenth century.

Johnson and Goldsmith continued the traditions of social and polite literature which had been established by the Queen Anne men.