Project Gutenburg's ever expanding library includes volumes 1-12 of the Right Honorable Edmund Burke, should you want to get a sense of the expanse of his writing, and if you're willing and able to read it on line. If you're looking for an encyclopedia article with some basics, you could do worse than the Wikipedia entry. Try the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy where someone thought it prudent to use the word "whilst":
Whilst Burke's thought has never lacked interpreters, on the whole understanding has been attempted without the persistence of historical insight and the strength of conceptual grasp required to do justice to him. Hence he has suffered an ironic fate for one who urged breadth and precision of thought. That is to say, he has figured as the spokesman for a very limited number of points. This type of treatment began in the nineteenth century, when Burke was invoked as an antidote to the confidence of the French Revolution by liberal thinkers who prized its principles, saw their narrowness, and required a sense of historical development to situate them properly.
Whilst--?
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Whilst the Victorian Web entry for Burke on the sublime is all too brief, you might find the contextualizing of nineteenth-century aesthetics very helpful. In fact if you're going to poke around for information on the Internet, I suggest you stick to scholarly resources as much as possible, so start learning to identify the ones you can use. Victorian Web is trustworthy and the overview of many of its featured fields is wonderfully extensive. Look at nineteenth-century religion, for example. The varieties of Christian theologies in the Victorian period alone are staggering--I know, I know, I'm jumping ahead of our Romantics and Burke--but do note that both Deism and Atheism have their public (popularized?) roots in early eighteenth-century thought. Just as we thought. It makes sense that a culture so convinced of aesthetics would also necessarily be invested in human autonomy.
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Burke on taste: (click to enlarge)
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