Burke's Reflections rebuts Richard Price by name, page-cited quotation, and verbatim citation — not by vague thematic association
Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) opens its substantive argument (pp. 9–18 of the Camelot Series reprint) by naming Richard Price directly: "On the forenoon of the 4th of November last, Doctor Richard Price, a non-conforming minister of eminence, preached at the dissenting meeting-house of the Old Jewry, to his club or society, a very extraordinary miscellaneous sermon." Burke escalates the charge, comparing the sermon's register to a Civil War-era precedent — "a predecessor of Dr. Price, the Rev. Hugh Peters" (1648) — then footnotes his own citations to the printed sermon by page: one reads "Discourse on the Love of our Country, Nov. 4th, 1789, by Dr. Richard Price, 3rd edition, pp. 17 and 18," a second, introducing what Burke treats as the sermon's central and most dangerous doctrine, reads "Discourse on the Lo[v]e of our Country, by Dr. Price, p. 34" (the scan renders "Love" as "Lore," an OCR artifact reproduced verbatim here).
That second citation is not paraphrase. Burke summarizes Price as asserting "that, by the principles of the Revolution, the people of England have acquired three fundamental rights... 1. 'To choose our own governors.' 2. 'To cashier them for misconduct.' 3. 'To frame a government for ourselves,'" and Price's own text at the cited page reads (long-s orthography original): "Thirdly; The right to chufe our own governors; to cafhier them for mifconduct; and, to frame a government for ourfelves." Burke is working from, and citing page-by-page, the actual printed sermon — a mechanism claim about how one primary text engages another, verified directly against both texts (Tier 1) rather than inherited from a secondary retelling. It grounds and specifies the causal claim in claim-price-1789-sermon-provoked-burke-reflections: the "provocation" was deliberate and citational, not a loose contextual association.
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