The Works of the Right Honourable Volume 3

The Works of the Right Honourable Volume 3 by Edmund Burke

William Hazlitt, a political opponent of Burke, regarded him as amongst his three favourite writers (the others being Junius and Rousseau) and made it "a test of the sense and candour of any one belonging to the opposite party, whether he allowed Burke to be a great man".[156] William Wordsworth was originally a supporter of the French Revolution and attacked Burke in A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff (1793), but by the early 19th century he had changed his mind and came to admire Burke. In his Two Addresses to the Freeholders of Westmorland, Wordsworth called Burke "the most sagacious Politician of his age", whose predictions "time has verified".He later revised his poem The Prelude to include praise of Burke ("Genius of Burke! forgive the pen seduced/By specious wonders") and portrayed him as an old oak. Samuel Taylor Coleridge came to have a similar conversion as he had criticised Burke in The Watchman, but in his Friend (1809–1810) had defended Burke from charges of inconsistency. Later in his Biographia Literaria (1817), Coleridge hails Burke as a prophet and praises Burke for referring "habitually to principles. He was a scientific statesman; and therefore a seer". Henry Brougham wrote of Burke that "all his predictions, save one momentary expression, had been more than fulfilled: anarchy and bloodshed had borne sway in France; conquest and convulsion had desolated Europe. […] The providence of mortals is not often able to penetrate so far as this into futurity". George Canning believed that Burke's Reflections "has been justified by the course of subsequent events; and almost every prophecy has been strictly fulfilled"