He has not observed on the nature of vanity who does not know that it is omnivorous,--that it has no choice in its food,--that it is fond to talk even of its own faults and vices, as what will excite surprise and draw attention, and what will pass at worst for openness and candor.
Burke analyzes the nature of vanity, suggesting it consumes everything, including its own flaws.
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The people of England will not ape the fashions they have never tried, nor go back to those which they have found mischievous on trial.
Always acting as if in the presence of canonized forefathers, the spirit of freedom, leading in itself to misrule and excess, is tempered with an awful gravity.
We procure reverence to our civil institutions on the principle upon which Nature teaches us to revere individual men: on account of their age, and on account of those from whom they are descended.
When such an unwarrantable maxim is once established, that no throne is lawful but the elective, no one act of the princes who preceded this era of fictitious election can be valid.
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