ABSTRACT
Edmund Burke’s earliest ambition in life, before, as Oliver Goldsmith memorably puts it, he “to party gave up what was meant for mankind,” was to become a man of letters (32). In a real sense, he never abandoned this aspiration when he turned to politics, but simply applied his formidable literary and intellectual talents in his new métier. His political orations and compositions are, without a doubt, more highly wrought and densely allusive than those of any contemporary or rival. Nathaniel Wraxall, a member of Parliament from 1780 to 1794 and an acute observer from the Commons benches of the political theater that played out around him, judged Burke without equal in the literary resources at his command:
In 1796 the political radical John Thelwall also paid tribute to that unparalleled range of reference, though in a manner that turns Burke’s gifts against him: “The rage of Juvenil, and the playful levity of Horace, are not sufficient; and Billingsgate and the shambles are forced into alliance with the muses, the classics, and the sciences, to supply him with terms and metaphors sufficiently forcible to express the mighty hatred with which he labours” (30).
