See, therefore, the immeasurableness of misconception. Of all public men,
that stand confessedly in the first rank as to splendor of intellect,
Burke was the _least_ popular at the time when our blind friend Schlosser
assumes him to have run off with the lion's share of popularity. Fox, on
the other hand, as the leader of opposition, was at that time a household
term of love or reproach, from one end of the island to the other. To the
very children playing in the streets, Pitt and Fox, throughout Burke's
generation, were pretty nearly as broad distinctions, and as much a war-
cry, as English and French, Roman and Punic. Now, however, all this is
altered. As regards the relations between the two Whigs whom Schlosser so
steadfastly delighteth to misrepresent,
'Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer'
for that intellectual potentate, Edmund Burke, the man whose true mode of
power has never yet been truly investigated; whilst Charles Fox is known
only as an echo is known, and for any real _effect_ of intellect upon
this generation, for anything but the 'whistling of a name,' the Fox of
1780-1807 sleeps where the carols of the larks are sleeping, that
gladdened the spring-tides of those years--sleeps with the roses that
glorified the beauty of their summers. [10]
JUNIUS
Schlosser talks of Junius, who is to him, as to many people, more than
entirely the enigma of an enigma, Hermes Trismegistus, or the mediaeval
Prester John.
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