EDMUND BURKE AND LORD BEACONSFIELD.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume IV, Issue 193, 8 December 1876, Page 14

EDMUND BURKE AND LORD BEACONSFIELD.

The offer of a peerage with the title of Beacomfield having onca been made to Edmund Burke, wo are naturally led to compare the present Earl Beaconsfield, in his recent elevation to the Earldom, with that illustrious Minister who, like himself, was not only a power in the State but also a star in the world of letters. Though as an orator Burke certainly carries off tlie palm, Lord Beaconsfield has no mean powers of debate, and there are fields of literature untried by Burke which he has cultivated with rare success. If nothing which he has written has ever thrilled so many hearts in Europe as the " Reflections on the French Revolution," yet on the other hand, lie has given to society a succession of brilliant novels in which he has made fiction a vehicle for communicating political ideas and maturing social schemes. As doctrinaire novels those of Mr. Disraeli take high rank, and promise to retain for a long while to come their place in English literature. Both of the statesmen whom we are here comparing rose from the middle rank of society, Lord Beaconsfield's father having been a literary man, and Edmund Burkes an attorney in large practice. Both have been intensely Conservative, for although Burke was counted among the Whigs and held office in Lord Rockingham's Whig Administration, the Whip of that period was not unlike the Conservative of our time ; and Burke penetrated in his day, as Lord Beaconsfield has in ours, the secret wisdom of our constitution, and felt an ardent attachment to all its parts. He saw more than most around him. the evils resulting from the abuse of authority and liberty, and the impossibility of building up suddenly a durable form of Government. He was more than a great man ; he represented a principle. He has often been accused of veering about, and of Bliding out of liberal into despotic proclivities. But the charge is false. He never shifted his ground though he sometimes changed his front. He always pleaded for order, and " a manly, moral, regulated liberty." The measure of popular power which he advocated was perhaps the utmost for which society in his day was rips. The present Premier resembles him in these respects. If Burke was a Conservative Liberal, Disraeli has been a Liberal {Conservative. When the time was in Disraeli's opinion ripe, he advocated and passed a larger measure of popular suffrage than his opponents had ever ventured to propose, and Burke severed himself from Fox only when Fox appeared to him to be helping forward the reign of a tyrannous and unprincipled democracy. A general political consistency has marked the career both of Burke and Disraeli, arid posterity will know how to award due honor to the second as it did to the first. In addition to the other qualities they have in common, both have been men of genius. It is impossible to take their writings in hand and not be struck by the original turn of: tnought and expression which characterises the productions of each. Dor is the resemblance in this respect a general one merely ; they have special points of contact, as for example the eastern colouring and imagery acquired by Disraeli in his travels, and by Burke in his studies. Id the speeches delivered by the latter in the trial of Warren Hastings, as well as the debates in the House of Commons in which India was concerned, it was evident that the map of the peninsula from Mount Imaus to Cape Comorin lay before bis mind's eye, and that years had been spent by him in making himself acquainted with the features of the country, the habits of the people, the splendour of its cities, and the riches of its rayahs. !Nor was it altogether otherwise with Disraeli. Nearly fifty years ago he was observing and musing in Constantinople, in Syria, Egypt, and the remote recesses of Nutoi». Many passages in c Sidonia ' and ' Tancred ' are but reproductions of experiences and reflections of his own in deserted and hallowed spots of Africa and the East. In ' Lothair ' too he is fain to recur again to the Orient climes he loved and visited in his youth, and to mingle philosophy and romance in the person of the Old Man of the Mountains. In 1831 he nearly endangered his life in an attempt he made to penetrate the Mosque of Omar at Jerusalem — that city to which his Jewish ancestry has ever bound him with instinctive affection. The rich Oriental colouring wliich pervades Burkes Begum Speech gives effect to many chapters in Disraeli's novels. Sydney Smith wrote of him* 1 in 1841 : "He is, I think, very likely to marry a Circassian. He is an ambitious man, though he looks as if his brethren had just «old him to the Ishmaelite merchants." In something of the same spirit Mr. John Lemoinne has said recently in tbo ' Debata ' : "Heis in every sense of the term an Oriental, a man of the ' Arabian Nights.' " — ' Tablet.'