1649. At the time Burke was writing, however, there had been very little revolutionary violence; more concerned with persuading his readers than informing them, he greatly exaggerated this element of the revolution in his text for rhetorical effect. In his Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful, he had argued that "large inexact notions convey ideas best", and to generate fear in the reader, in Reflections he constructs the set-piece of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette forced from their palace at sword point. When the violence actually escalated in France in 1793 with the Reign of Terror, Burke was viewed as a prophet. Burke also criticizes the learning associated with the French philosophes; he maintains that new ideas should not, in an imitation of the emerging discipline of science, be tested on society in an effort to improve it, but that populations should rely on custom and tradition to guide them. Composition and publication of the Rights of Men In the advertisement printed at the beginning of the Rights of Men, Wollstonecraft describes how and why she wrote it: So the pamphlet could be published as soon as she finished writing it, Wollstonecraft wrote frantically while her publisher Joseph Johnson printed the pages. In fact, Godwin's Memoirs of Wollstonecraft tells that the sheets of manuscript were delivered to the press as they were written. Halfway through the work, however, she ceased writing. One biographer describes it as a "loss of nerve"; Godwin, in his Memoirs, describes it as "a temporary fit of torpor and indolence". Johnson, perhaps canny enough at this point in their friendship to know how to encourage her, agreed to dispose of the book and told her not to worry about it. Ashamed, she rushed to finish. Wollstonecraft's Rights of Men was published anonymously on 29 November 1790, the first of between fifty and seventy responses to Burke by various authors. Only three weeks later, on 18 December, a second edition, with her name printed on the title page, was issued. Wollstonecraft took time to edit the second edition, which, according to biographer Emily Sunstein, "sharpened her personal attack on Burke" and changed much of the text from first person to third person; "she also added a non-partisan code criticising hypocritical liberals who talk equality but scrape before the powers that be." Structure and major arguments Until the 1970s, the Rights of Men was typically considered disorganized, incoherent,