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secure before the narrative was closed. The observations which followed seemed to suggest trains of thinking rather than to draw conclusions; and so skilfully did he conceal his art, that the hearers thought they formed their opinion in consequence of the workings of their own minds, when in truth it was the effect of the most refined dialectics. For parliamentary oratory he was more considerable than any lawyer our profession could boast of till the appearance of Henry Brougham, having been for many years in both Houses in the very first rank of debaters. . . . Nothing remains to be said for the purpose of proving that he was the first of common law judges."

Edmund Burke.

DMUND BURKE was born in a house on Arran
Quay, Dublin, January 1st, 1730 (O. S.)

He

His

was the younger son of a reputable Protestant attorney, Richard Burke or Bourke, and of his wife, a Miss Nagle. In his early years he suffered severely from the pains and penalties inflicted by a delicate constitution; so that when his brothers were pleasantly occupied in the athletic games and exercises of boyhood, he might be seen reclining on a sofa, diligently reading. elder brother, Richard, himself a man of considerable parts, when found in later life deeply meditating after one of Edmund's magnificent orations in the House of Commons, excused himself by saying, "I have been wondering how Ned has contrived to monopolize all the talents of the family; but now I remember, when we were at play he was always at work." It is consolatory to some of us to reflect that delicate health in childhood is not always a bar to success in after-life. The law of compensation prevails in all things; and a volume might be filled with the names of men whose ability to serve their country-or themselves-has closely been connected with the patient industry rendered compulsory or possible by early “invalidism.”

That he might enjoy the benefit of country air, young

Burke, while still a child, was sent to his uncle's house at Castletown Roche, where he received the rudiments of education from the village schoolmaster, and learned, perhaps, that the neighbourhood was hallowed groundhallowed by the memories of Spenser, Essex, and Raleigh. In 1741 he was sent to the "classical academy" at Ballitore. His untiring application, his keen apprehension, and his tenacious memory, soon lifted him above his school-fellows. In his leisure hours he applied himself with particular delight to the study of history and poetry; and we are pleased to conjecture that his eloquence owed some of its imaginative colouring to his frequent perusal of the old chivalrous romances, such as the "Palemerin of England" and "Don Belianis of Greece." It is not necessary for an orator to be a poet, or for a poet to be an orator; but I am disposed to believe that every great poet must possess the oratorical instinct, as Homer, Milton, and Shakespeare possessed it, and that a great orator must have a certain measure of the poetic insight, as was the case with Demosthenes and Cicero, with Chatham and with Burke. The last-named, like most lads with a literary taste, made several attempts in verse during his school days—beginning a drama on the story of King Alfred, and translating the idyll of Theocritus on the death of Adonis.

The schoolmaster at Ballitore was a man of capacity and enlightenment; and it seems to have been by him. that Burke was early indoctrinated in the principle of tolerance, and from him that he imbibed his enthusiasm for civil and religious freedom. In one of his House of Commons speeches he remarked, that he had been educated as a Protestant of the Church of England, by a Dissenter who was an honour to his sect [the Society of

Friends], though that sect was one of the purest. Under his eye he had read the Bible, morning, noon, and night, and had ever since been the happier and the better for such reading. The lad afterwards turned his attention to the theological treatises of all shades of opinion that had been so ably written in the last and present century; but eventually discovering, that they confounded and bewildered instead of instructing and assisting him, he had thrown them aside, resolved to hold firmly the faith of the Church of England. But towards Protestant Nonconformists, as towards Romanists, he cherished the most equitable feelings, and protested against any restriction being placed upon the rights of conscience.

*

In April, 1743, Burke entered Trinity College, Dublin, as a pensioner. He took his degree as Bachelor of Arts in 1748, and as Master of Arts in 1751. As a student his tastes disposed him to devote his time and energies to the classics, history, metaphysics, and general literature. He had the good sense to be partial to a well-written novel, and, as might have been expected of so judicious a critic, he preferred Fielding and Smollett to Richardson. He read Le Sage with pleasure, as well as Addison, and, of course, Shakespeare. In a letter written about this time he expresses his strong admiration of Plutarch. Among the Greek orators he preferred Demosthenes, and among the Greek dramatists Sophocles. He placed a higher value upon the Greek historians than upon the Latin. I suppose it was the picturesqueness and amplitude of Thucydides which pleased him more than the terse and thought-weighted sentences of Tacitus. To Lucretius, Virgil, and Horace he was exceedingly

* Oliver Goldsmith was one of his contemporaries.

partial. That he regarded the Æneid as superior to the Iliad, most scholars will consider a serious error of taste; but he modified his judgment to some extent by admitting that the elder poet surpassed the younger in sublimity, strength, and invention. If it be true that a man is known by the company he keeps, it is still more true that the bent of his genius and the strain of his character may be ascertained from the books he reads; and therefore Burke's literary partialities become a matter of interest to his biographer.

The reader will not object, perhaps, to a specimen of Burke's powers as a versifier and translator. While at Trinity College he rendered the latter portion of Virgil's second Georgic into English heroic couplets. That his version is equal to Dryden's we cannot allow, but it is very smooth and correct:—

"Oh, happy swains! did they know how to prize
The many blessings rural life supplies;
When in safe huts from clattering arms afar,
The pomp of cities and the din of war,
Indulgent earth, to pay his labouring hand,
Pours in his arms the blessings of the land.
Calm through the valley flows along his life,
He knows no danger, as he knows no strife.
What! though no marble portals, rooms of state,
Vomit the cringing torrent from his gate ;
Though no proud purple hang his stately halls,
Nor lives the breathing brass along his walls,
Though the sheep clothe him without colour's aid,
Nor seeks he foreign luxury from trade;
Yet peace and honesty adorn his days

With rural riches and a life of ease."

Burke's earliest published effort, however, was, fitly enough, of a political character. In 1749, just before leaving Trinity College, he attacked the pretentious

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