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૨૯૮
આ વિચારને મૂર્ત સ્વરૂપમાં જાહેર મૂકવાના હેતુથી ઈ. સ. ૧૭૮૦માં vyš Reflections on the French Revolution 1140 yed} બહાર પાડયું. આ પુસ્તકની હજારો નકલો ટૂંક મુદતમાં ખપી ગઈ અંગ્રેજો કાંસની રાજ્યક્રાંતિ વિરુદ્ધ પડ્યા. તેમને એ ડર લાગે કે surely never lighted on this orb which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in; glittering like the morning star, full of life and splendour and joy. Oh! What a revolution and what a heart must I have, to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall. Little did I dream when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult.---But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever. Never, never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a . stain like a wound, which inspired courage while it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness.
Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution.
