Our disgust at the pages of insult which were here levelled at a great man, is perhaps moderated by the thought that Burke himself, who of all people ought to have known better, had held up to public scorn and obloquy men of such virtue, attainments, and real service to mankind as Richard Price and Joseph Priestley.
It was during these months that he composed the _Letters on a Regicide Peace_, though the third and fourth of them were not published until after his death.

There have been those to whom these compositions appeared to be Burke's masterpieces.

In fact they are deplorable.
They contain passages of fine philosophy and of skilful and plausible reasoning, but such passages only make us wonder how they come to be where they are.

The reader is in no humour for them.

In splendour of rhetoric, in fine images, in sustention, in irony, they surpass anything that Burke ever wrote, but of the qualities and principles that, far more than his rhetoric, have made Burke so admirable and so great--of justice, of firm grasp of fact, of a reasonable sense of the probabilities of things--there are only traces enough to light up the gulfs of empty words, reckless phrases, and senseless vituperations, that surge and boil around them.
It is with the same emotion of "grief and shame" with which Fox heard Burke argue against relief to Dissenters, that we hear him abusing the courts of law because they did not convict Hardy and Horne Tooke.