“To a vigour,” Mr. Burke went on, “that seemed never to calculate upon danger, he joined a prudence that seemed never to run a risk. Though often the object of aspersion—as who, conspicuous in the political world, is not?—he always refused to prosecute; he would not even answer his calumniators. He held that all classes had a right to stand for something in public life! “We,” he said, “who are at the head, Act;—in God’s name let those who are at the other end, Talk! If we are Wrong, ’tis our duty to hearken, and to mend! If we are Right, we may be content enough with our superiority, to teach unprovoked malice its impotence, by leaving it to its own fester.”
“So elevated, indeed,” Mr. Burke continued, “was his disdain of detraction, that instead of suffering it to blight his tranquillity, he taught it to become the spur to his virtues!”
Mr. Burke again paused; paused as if overcome by the warmth of his own emotion of admiration; and presently he gravely protested, that the multifarious perfections of Cardinal Ximenes were beyond human delineation.
Soon, however, afterwards, as if fearing he had become too serious, he rose to help himself to some distant fruit—for all this had passed during the dessert; and then, while standing in the noblest attitude, and with a sudden smile full of radiant ideas, he vivaciously exclaimed, “No imagination—not even the imagination of Miss Burney!—could have invented a character so extraordinary as that of Cardinal Ximenes; no pen—not even the pen of Miss Burney!—could have described it adequately!”
Think of me, my dear Mr. Crisp, at a climax so unexpected! my eyes, at the moment, being openly rivetted upon him; my head bent forward with excess of eagerness; my attention exclusively his own!—but now, by this sudden turn, I myself became the universally absorbing object! for instantaneously, I felt every eye upon my face; and my cheeks tingled as if they were the heated focus of stares that almost burnt them alive!
And yet, you will laugh when I tell you, that though thus struck I had not time to be disconcerted. The whole was momentary; ’twas like a flash of lightning in the evening, which makes every object of a dazzling brightness for a quarter of an instant, and then leaves all again to twilight obscurity.