Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke  

"But it must be recollected that in 1756 Bolingbroke was considered absolutely first-rate, and that it was no slight exercise in self-education for a young man to force himself to forge the admired style of a great favourite with so much success as to take in the St. Johnians themselves. Even thus early Burke looked upon any relaxation of the curb of government on the popular mouth as being not less infamous than perilous; and it really is astonishing that there should have been readers of the Vindication who did not perceive that the arguments in that work were absurd, and the whole thing a piece of polemic by parody. It is very interesting to those who have mastered the needful elements of irony to trace in this his first publication the same burning zeal for constitutional forms of accepted rule which inspired the great speeches of his later manhood. One unfortunate result of this early pastiche has been noted by Mr. John Morley."--A History of Eighteenth Century Literature (1889) by Edmund Gosse