You, if you are what you ought to be, are in my eye the great oaks that shade a country, and perpetuate your benefits from generation to generation.

The immediate power of a Duke of Richmond, or a Marquis of Rockingham, is not so much of moment; but if their conduct and example hand down their principles to their successors, then their houses become the public repositories and office of record for the constitution....

I do not look upon your time or lives as lost, if in this sliding away from the genuine spirit of the country, certain parties, if possible--if not, the heads of certain families--should make it their business by the whole course of their lives, principally by their example, to mould into the very vital stamina of their descendants those principles which ought to be transmitted pure and unmixed to posterity." Perhaps such a passage as this ought to be described less as reflection than as imagination--moral, historic, conservative imagination--in which order, social continuity, and the endless projection of past into present, and of present into future, are clothed with the sanctity of an inner shrine.

We may think that a fox-hunting duke and a racing marquis were very poor centres round which to group these high emotions.

But Burke had no puny sentimentalism, and none of the mere literary or romantic conservatism of men like Chateaubriand.