When one measures Edmund Burke's Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful against the accumulated bulk of his surviving writings – the collected volumes of his correspondence, pamphlets and speeches, the twenty-five reels of microfilmed manuscripts among the Wentworth muniments alone, the twenty-six volumes of longhand transcript from the trial of Warren Hastings – it seems extraordinary that this small treatise could influence so decisively how the rest of his work is read and understood. The 1757 first edition of the Philosophical Enquiry was after all a lean sort of book: Burke was obliged to put a little more flesh on its argumentative bones (an ‘Introduction on Taste’, and several new passages and chapters) when he published the second edition in 1759, and he remained rather apologetic about it. From early in his parliamentary career he complained that the treatise had given him a reputation for being ‘abstracted and subtile’, and when in 1792 Edmund Malone encouraged him to return to it, he found that he had no appetite for the subject: ‘The thread of speculative Science once broken is not easily spliced again.’ So if Burke himself felt that three decades of Westminster graft had extinguished his interest in speculative aesthetics, why do modern readers continue to search for connections between the Philosophical Enquiry and the larger body of his writings?