Date of Award

6-1926

Degree Type

Bachelors Essay

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts (BA)

Department

English

Abstract

Edmund Burke, the orator, is familiar to all who claim any knowledge of English literature; but it is to be feared that the literary worth of his works has been little appreciated by the casual student of Burke. His name immediately conjures up in our minds a comparison with Cicero, Webster and O'Connell rather then with Newman, Arnold or Ruskin, those whose mastery of style and beautiful prose thought have been the model of all English scholars even to our own time. It is the failing too often of treating the oratory and rhetoric of Burke as things apart and estranged one from the other. In this short treatise, we shall attempt to justify the claim of greatness for Burke as a rhetorician while at the same time considering and giving fair attention to those more familiar details that have established him as the popular champion of our fore-fathers' rights in the old colonial days.

It shall be our purpose to make a study of. the orations and writings of Edmund Burke to discover the outstanding traits of his prose style and to determine, as far as possible, the influences that affected him most and the effect which his writings and speeches have had on audiences, past and present. We shall find that the chief characteristics of his style are his strength, exceptional erudition and brilliant figures of speech and we shall prove our contentions to the various opinions advanced, by quotations from the works of Burke himself. Our second concern shall be to discuss Burke as he is most generally regarded, as the outstanding figure in English oratory. It is this latter conception which is present in the minds of the majority of us. But little do we know of this man if we are ignorant of his surprising versatility and varegated talents. His works are text-books of political science, he is a classical scholar par excellens and an unimpeachable authority on moral philosophy and dogma. The genius of the man has expressed itself in so many varied ways that it is difficult to do full justice to any of them in one short work. Guided then by the knowledge that we cannot give adequate expression nor full justice to Edmund Burke, we shall attempt but to study the man first as the rhetorician and secondly as the orator. Perhaps if we confine ourselves to these two sublimations of Burke's talents, we may be able to give some little new appreciation and admiration of the merits of this colossus of the eighteenth century.

Comments

A Thesis submitted to fulfill the requirements for a Bachelor of Arts degree. College of Liberal Arts.

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