select Works - 1875 Author:Edmund Burke Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: flashes over his mind. Remark the indignation and bitterness of the following allusion to his own situation in the world of English politicians1, his treatment b... more »y his younger contemporaries, especially Charles Fox2, and the implied comparison between himself and the French statesman De la Tour du Pin, before the latter resigned office. ' . . . From my heart I pity the condition of a respectable servant of the public, like this war minister, obliged in his old age to pledge the assembly in their civic cups, and to enter with a hoary head into all the fantastick vagaries of these juvenile politicians. Such schemes are not like propositions coming from a man of fifty years' wear and tear amongst mankind. They seem rather such as ought to be expected from those grand com- pounders in politics, who shorten the road to their degrees in the state, and have a certain inward fanatical assurance and illumination upon all subjects: upon the credit of which one of their doctors has thought fit, with great applause, and greater success, to caution the assembly not to attend to old men, nor to any persons who valued themselves upon their experience. I suppose all ministers of state must qualify, and take this test; wholly abjuring the errors and heresies of experience and observation. Every man has his own relish. But I think, if I could not attain to the wisdom, I would at least preserve something of the stiff and peremptory3 dignity of age. These gentlemen deal in regeneration ; but at any price I should hardly yield my rigid fibres to be regenerated by them; nor begin, in my grand climacteric, to squall in their new accents, or to stammer, in my second cradle, the elemental sounds of their barbarous metaphysics. 5; isti mihi largiantur ut repuerascam, et in eorum cunis vagiam. iialde recu...« less