Depont asked his impressions of the Revolution and Burke replied with two letters. The longer, second letter, drafted after he read Richard Price's speech A Discourse on the Love of Our Country in January 1790, became Reflections on the Revolution in France. Published in November 1790, the work was an instant bestseller as thirteen thousand copies were purchased in the first five weeks and by the following September had gone through eleven editions. According to Stephen Greenblatt in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, "part of its appeal to contemporary readers lay in the highly wrought accounts of the mob's violent treatment of the French king and queen (who at the time Burke was writing were imprisoned in Paris...)." The French king and queen were respectively executed three years later, in January and October 1793. Burke wrote that he did not like abstract thinking, that freedom and equality were different, that genuine equality must be judged by God and that liberty was a construct of the law and no excuse to do whatever one would like. He was not comfortable with radical change and believed that the revolutionaries would find themselves further in trouble as their actions would cause more problems. In his opinions, the revolutionaries did not understand that "there are no rights without corresponding duties, or without some strict qualifications". With his view of what he believed would happen to the revolutionaries, one can see why Burke did not like change. Burke believed that people such as the revolutionaries cannot handle large amounts of power. "When men play God", Burke said, "presently they behave like devils". Arguments In the Reflections, Burke argued that the French Revolution would end disastrously because its abstract foundations, purportedly rational, ignored the complexities of human nature and society. Further, he focused on the practicality of solutions instead of the metaphysics, writing: "What is the use of discussing a man's abstract right to food or to medicine? The question is upon the method of procuring and administering them. In this deliberation I shall always advise to call in the aid of the farmer and the physician, rather than the professor of metaphysics". Following St. Augustine and Cicero, he believed in "human heart"-based government. Nevertheless, he was contemptuous and afraid of the Enlightenment, inspired by the writings of such intellectuals such as David Hume, Edward Gibbon, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire and Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, who