"Aye, sir," Johnson broke in, "and there is a gratification of pride.

Though we cannot outvote them, we will out-argue them." Out-arguing is not perhaps the right word for most of Burke's performances.

He is at heart thinking more of the subject itself than of those on whom it was his apparent business to impress a particular view of it.

He surrenders himself wholly to the matter, and follows up, though with a strong and close tread, all the excursions to which it may give rise in an elastic intelligence--"motion," as De Quincey says, "propagating motion, and life throwing off life." But then this exuberant way of thinking, this willingness to let the subject lead, is less apt in public discourse than it is in literature, and from this comes the literary quality of Burke's speeches.
With all his hatred for the book-man in politics, Burke owed much of his own distinction to that generous richness and breadth of judgment which had been ripened in him by literature and his practice in it.
Like some other men in our history, he showed that books are a better preparation for statesmanship than early training in the subordinate posts and among the permanent officials of a public department.
There is no copiousness of literary reference in his works, such as over-abounded in civil and ecclesiastical publicists of the seventeenth century.

Nor can we truly say that there is much, though there is certainly some, of that tact, which literature is alleged to confer on those who approach it in a just spirit and with the true gift.