"We ought," he said in a famous sentence, "to venerate where we are unable presently to comprehend." It is easy to see why a mind so attuned recoiled from horror at the French Revolution.

There is something almost sinister in the destiny which confronted Burke with the one great spectacle of the eighteenth century which he was certain not merely to misunderstand but also to hate.

He could not endure the most fragmentary change in tests of religious belief; and the Revolution swept overboard the whole religious edifice.

He would not support the abolition even of the most flagrant abuses in the system of representation; and he was to see in France an overthrow of a monarchy even more august in its prescriptive rights than the English Parliament.

Privileges were scattered to the winds in a single night.