scatters apophthegms that take us into the regions of lasting wisdom. In the midst of the torrent of his most strenuous and passionate deliverances, he suddenly rises aloof from his immediate subject, and in all tranquillity reminds us of some permanent relation of things, some enduring truth of human life or society.

Payne, Burke's Select Works, I., xxxii.-xxxiii., xxxv.-xxxvi., xlix.

The literature of England is remarkable for the extent in which it is pervaded by political ideas. Poets, divines, dramatists, and historians, alike illustrate the leading tendency of the English mind. In the two former of these classes Burke had an especial interest. Hooker and South, Milton and Dryden, were often to him a real fount of inspiration. His philosophical mind readily discerned any analogy which was convertible to his own purpose, and this faculty in him was rarely misused. Burke knew general English literature well ; and he turned all his knowledge to such account that next to facts and reasonings upon facts, it became his chief resource. Burke moreover, like Cicero, had received the training, not of a politician, but of a man of letters. When Cicero first appeared in the character of a statesman, politicians used contemptuously to call him "the Greek," and "the Scholar. Every one of Burke's productions exhibits a mind thoroughly tinctured with scholarship, in the widest sense of the word, and perfected in it by continuous practice. His scholarship is of the Roman rather than the Greek model. Cicero, Livy, and Tacitus were familiarised to him by sympathy with their subject-matter. He was equally acquainted with the poets, and was often indebted to them for an illustration.

In the sections of his works in which this grave simplicity is most prominent, Burke frequently employed the impressive phrases of the Holy Scriptures, affording a signal illustration of the truth, that he neglects the most valuable repository of rhetoric in the English language who has not well studied the English Bible.

I the aims of writing could be reached by simple reasoning

and description, closely and concisely expressed, much of the poetry and the prose of the last century would be unsurpassable. The more sensitive elements in human nature, however, will not consent to be thus desolated, and the formal writer is thwarted at every step by the recoil of his own mechanism. In the literary art, as in all others, nature must be patiently studied. Burke, who never aimed at merely literary fame, and never once, in his mature years, cherished the thought of living to future ages in his works, was well acquainted with the economics of his art. He devoted himself solely to the immediate object before him, with no sidelong glance at the printing press or the library shelf. He reasoned little, or not at all, when he conceived reason to be out of place, or insufficient for his purpose. He never rejected a phrase or a thought because it did not reach the standard required by literary dignity. With all this, his writing always reaches a high standard of practical excellence, and is always careful and workmanlike. It is, moreover, well attuned to the ear. The cadence of Burke's sentences always reminds us that prose writing is only to be perfected by a thorough study of the poetry of the language. Few prose writers were so well acquainted with the general body of English verse, and few have habitually written so fully, so delicately, and so harmoniously.

Goodrich, Select British Eloquence, pp. 207-208.

A few things have come down to us as to his course of reading. He had mastered most of the great writers of antiquity. Demosthenes was his favourite orator, though he was led in after life, by the bent of his genius, to form himself on the model of Cicero, whom he more resembled in magnificence and copiousness of thought. He delighted in Plutarch. He read most of the great poets of antiquity, and was peculiarly fond of Virgil, Horace, and Lucretius, a large part of whose writings he committed to memory. In English he read the Essays of Lord Bacon again and again with increasing admiration, and pronounced them "the greatest works of that great man. Shakspeare was his daily study. But his highest reverence was reserved for Milton, "whose richness of lan

guage, boundless learning, and Scriptural grandeur of conception, were the first and last themes of his applause. The philosophical tendency of his mind began now to display itself with great distinctness, and became, from this period, the master principle of his genius. "Rerum cognoscere causas seems ever to have been his delight, and soon became the object of all his studies and reflections. He had an exquisite sensibility to the beauties of nature, of art, and of elegant composition, but he could never rest here. "Whence this

enjoyment?" "On what principles does it depend ?" "How might it be carried to a still higher point?"-these are questions which seem almost from boyhood to have occurred instinctively to his mind. His attempts at philosophical criticism commenced in college, and led to his producing one of the most beautiful works of this kind to be found in any language. In like manner, history to him, even at this early period, was not a mere chronicle of events, a picture of battles and sieges, or of life and manners; to make it history, it must bind events together by the causes which produced them. The science of politics and government was in his mind the science of man; not a system of arbitrary regulations, or a thing of policy and intrigue, but founded on a knowledge of those principles, feelings, and even prejudices, which unite a people together in one community—“ties,” as he beautifully expresses it, "which, though light as air, are strong as links of iron.' Such were the habits of thought to which his mind was tending even from his college days, and they made him pre-eminently the great PHILOSOPHICAL ORATOR of our language.

Being intended by his father for the bar, Mr. Burke was sent to London at the age of twenty, to pursue his studies at the Middle Temple. But he was never interested in the law. He saw enough of it to convince him that it is "one of the first and noblest of human sciences-a science which does more to quicken and invigorate the understanding, than all other kinds of learning put together." Still, it was too dry and technical for a mind like his; and he felt, that, "except in persons very happily born, it was not apt to open and liberalize the mind in the same proportion." He therefore soon

gave himself up, with all the warmth of his early attachment, to the pursuits of literature and philosophy. His diligence in study was now carried to its highest point. He devoted every moment to severe labour; spending his evenings, however, in conversation with the ablest men engaged in the same employments, and thus varying, perhaps increasing, the demand for mental exertion. Few men ever studied to greater effect. He early acquired a power which belongs peculiarly to superior minds-that of thinking at all times and in every place, and not merely at stated seasons in the retirement of the closet. His mind seems never to have floated on the current of passing events. He was always working out trains of thought. His reading, though wide and multifarious, appears from the first to have been perfectly digested. His views on every subject were formed into a complete system; and his habits of daily discussing with others whatever he was revolving in his own mind, not only quickened his powers, but made him guarded in statement, and led him to contemplate every subject under a great variety of aspects. His exuberant fancy, which in most men would have been a fatal impediment to any attempt at speculation, was in him the ready servant of the intellect, supplying boundless stores of thought and illustration for every inquiry. Such were his habits of study from this period, during nearly fifty years, down to the time of his death. Once only, as he stated to a friend, did his mind ever appear to flag. At the age of forty-five, he felt weary of this incessant struggle of thought. He resolved to pause and rest satisfied with the knowledge he had gained. But a week's experience taught him the misery of being idle; and he resumed his labours with the noble determination of the Greek philosopher, γηράσκειν διδασκύμενος, to grow old in learning. Gifted as he was with pre-eminent genius, it is not surprising that diligence like this, which would have raised even moderate abilities into talents of a high order, should have made him from early life an object of admiration to his friends, and have laid the foundation of that richness and amplitude of thought in which he far surpassed every modern orator.

Goodrich, Select British Eloquence, p. 206.

When eleven years old, he was sent to a school at Ballitore, about twenty miles from Dublin, under the care of a Quaker named Shackleton, who was distinguished, not only for the accuracy of his scholarship, but for his extraordinary power of drawing forth the talents of his pupils, and giving a right direction to their moral principles. Mr. Burke uniformly spoke of his instructor in after life with the warmest affection, and rarely failed, during forty years, whenever he went to Ireland, to pay him a visit. He once alluded to him in the House of Commons, in the following terms: "I was educated," said he, "as a Protestant of the Church of England, by a Dissenter who was an honour to his sect, though that sect has ever been considered as one of the purest. Under his eye, I read the Bible, morning, noon, and night; and have ever since been a happier and better man for such reading." Under these influences, the development of his intellect and of his better feelings was steady and rapid. He formed those habits of industry and perseverance, which were the most striking traits in his character, and which led him to say in after life, "Nitor in adversum is the motto for a man like me." He learned that simplicity and frankness, that bold assertion of moral principle, that reverence for the Word of God, and the habit of going freely to its pages for imagery and illustration, by which he was equally distinguished as a man and an orator. At this period, too, he began to exhibit his extraordinary powers of memory. In every task or exercise dependent on this faculty, he easily outstripped all his competitors; and it is not improbable that he gained, under his early Quaker discipline, those habits of systematic thought, and that admirable arrangement of all his acquired knowledge, which made his memory one vast storehouse of facts, principles, and illustrations, ready for use at a moment's call. At this early period, too, the imaginative cast of his mind was strongly developed. He delighted above all things in works of fancy. The old romances, such as Palmerin of England and Don Belianis of Greece, were his favourite study; and we can hardly doubt, considering the peculiar susceptibility of his mind,