Page images
PDF
EPUB

EDMUND BURKE.

S

ETTING aside the suggestion of a descent from the noble Norman family of De Burgh, which settled in Ireland in the reign of Henry the Second, as unsupported by any satis. factory evidence, the family of Edmund Burke may be traced to a mayor of the city of Limerick of some historic reputation in the troublous scenes of the parliamentary contest with Charles the First. This was the great grandfather of Edmund. He was on the royal side in the struggle and conseHis quently suffered in fortune. grandson Richard, a Protestant, mar ried a Miss Nagle, of a respectable Catholic family of the county of Cork. He was bred as an attorney, and removing from Limerick to Dublin became engaged in a profitable practice in that city. Here at his residence on Arran Quay, then a fashionable quarter of the town, his son Edmund was born on the first of January (the 12th, new style), 1728-if we follow the register of Trinity College-a year also memorable for its introduction of Oliver Goldsmith into the world. The date given by his biographer Prior is 1730; his latest biographer, Macknight, thinks that many difficulties

would be removed by placing it in
1729. In his childhood and early life
Edmund was of a delicate constitution,
being threatened with consumption.
Of his father's family of fourteen or
fifteen children all but four died young,
-an elder brother Garret; Richard, the
celebrated London wit, the friend of
Goldsmith and immortalized in his
verses, and a sister Juliana, married to
a Mr. French, from whom are descended
any surviving representatives of the
family. In consequence of his ill
health Edmund was removed about
the age of six from the residence in
Dublin to the house of his maternal
grandfather at Castletown Roche, the
home of the Nagles, in the county of
Cork, a district famous for its his-
torical memories and its association
with the life of the poet Spenser, who
here from the Castle of Kilcolman
looked out upon the scenery which he
introduced in the Faery Queen. Spen-
ser was always a favorite with Burke,
and his eloquent biographer Macknight
is inclined to trace something of the
influence of the poet upon his mind
and writings to this early acquaintance
with the name and fame of the bard
in this "main haunt and region of his

(159)

song." "The greatest of writers," is and the improvement of health his his remark, "has said that a divinity most desirable achievement. Returnmay ever be seen directing each indi- ing to Dublin at the age of twelve, if vidual human life to its purposed end. we accept the earliest date of his Who cannot discern it here? Read birth, he passed a year at home, after amid the scenes in which it was writ- which he was placed with his brothers ten, the Faery Queen could never be Garret and Richard at a boardingforgotten; and many a splendid sen- school at Ballitore, a pretty village tence and poetical allusion, which give about thirty miles south of the capisuch a peculiar fascination to the driest tal, in the county Kildare, established subject when treated by Burke, may by the members of the Society of easily be traced to the bard of Kilcol- Friends who had settled at that place. man, whose mind was filled with such It was fortunate in the possession of noble visions of all that is beautiful in its first schoolmaster, Abraham Shackhumanity; who was, as his View of leton, a man of worth and learning, the State of Ireland amply testifies, not ever held in great regard by Burke, only a great poet, but also a true polit- who once sounded his praises in the ical philosopher, and who suffered so House of Commons, declaring that he cruelly for his attachment to the coun- had been educated as a Protestant of the try of his adoption." Of course, the Church of England by a dissenter who boy, if he read Spenser at all, could was an honor to his sect, though that not read as the man afterwards learned sect was considered one of the purest. to read; but the exercise of the imag. Under his eye he had read the Bible, ination, natural to youth, must always morning, noon and night, and had ever have had a peculiar fascination for since been the happier and better man Burke, and who better than Spenser, for such reading. The boy Edmund whose verse has inspired many poets, took kindly to the good Quaker's into engage the attention, and to teach structions and studied diligently, read the lesson to the infant mind of all much and profited greatly by the inti beauty, grace, tenderness in that fas- macy which he formed with his precination of knightly adventure? ceptor's son Richard, who was his correspondent in after years, and with whom he cherished the most friendly relations during a life which ended a few years only before his own. It was a school of liberal, generous ideas, that academy at Ballitore, which was kept up by the Shackleton family, in three generations, father, son and grandson. There is a story related by Prior of Burke in these school-days which shows "the child, the father of the man." "Seeing a poor man pulling down his

It was an advantage to Burke that so much of his boyhood was passed in the country in the society of his kind relatives. He was treated with indulgence and consideration, lived happily, and always looked back upon this period of his life with pleasure. His mother had taught him to read and he now attended the village school; but he was not pressed in his studies; nature and the simple enjoyable life about him were his best instructors,

own hut near the village, and hearing that it was done by order of a great gentleman in a gold-laced hat (the parish conservator of the roads), upon the plea of being too near the highway, the young philanthropist, his bosom swelling with indignation, exclaimed, that were he a man and possessed of authority, the poor should not thus be oppressed." After nearly two years at Ballitore, Burke left the school to become a student of Trinity College, Dublin. He carried with him a fair training in the classics and some skill in verse-making, encouraged by rivalry with his friend, Richard Shackleton, with whom about this time he competed in the translation of the Idyll of Theocritus on the death of Adonis. He had also spent much time in perusing with delight the old romances, Palmerin of England, and Don Belianis of Greece.

His college career, though not distinguished by any extraordinary academical honors or achievements in scholarship, was characterized by reg. ularity and a fair application of his powers. He probably was no proficient in Greek, but he must have made a good general acquaintance with some of the leading authors of that tongue, while he gave his admiration to the Latin poets Virgil, Ovid and Horace, and especially to the dramatic and philosophical historian, Sallust. Metaphysics he valued always rather for their power of enriching the mind by adding to its faculties of apprehension, than for the science itself. He in turn applied himself with zeal to natural philosophy, logic and history, and ended with poetry. Milton seems

to have attracted his attention more than Shakespeare, and he would seem to have entered more heartily into the enjoyment of the Æneid than of Homer. While at college he translated in rhyme the panegyric of country life at the close of the second Georgic of Virgil, if not with peculiar poetic felicity, certainly with a creditable appreciation of the original and of his English model in Dryden. On one occasion, in a Dublin literary society of which he was a member, he was applauded for his recitation of the speech of Moloch in Paradise Lost. He also attended the meetings of the Historical Society, where politics were discussed, and wrote two satirical arti cles, from the government or conservative point of view, directed against what he considered the overwrought patriotic sentiments and doctrines of the day. In 1748 he took his Bachelor's Degree at Trinity College, and not long after proceeded to London to enroll himself as a student of the law at the Middle Temple.

The law by no means engrossed the whole of Burke's time during his early years in London, which he was expected by his father to devote to the profession. He seems never to His have taken very kindly to it. mind was too much imbued with literature and philosophy to relish very greatly its technical subtleties. He knew shorter paths to learning, which he esteemed of greater account. He was too essentially moral and practical to get entangled in its obscure and Hence while he thorny intricacies. regarded it in its political and social relations as "one of the first and no

woman, Mrs. Vesey, of Bolton Row the friend and rival of Mrs. Montague, who made all her guests at their ease, and who was as full of Irish frolic and of Irish bulls, as if she still flourished on the banks of the Liffey. There were the two model women of French society in those days, Madame du Def fand and Mademoiselle de L'Espinasse, of whose class Sidney Smith once said that they "outraged every law of civilized society, and gave very pleas ant little suppers." Burke attended those suppers when in Paris in 1773, and listened to the wit and the athe

blest of human sciences, doing more to quicken and invigorate the under standing than all the other kinds of learning put together," he thought it "not apt, except in persons very happily born, to open and to liberalize the mind exactly in the same proportion." Indifferent health also came in the way of any great exertions in the study of the profession. We hear of visits to different parts of England, to Bristol and elsewhere; while in London, through his acquaintance with Arthur Murphy, he is becoming familiar with literary and dramatic life.* An agreeable chapter could be writ-ism that circled so freely round their ten regarding Burke's female acquaintances, their virtues, their failings, and their celebrity. There is Peg Woffington, the unfortunate actress, the daughter of a poor grocer's widow on Ormond Quay, Dublin, who fascinated everybody who came within her reach, and with whom young Edmund exchanged glances in the green-room of Drury Lane. There is Mrs. Montague, one of the most brilliant and accomplished women of her time, of great wealth and of great kindness, whose house was always open to men of let ters, and who, in 1759, took a real pleasure in introducing the young author of the "Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful" to her great friends. There was Burke's good-natured country

* For the remainder of this notice we are indebted to an appreciative article in the "North British Review" based on Thomas Macknight's

eloquent History of the Life and Times of

Edmund Burke," to which as well as to "Edmund Burke, a Historical Study," by John Morley (1869), the reader may be referred for the fullest presentation of the man and his character in history.

tables. Finance and philosophy, the drama and the Contrat Social, D'Alembert and Diderot, Voltaire and Rousseau, Helvetius and "le bon David,"-all were discussed, all were made the subject of some jeu d'esprit. Burke was disgusted with what he saw of French society, and in his "French Revolution" has held it up as a terri ble spectacle to all coming time.

But the young writer has gone to his garret with health, hope, and genius on his side, and it will go hard with him if he cannot wring from letters what will supply his humble board. As an ingenious decoy to the English public, Burke brought out a pamphlet entitled A Vindication of Natural Society (1756), which he dexterously ascribed to a late "noble writer." Every one pronounced the brochure Bolingbroke's. It was full of his ingenious arguments, it was full of his bold assumptions, and it was his style all over. But so high authorities as Lord Chesterfield and Mr. Pitt had pronounced Lord Bolingbroke's style

"inimitable;" and here the most accomplished man of fashion, and the most brilliant orator of the age, were both at fault, for it actually turned out to be the work of a poor law student of the Inner Temple. Hencefor ward Burke had no need to enter the lists with his visor down. This philosophical satire placed his claims to literary recognition beyond all doubt, and he was only following the dictates of prudence or of policy when he ventured before the public hereafter anonymously. A few months after wards there appeared A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. His theory, that everything was beautiful that possessed the power of relaxing the nerves and fibres, and thus inducing a certain degree of bodily languor and sinking, is almost too grotesque to be calmly commented on; yet the book is full of the most ingenious observations on mental phenomena; and, while comparatively cold and unimpassioned in its style, it possesses, nevertheless, many specimens of rare illustration and most apt allusion, charming the reader even when the oddity of his postulate affronts the reason, and does violence to the feelings.

Towards the end of 1756, or early in the succeeding year, Burke married Miss Nugent, a countrywoman of his own, the daughter of Dr. Nugent, a physician in Bath. As this lady was brought up a Roman Catholic, it was probably this circumstance that gave rise to some whispers respecting Burke's alleged oscillation between his own faith and hers. After her

marriage she joined the Church of
England, made to him one of the best
of wives, and survived him some four-
teen years. His father-in-law came up
shortly afterwards to London, and for
many years Burke found a home in
Wimpole Street with this excellent
physician. In 1759 he became con-
nected with Dodsley the publisher,
with whom he engaged to write the
historical section of the Annual Reg-
For the next
ister for £100 a-year.
fifteen years or so, his lucid mind can
be traced in its pages, giving order
and arrangement to its reports, and in-
fusing genius into its details. It was
during the same year that he was in-
troduced by Lord Charlemont to "Sin-
gle-speech" Hamilton, a selfish, crafty
Scot, of much more ability than he
generally gets credit for, who had a
seat at the Board of Trade and a resi
dence at Hampton Court. Whatever
was the nature of Burke's connection
with this man-for it has not been
clearly defined-we are safe in assert-
ing that it was in the manufacture of
ideas that the young writer was em-
ployed. He lived with Hamilton for
the next six years, and, after an irre-
concilable quarrel, the £300 of Irish
pension which the wily Hamilton had
procured for him, was thrown up, and
Burke turned his back on "Single-
speech" forever.

Shortly after the Annual Register was started, Burke met Johnson, for the first time, at Garrick's table. Johnson was close on fifty, and we find the editor of the Register in 1759 reproaching the nation with having done nothing for the author of Rasselas. Gruff old Samuel seems to have taken

« PreviousContinue »