Nay, the perspective varies, and shows them quite other than you thought them.
At a distance, if we judge uncertainly of men, we must judge worse of _opportunities_, which continually vary their shapes and colours, and pass away like clouds." Our admiration at such words is quickly stifled when we recall the confident, unsparing, immoderate criticism which both preceded and followed this truly rational exposition of the danger of advising, in cases where we know neither the men nor the opportunities.

Why was savage and unfaltering denunciation any less unbecoming than, as he admits, crude prescriptions would have been unbecoming?
By the end of 1791, when he wrote the _Thoughts on French Affairs_, he had penetrated still farther into the essential character of the Revolution.

Any notion of a reform to be effected after the decorous pattern of 1688, so conspicuous in the first great manifesto, had wholly disappeared.

The changes in France he allowed to bear little resemblance or analogy to any of those which had been previously brought about in Europe.

It is a revolution, he said, of doctrine and theoretic dogma.