Page:Biographia Hibernica volume 1.djvu/278

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BURKE 267 ling particularly ou the French revolution, and on the separation from admired friends, he spoke with pleasure of the conscious rectitude of his intentions; and entreated that, if any unguarded asperity of his had offended them, to believe that no offence was intended. On the following day, while one of his friends, with the assistanee of his servants, was carrying him into another room, he faintly uttered God bless you !" fell back, and instantly expired, in the sixty-eighth year of his age. In this sketch of the life of Edmund Burke, it has been impossible to insert even the titles of his numerous publi eations. They have been since published entire by his executors Drs. King and Lawrence, in five vols. 4to. and twelve vols. 8vo. and will ever form a stupendous monu- ment of his great and unrivalled talents. By the political student, however, they will require to be read with a con- siderable portion of that judgment which, in the author, was frequently paralysed by the rapidity of his ideas, and the bewitching seductions of his imagination. Iu his person, Burke was about five feet ten inches high, erect, and well formed; with a countenance rather soft and open, which, except by an occasional bend of his brow, caused by his being near-sighted, indicated none of those great traits of mind which he possessed. The best print of him is from a half-length by Sir Joshua Reynolds, painted when he was in the meridian of life. An opinion bas been very prevalent, that, Sir Joshua Reynolds' lectures were written by Burke,-but whoever will compare these discourses with the Essay on the Sub- lime and Beautiful, will find their theories of beauty to have been by no means the same. According to Burke, comparative smallness, smoothness, variety in the direction of their parts, freedon from angularity ia their parts, delicacy of construction, clearness and brightness, colour without glare,-these are the constituents of beauty. In this enumeration, Burke has omitted one great con- stituent of beauty, infinitely more important than all he