When the news reached England that the insurgents of Paris had stormed the Bastille, Fox exclaimed with exultation, how much it was the greatest event that had ever happened in the world, how much the best.

Is it an infirmity to wish for an instant that some such phrase of generous hope had escaped from Burke; that he had for a day or an hour undergone that fine illusion which was lighted up in the spirits of men like Wordsworth and Coleridge?
Those great poets, who were destined one day to preach even a wiser and a loftier conservatism than his own, have told us what they felt-- When France in wrath her giant limbs upreared, And with that oath, which smote air, earth, and sea, Stamped her strong foot, and said she would be free.
Burke from the first espied the looming shadow of a catastrophe.

In August he wrote to Lord Charlemont that the events in France had something paradoxical and mysterious about them; that the outbreak of the old Parisian ferocity might be no more than a sudden explosion, but if it should happen to be _character_ rather than accident, then the people would need a strong hand like that of their former masters to coerce them; that all depended upon the French having wise heads among them, and upon these wise heads, if such there were, acquiring an authority to match their wisdom.

There is nothing here but a calm and sagacious suspense of judgment.

It soon appeared that the old Parisian ferocity was still alive.