Temperament is the key to biography. The biographer must bring to life the temperament of the subject, encountering him personally, without permitting the biographer's own disposition to color that encounter. That distance is necessary despite the fact that the connection with a subject must be one the biographer feels personally, if there is to be any success. It is a high-wire act, and an early indication of F. P. Lock's success in this second volume of his splendid critical biography of Edmund Burke reassures the reader as early as page 5. Writing about the pleasure Burke took in retreating to his country estate at Beaconsfield during a season of rainstorms and political storms in 1784, Lock notes that “the rain was the easiest to bear, for even Burke could not take it personally.” In that sentence we read all we must know of Burke's highly emotive personality, whose nature was detailed so comprehensively in the first volume of Lock's biography. At the same time we can, with only the smallest amount of irony, see firm evidence of Lock's critical detachment from the subject he knows so well.

F. P. Lock is a professor of English at Queen's University in Ontario, and with the first volume of Edmund Burke (1998) he embarked capably upon a project long overdue. Biographical treatments of the life of Burke began appearing almost immediately after Burke's death. Those treatments, from Robert Bisset's outright hagiography (The Life of Edmund Burke [London, 1800]) to Conor Cruise O’Brien's celebration of Burke's Irishness (The Great Melody [Chicago, 1992]), have been exceptionally numerous, and some even have been creditable. Yet no biography of Burke before Lock's work matches his thorough and unruffled exploration of one of the most polarizing political writers. For scholars interested in Burke's life and works, the beginning of Lock's work in 1998 was a moment awaited for the two centuries since Burke's death. The completion of that work in 2006 is no less notable.

The years encompassed by the present volume are the critical years of Burke's life, just more than a dozen years that contain his decade-long crusade against Warren Hastings, the French Revolution and publication of the Reflections on the Revolution in France, the split with Charles James Fox, and Burke's grief and decline after the death of his son, Richard. As we encounter Burke at the beginning of this volume, the second Rockingham administration has collapsed with the untimely death of the marquess, and Burke is in the wilderness. A Whig ministry under the Earl of Shelburne has failed, as did a temporary coalition with Lord North, and young Pitt has solidified his position, repudiating the old Whigs and Burke's vision of his party. Tumult lies ahead, and the mad pace of events that these pages document tested Burke's political acumen as much as they tax biographers and others who wish to understand him.

Anyone who has worked through the speeches and letters from these years, particularly in an effort to trace the serpentine proceedings against Hastings, knows the complexity and the difficulty involved. Lock's approach is sensible, chronological in its organization but breaking the chapters into digestible bits that take only one or two themes at a time. This is notable especially in chapter 6 (“The Making of the Reflections, 1789–1790”), where Lock takes up the most frenzied moment of Burke's life. Of course this chapter begins by following the events that unfolded rapidly in France and brought forth the revolution. But, contemporaneous to these historic events and the first drafts of the Reflections, Burke also was at pains to maintain the proceedings against Hastings in late 1789 and early 1790 when the House of Commons seemed about to terminate the impeachment trial. Lock's whole biographical project easily could have run aground in its treatment of these critical years, the period that we expect readers to be most interested in while also the most difficult to capture. Lock threads deftly between the Scylla of artificially separating these causes in Burke's life and the Charybdis of making too-facile connections between them. France and Hastings each receive their due, and Lock maintains the theme of Burke's precarious political position to color Burke's responses to both. Yet there is no ambition in this narrative to spread conclusions too thinly over the facts.

The next chapter, focusing on the Reflections squarely, deserves some special attention because it represents a break in the biographical narrative. Lock steps somewhat out of his role as biographer and puts on his English professor hat to analyze the style and rhetoric of the Reflections. Within the detached prose of Lock's biography, phrases such as “Conventional Petrachan images evoke an idealized princesse lointaine” leap out and remind us that the author is present and brings an expertise with him that goes beyond his biographical explorations (298). This could be jarring—indeed, in a sense it is jarring because the tone is so notably different from the rest of this book. Fortunately for Lock and his readers, his analysis is astute and largely free from jargon (the above passage representing a rare exception). Indeed, we might say that the Reflections is such a difficult and densely packed text with so many rhetorical purposes buried within it that we are fortunate to have Lock's skillful analysis to guide us. We should say also that, since Burke is known best for the Reflections, unmasking that text in the way Lock does probably is an essential adjunct to a responsible biographical treatment.

The last, tragic years of Burke's life are here, too. Alienated from his political allies, regarded as a fiend or a madman by enemies, and grieving the death of his son Richard from tuberculosis, Burke embarked upon an energetic retirement, perhaps to “continue the work left undone by his son” as much as to distract himself from the sorrows that surrounded him (479). These were the years of the combative, even vituperative, Letters on a Regicide Peace, and they also saw Burke take up the cause of Roman Catholics in Ireland with renewed vigor. Lock perceptively places this particular cause in the context of Burke's fears of Jacobinism and of how Burke saw religion in any of its traditional forms as a sure rampart against revolutionary fervor.

We see the ease Lock has with Burke's personality in countless small episodes. Five very satisfying pages are devoted to an ongoing real estate dispute between Burke and his neighbor at Beaconsfield, Edmund Waller. We see Burke responding charitably first to provocations from Waller. An exchange of letters proceeds from “gentlemanly nonchalance” to a point where Burke's unleashes his emotions in a way worthy of any of his political causes (103). In all matters, Lock suggests, it was Burke's care (in Burke's own words) “to prove himself ‘perfectly in the right’” (103), and the greatness of Lock's biography lies in how he permits Burke to reveal that drive to us at his moments of historic greatness and his moments of personal pettiness. A whole man with a frustrating and complex temperament emerges from these volumes. To have captured it all so completely is a great achievement for Lock, who can take considerable pride, and readers, who will take great pleasure.