Prejudice and error is only a mist, which the sun, which has now risen; will effectively disperse. Keep them about you as tight as the countryman in the fable did his cloak; the same sun without any more violence than the warmth of his beams, will compel you to throw it aside, unless you chose to sweat under it, and bear the ridicule of all your cooler and less encumbered companions.29

Among the radicals who had self-consciously put aside all cloaks of mist and mystery was Jeremy Bentham, who was not above using, against the Reflections, the same exaggerated near-hysterical rhetoric that was Burke’s trademark. Bentham described Burke as “blinded by his rage, in this his frantic exclamation, wrung from him by the unquenched thirst for lucre—this mad man, than whom none perhaps was ever more mischievous—this incendiary.”30

Two of the most famous radical replies to Burke’s Reflections emphasized the same theme—Burke’s disregard for the age-old suffering of the common people in his preoccupation with the brutality of revolutionary justice. Thomas Paine, in his Rights of Man, saw Burke venerating power and “all the governments in the world, while the victims who suffer under them, whether sold into slavery, or tortured out of existence, are wholly forgotten.”31 But it was the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft who best captured this common radical response to Burke.

Misery to reach your heart I perceive, must have its caps and bells; your tears are reserved, very naturally considering your character, for the declamation of the theater, or for the downfall of queens, whose rank throws a graceful veil over vices that degrade humanity; but the distress of many industrious mothers whose helpmates have been torn from them, and the hungry cry of the helpless babes, were vulgar sorrows that could not move your commiseration, though they might extort an alms.32

Burke was, of course, soundly praised by members of the belleslettres circles in which he moved after his literary and political debut in London. He was feted by the likes of Samuel Johnson, David Garrick, and Oliver Goldsmith, on the one hand, and by bluestockings like Mrs. Montagu, Mrs. Carter, and Mrs. Veysey, on the other. James Boswell, Horace Walpole, Arthur Young, and Fanny Burney sang his praises. They all were dazzled primarily by his reputation for spellbinding oratory in the Commons. It would be the French Revolution, however, and his response to it that made him a legendary figure. In seventeen days after its publication on November 1, 1790, 5,500 copies of his Reflections were sold. By November 29 the sales had reached twelve thousand, according to Burke’s account. Within a year some nineteen thousand copies had been sold in England.

The establishment loved Reflections, and with its response began the myth of Burke as heroic Tory defender of the faith. Conservatives rallied to what they had long sought—a resounding defense of their privileges and a clarion call for resistance to Jacobinism, to democracy and leveling in both France and England. William Windham, fast becoming a leader in the House of Commons, wrote that “never was there, I suppose, a work so valuable in its kind, or that displayed powers of so extraordinary a nature.” It was a work, he wrote, quite “capable of ... turning the stream of opinion throughout Europe.”33 George III is quoted as having said, “Burke’s Reflections is a good book, a very good book; every gentleman ought to read it.”34 At Oxford there was talk of awarding Burke an LL.D. “in consideration of his very able Representation of the True Principles of our Constitution Ecclesiastical and Civil.”35 The Times of London saw it as a welcome antidote to “all those dark insidious minds who would wish to level it in a similar manner with the French for the sake of their own selfish purposes.”36 The great historian Edward Gibbon agreed. Reflections was “a most admirable medicine against the French disease,” which was making too much headway in England. He admired Burke’s eloquence and “adored his chivalry.” He even forgave him his superstition. 37

The mythic figure of Burke was fast taking form even in the last years of the eighteenth century. Two people crucial in helping to give Burke to history were poets who came to Burke guilt-ridden over their own early enthusiasm for Jacobinism. The young Coleridge, for example, had attacked in an ode of 1794 Burke’s “wizard spell” in rallying Europe against Jacobinism. Years later he wrote of Burke as “a great man,” a man of “transcendent greatness” and “of measureless superiority to those about him.” He could not conceive “of a time or a state of things in which the writings of Burke will not have the highest value.” He saw in Burke’s writings “the germs of almost all political truths.”38 Wordsworth in 1799 wrote of “that great stage, where Senators, tongue-favoured men, perform.” One senator he remembers above all. And so the legend of Burke who said “no” took shape.

Genius of Burke! forgive the pen reduced
By specious wonders, and too slow to tell
Of what the ingenuous, what bewildered men,
Beginning to mistrust their boastful guides,
And wise men, willing to grow wiser, caught
Rapt auditors! from they most eloquent tongue—
Now mute, for ever mute in the cold grave
I see him,—old, but vigorous in age,—
Stand like an oak whose stag-horn branches start
Out of its leafy brow, the more to awe
The younger brethren of the grove. But some—
While he forewarns, denounces, launches forth,
Against all systems built on abstract rights,
Keen ridicule; the majesty proclaims
Of Institutes and Laws, hallowed by time;
Declares the vital power of social ties
Endeared by custom; and with high disdain,
Exploding against Theory, insists
Upon the allegiance to which men are born. 39

In the nineteenth century, however, Burke the heroic and legendary figure, the conservative prophet, lay dormant. He was remembered more as the model of the prudent statesman whose teaching contained the essence of political wisdom. Even more than this, he was eulogized as a great master of the English language. William Hazlitt, Thomas De Quincey, and Matthew Arnold praised Burke’s prose. According to Macaulay he was the greatest Englishman of letters since Milton.