BURKE. world tbe essays of his own inexperience for the produc- tions of a veteran, and such a veteran as Bolingbroke; but the experiment succeeded. Macklin the player, who was a kind of professor of Belles Lettres at the Grecian coffee-house, affected to detect Bolingbroke at every turn and exclaimed to the young templars, Burke, perhaps, being one of the audience, "Oh! this must be Harry Bo- lingbroke, I know him by his cloven foot." It is also said that Warburton, and even Chesterfield, were at first de- ceived. It may have been so, but to us the irony appears tolerably evident. Burke's intention by this ironical attack upon society, as at present constituted, was to shew the disciples of Lord Bolingbroke, that the same train of reasoning by which their master had attempted to explode the religion of their country, in whose fate they were but little interested, might be applied to the destruction of their property and the annibilation of their privileges, and wisely concluded that the argument ad crumenam was the most effective, if not the soundest which could be employed against them. There is a radical fallacy in the reasoning of the sceptical philosophers, which lays them fairly open to such attacks as this of Burke's. They take it for granted, that all the evils which exist, are effects of the peculiar systems under which they exist. They deem it sufficient to point out evil to prove the necessity of alteration, forgetting that good and bad, like up and down, are, practically speaking, only terms of comparison, and, that it is idle to point out defects in a system, without at the same time furnishing an opportunity of comparing them with remedies; for since a perfect system can never be made without perfect materials, it behoves the objector to shew that the defect is in the construction, and not in the elements, which he cannot do, unless by shewing how a different construction would have obviated the objection. In a rapid and masterly sketch, Burke shews that political societies have seldom been employed but in injuring esch
