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of the people. This sympathy may be due in part to the fact that he was a native of a country which had suffered long under oppression. He was born in Ireland in 1729,1 the son of a solicitor in good practice. Though Burke's mother was a Roman Catholic and brought up his sister in the same faith, yet he and his two brothers adopted the religion of their Protestant father. Throughout his life, however, he was always so tolerant of Catholics that he was sometimes charged with being a Jesuit.

At the age of about twelve he went to school to a Quaker, Abraham Shackleton, for whose character he had the highest regard, and to whom he always professed to owe the best part of his education. After two years with Mr. Shackleton, of whose son Richard he made a lasting friend, Burke entered Trinity College, Dublin, where he took his bachelor's degree in 1748. In the half-dozen letters which he wrote from college to Shackleton, he stands before us full of attraction, a young man brimming with life, serious in thought, and eager for knowledge. In some pages he gives vivacious accounts of his walks in the country, and in others he considers such matters as the still unsettled question of the salvation of the heathen: “I am of your opinion that those poor souls who never had the happiness of hearing that saving name shall in no wise be damned. But, as you know, . . . there are several degrees of felicity: a lower one, which the mercy of God will suffer them to enjoy, but not anything to be compared to that of those who have lived and died in Christ." A bishop could

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1 Of the several biographies of Burke the best are James Prior's, 2 vols., London, 1854; John Morley's small volume in the English Men of Letters, and the twenty pages in the Dictionary of National Biography. In connection with any of them the Correspondence, London, 1844, is very interesting. Accounts of Burke's life, in some respects prejudiced, but showing contemporary opinion, appeared in the Annual Register for 1797 and 1798. The present narrative is based upon Morley's. 3 Ibid., 4-6. 4 Ibid., 9.

2 Correspondence, I, 254.

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not be more cocksure. In his pursuit of knowledge Burke seems to have been rather unsystematic. Of his fits of "madness over various studies he wrote: "First I was greatly taken with natural philosophy, which, while I should have given my mind to logic, employed me incessantly. This I call my furor mathematicus. But this worked off as soon as I began to read it in the college, as men by repletion cast off their stomachs all they have eaten. Then I turned back to logic and metaphysics. Here I remained a good while, and with much pleasure; and this was my furor logicus, a disease very common in the days of ignorance and very uncommon in these enlightened times. Next succeeded the furor historicus, which also had its day, but is now no more, being entirely absorbed in the furor poeticus." By the furor poeticus he was inspired to some hundred and fifty lines which have been printed in the Correspondence, and no one knows how much more, - of such verse as might be expected of the average sophomore when Pope's fame was at its height. Unsystematic though Burke may have been, he nevertheless kept at work: "I spend three hours almost every day in the public library," he says. "I have read some history. I am endeavoring to get a little into the accounts of this our own poor country." 3

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The seventeen years between graduation and 1765, when Burke's career was finally determined by his election to Parliament, he spent in various employments. He went to London with the intention of taking up law, but succumbed to the attractions of literature and philosophy. Prevented by ill health from steady application, he traveled considerably in England and on the Continent; he frequented debating clubs and theatres, and he did more or less hack work for the booksellers. He published nothing, however, with which his name is connected till the two books of 1756: A Vindication of

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Natural Society and A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas on the Sublime and Beautiful. In the first he attempted to refute Bolingbroke's arguments against revealed religion by showing that they might be urged with equal force against the thing which in his eyes was scarcely less sacred, the social organization by which the rights of the individual are maintained. In the second book he took up a subject much discussed at the time; and, though his speculations have been superseded, he has the credit of stimulating Lessing to the production of Laocoon, which is regarded as the most valuable contribution of that age to æsthetic thought.' Burke also wrote, or helped to write, an Account of the European Settlements in America and an Abridgment of the History of England. Then in 1759 he began to edit for Dodsley that summary of important events, the Annual Register, with which he was connected for thirty years. In 1761 he went to Ireland, attached in some indefinite way, perhaps as a sort of secretary, to William Gerard Hamilton, "Single-speech" Hamilton,who was secretary to the lord-lieutenant. Here Burke studied on the spot those evil effects of oppression on which he dwells in this speech; for the punishment of Irish rebellion by restricting commerce and manufactures, by taking many of the ordinary rights of citizens from the Catholics, who were in an enormous majority, and by confiscating land and outlawing owners, had impoverished the country and rendered the people ferocious. After two years in Dublin, Burke, finding that, contrary to agreement, he must give all his time and energy to Hamilton and resign his literary ambitions, indignantly broke with his patron and returned to England. There he joined

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Morley's Burke, 18.

2 See pages 43-46.

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3 Green, IV, 54; Burke's Tract on the Popery Laws, Works, VI, 299. 4 See Correspondence, I, 46–51, 55–78, 83, 84; and Augustine Birrell's Obiter Dicta, Second Series, New York, 1887, 165–170.

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the famous Literary Club with which are associated the names of Johnson, Goldsmith, Sir Joshua Reynolds and Garrick. In this brilliant circle Burke stood among the first. fellow," said Johnson, “calls forth all my powers." In recognition of his general abilities and of the knowledge of politics which he had shown in the Annual Register, he was offered the post of private secretary to Lord Rockingham when the latter became Prime Minister in 1765. This place Burke accepted,

and just at the close of the year he was elected a member of Parliament from Wendover. Within a week or two after taking his seat, at the beginning of 1766, he had spoken twice for the repeal of the Stamp Act. That he produced a strong impression is evident from one of Dr. Johnson's letters: "He has gained more reputation than perhaps any man at his [first] appearance ever gained before. He made two speeches in the House for repealing the Stamp Act which were publicly commended by Mr. Pitt, and have filled the town with wonder.” 2 Upon the fall of the Rockingham ministry, Burke, who might have had a place under the new administration, remained with his friends. Turning to their account his literary powers, he began his series of great political tracts which have outlived so much other writing of the kind, because he treats of passing events in the light of enduring wisdom. First in 1769 he put forth the Observations on the Present State of the Nation, a reply to a pamphlet by George Grenville, who had accused his successors of ruining the country. In this controversy Burke showed himself a master of the intricate details of revenue and finance.

At this point in his career he took part in some transactions which gave his enemies a handle against him. Though he had been living almost from hand to mouth till he entered Parliament, he bought in 1768 an estate worth upwards of one hundred thousand dollars in our money, and correspondingly expensive to maintain. The matter has been much discussed 2 Ibid., 16.

1 Boswell's Life of Johnson, II, 450.

by biographers and critics, but has never been settled with complete satisfaction. This much, however, is clear: Burke lived on terms of close intimacy with his brother Richard and a distant kinsman, William Burke. Richard and William, together with Lord Verney, a political, patron of Edmund, speculated wildly in stock of the East India Company, and later Richard was engaged in some questionable dealings in West Indian lands. That these ventures were shared by Burke has been charged but never proved. In vindication of his conduct it can be shown that most of the money for the purchase of his estate, Beaconsfield, he raised on a mortgage and on his bond to Lord Rockingham. After getting the place, he was so straitened for means to keep it up that he borrowed right and left from his friends. For example, he was in debt thirty thousand pounds to Lord Rockingham at the death of the latter in 1782, and Rockingham directed that the debt should be cancelled in view of Burke's faithful services. From these facts and others

it appears that Burke's faults were neither dishonesty in speculation nor venality in Parliament, but rather a desire to live as he thought became a man in high position, a free-handed carelessness and improvidence which led him to lend or give even more readily than he borrowed or accepted, and an adherence to eighteenth-century standards of propriety, which in such things were lower than ours.

Whatever may have been his shortcomings in these private affairs, his public services outweigh them a thousand times. For one thing, he was on the right side in the long contest over Wilkes. This man, a radical writer who had been outlawed for libel, was in 1768 elected to Parliament from the county of Middlesex. Parliament, subservient to the king, expelled him. Then he was returned three times in quick succession, and each time the House pronounced his election void.1 Having

1 Green, IV, 243–247. Parliamentary History, XVI, 532–596. The case forms the basis of many of the attacks of Junius upon the government.

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