"His Reflections were written in 1790, before there had been any degeneration in the moral fervours of the politicians in Paris, while Louis XVI still reigned and Robespierre was unheard of; and it was the arrival of the dooms Burke had prophesied that made him a major figure of his time. He spent the best part of the decade in a kind of mental thunderstorm, ending it with a plea that the place of his burial should be kept secret, lest vindictive democrats dug up his bones for desecration. On the whole, whatever the merit of these ringing arguments, his influence was bad. His opinions on the horrors of social revolution, and on the impropriety of any change at all, became the commonplaces of dinner-tables, and both the ethos and the methods of the landowners of England hardened accordingly."