published on 31 October 1797.
The text of A Letter to a Noble Lord, first published on 24 February 1796, comes from the thirteenth impression.
Minor errors of spelling have been silently corrected, although the eighteenth-century orthography of the texts has been preserved. One or two minor doubtful readings have been revised for greater clarity, in accordance with the Bohn and Oxford editions, and other variants have been compared. Burke’s eighteenth-century Greek has been modernized. Quotation marks surround translations from Latin if the quote is direct or fairly direct; quotation marks do not surround translations of proverbial Latin sayings and very indirect (or untraceable) Latin quotations. The editor’s footnotes are bracketed to distinguish them from Burke’s, which have all been retained.
I wish to express appreciation to the staffs of the Beinecke Rare Book Room at the Yale University Library and of the Boston Athenaeum for providing the needed texts. Professor Jeremiah Reedy of Macalester College provided the long translation from Walsingham in An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs and gave useful advice on many of the Latin translations.
Burke scholars will recognize the influence of Francis Canavan and Peter Stanlis in my Foreword, and to them I express gratitude.
This book is dedicated to my wife, Judith C. Ritchie:
Esse sacerdotes delubraque vestra tueri
Poscimus; et quoniam concordes egimus annos,
Auferat hora duos eadem, nec conjugis unquam
Busta meae videam, neu sim tumulandus ab illa.
Works, Bohn
The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke. 9 vols. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1854–62.
Corr., Copeland
Copeland, Thomas W., et al., eds. The Correspondence of Edmund Burke. 10 vols. Chicago and Cambridge: Chicago and Cambridge University Presses, 1958–78.
Corr., 1844
Burke, Edmund. Correspondence of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke between the Year 1744, and the Period of his Decease, in 1797, eds. Charles William Wentworth-Fitzwilliam, 5th Earl Fitzwilliam, and Sir Richard Bourke. 4 vols. London: Francis and John Rivington, 1844.
Parliamentary Register
Parliamentary Register: of History of the Proceedings and Debates of the House of Commons (and House of Lords) … , 112 vols., London, 1775–1813.
Parliamentary History
The Parliamentary History of England from the Norman Conquest in 1066 to the year 1803, ed. W. Cobbett. 36 vols. London: 1806–20.
Reflections
O’Brien, Conor Cruise, ed. Reflections on the Revolution in France. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968.
Writings and Speeches
Langford, Paul, et al., eds. The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke. 12 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981–.
FURTHER REFLECTIONS
ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE
LETTER TO CHARLES-JEAN-FRANÇOIS DEPONT
Edmund Burke’s letter to Charles-Jean-François Depont (1767–1796) is his first extensive analysis of the French Revolution. Written just four months after the fall of the Bastille, when many Englishmen were uncertain in their opinions of the events in France, the letter is striking for the certainty of its judgments. Burke did not send this letter immediately, for he believed it might endanger Depont, but the young Frenchman continued to urge Burke to send his views of the Revolution (Corr. Copeland 6:59–61). Burke probably sent the letter below in early 1790. Burke’s more important, much longer Reflections on the Revolution in France also takes the form of a letter to Depont. In its language and in its themes of constitutional government, prudence, and abstract versus “practical” liberty, the letter below is in some respects an early draft of the Reflections.
The date of this letter is supplied by Alfred Cobban and Robert A. Smith, editors of volume six of the Copeland edition of the Correspondence.
LETTER TO CHARLES-JEAN-FRANÇOIS DEPONT
November 1789
DEAR SIR,
We are extremely happy in your giving us leave to promise ourselves a renewal of the pleasure we formerly had in your company at Beconsfield1 and in London. It was too lively to be speedily forgotten on our part; and we are highly flattered to find that you keep so exactly in your memory all the particulars of the few attentions which you were so good to accept from us during your stay in England. We indulge ourselves in the hope that you will be able to execute what you intend in our favour; and that we shall be more fortunate in the coming spring, than we were in the last.
You have reason to imagine that I have not been as early as I ought, in acquainting you with my thankful acceptance of the correspondence you have been pleased to offer. Do not think me insensible to the honour you have done me. I confess I did hesitate for a time, on a doubt, whether it would be prudent to yield to my earnest desire of such a correspondence.
Your frank and ingenuous manner of writing would be ill answered by a cold, dry, and guarded reserve on my part. It would, indeed, be adverse to my habits and my nature, to make use of that sort of caution in my intercourse with any friend. Besides, as you are pleased to think that your splendid flame of liberty was first lighted up at my faint and glimmering taper, I thought you had a right to call upon me for my undisguised sentiments on whatever related to that subject. On the other hand, I was not without apprehension, that in this free mode of intercourse I might say something, not only disagreeable to your formed opinions upon points on which, of all others, we are most impatient of contradiction, but not pleasing to the power which should happen to be prevalent at the time of your receiving my letter. I was well aware that, in seasons of jealousy, suspicion is vigilant and active; that it is not extremely scrupulous in its means of inquiry; not perfectly equitable in its judgments; and not altogether deliberate in its resolutions. In the ill-connected and inconclusive logic of the passions, whatever may appear blameable is easily transferred from the guilty writer to the innocent receiver. It is an awkward as well as unpleasant accident; but it is one that has sometimes happened. A man may be made a martyr to tenets the most opposite to his own. At length a friend of mine, lately come from Paris, informed me that heats are beginning
