Burke | Page 3

became a student of Trinity College, Dublin, and he
remained there until 1748, when he took his Bachelor's degree. These
five years do not appear to have been spent in strenuous industry in the
beaten paths of academic routine. Like so many other men of great gifts,
Burke in his youth was desultory and excursive. He roamed at large
over the varied heights that tempt our curiosity, as the dawn of
intelligence first lights them up one after another with bewitching
visions and illusive magic. "All my studies," Burke wrote in 1746,
when he was in the midst of them, "have rather proceeded from sallies
of passion, than from the preference of sound reason; and, like all other
natural appetites, have been very violent for a season, and very soon
cooled, and quite absorbed in the succeeding. I have often thought it a
humorous consideration to observe and sum up all the madness of this
kind I have fallen into, this two years past. 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."
This is from one of Burke's letters to Richard Shackleton, the son of his
schoolmaster, with whom he had formed one of those close friendships
that fill the life of generous youth, as ambition fills an energetic
manhood. Many tears were shed when the two boys parted at Ballitore,
and they kept up their intimacy by a steady correspondence. They
discuss the everlasting dispute as to the ultimate fate of those who
never heard the saving name of Christ. They send one another copies of
verses, and Burke prays for Shackleton's judgment on an invocation of

his new poem, to beauteous nymphs who haunt the dusky wood, which
hangs recumbent o'er the crystal flood. Burke is warned by Shackleton
to endeavour to live according to the rules of the Gospel, and he
humbly accepts the good advice, with the deprecatory plea that in a
town it is difficult to sit down to think seriously. It is easier, he says, to
follow the rules of the Gospel in the country than at Trinity College,
Dublin. In the region of profaner things the two friends canvass the
comparative worth of Sallust and of Tully's Epistles. Burke holds for
the historian, who has, he thinks, a fine, easy, diversified narrative,
mixed with reflection, moral and political, neither very trite nor
obvious, nor out of the way and abstract; and this is the true beauty of
historical observation.
Some pages of verse describe to Shackleton how his friend passes the
day, but the reader will perhaps be content to learn in humbler prose
that Burke rose with the dawn, and strode forth into the country
through fragrant gardens and the pride of May, until want of breakfast
drove him back unwillingly to the town, where amid lectures and books
his heart incessantly turned to the river and the fir-woods of Ballitore.
In the evening he again turned his back on the city, taking his way
"where Liffey rolls her dead dogs to the sea," along to the wall on the
shore, whence be delighted to see the sun sink into the waters, gilding
ocean, ships, and city as it vanished. Alas, it was beneath the dignity of
verse to tell us what we should most gladly have known. For,
"The muse nor can, nor will declare, What is my work, and what my
studies there."
What serious nourishment Burke was laying in for his understanding
we cannot learn from any other source. He describes himself as
spending three hours almost every day in the public library; "the best
way in the world," he adds oddly enough, "of killing thought." I have
read some history, he says, and among other pieces of history, "I am
endeavouring to get a little into the accounts of this, our own poor
country,"--a pathetic expression, which represents Burke's perpetual
mood, as long as he lived, of affectionate pity for his native land. Of
the eminent Irishmen whose names adorn the annals of Trinity College

in the eighteenth century, Burke was only contemporary at the
University with one, the luckless sizar who in the fulness of time wrote
the Vicar of Wakefield.