Burke | Page 4

There is no evidence that at this time he and
Goldsmith were acquainted with one another. Flood had gone to
Oxford some time before. The one or two companions whom Burke
mentions in his letters are only shadows of names. The mighty Swift
died in 1745, but there is nothing of Burke's upon the event. In the
same year came the Pretender's invasion, and Burke spoke of those who
had taken part in it in the same generous spirit that he always showed to
the partisans of lost historic causes.
Of his own family Burke says little, save that in 1746 his mother had a
dangerous illness. In all my life, he writes to his friend, I never found
so heavy a grief, nor really did I well know what it was before. Burke's
father is said to have been a man of angry and irritable temper, and
their disagreements were frequent. This unhappy circumstance made
the time for parting not unwelcome. In 1747 Burke's name had been
entered at the Middle Temple, and after taking his degree, he prepared
to go to England to pursue the ordinary course of a lawyer's studies. He
arrived in London in the early part of 1750.
A period of nine years followed, in which the circumstances of Burke's
life are enveloped in nearly complete obscurity. He seems to have kept
his terms in the regular way at the Temple, and from the mastery of
legal principles and methods which he afterwards showed in some
important transactions, we might infer that he did more to qualify
himself for practice than merely dine in the hall of his inn. For law,
alike as a profession and an instrument of mental discipline, he had
always the profound respect that it so amply deserves, though he saw
that it was not without drawbacks of its own. The law, he said, in his
fine description of George Grenville, in words that all who think about
schemes of education ought to ponder, "is, in my opinion, one of the
first and noblest of human sciences; a science which does more to
quicken and invigorate the understanding than all the other kinds of
learning put together; but it is not apt, except in persons very happily
born, to open and to liberalise the mind exactly in the same
proportion."[1] Burke was never called to the bar, and the circumstance

that, about the time when he ought to have been looking for his first
guinea, he published a couple of books which had as little as possible to
do with either law or equity, is a tolerably sure sign that he had
followed the same desultory courses at the Temple as he had followed
at Trinity College. We have only to tell over again a very old story. The
vague attractions of literature prevailed over the duty of taking up a
serious profession. His father, who had set his heart on having a son in
the rank of a barrister, was first suspicious, then extremely indignant,
and at last he withdrew his son's allowance, or else reduced it so low
that the recipient could not possibly live upon it. This catastrophe took
place some time in 1755,--a year of note in the history of literature, as
the date of the publication of Johnson's Dictionary. It was upon
literature, the most seductive, the most deceiving, the most dangerous
of professions, that Burke, like so many hundreds of smaller men
before and since, now threw himself for a livelihood.
[Footnote 1: American Taxation.]
Of the details of the struggle we know very little. Burke was not fond
in after life of talking about his earlier days, not because he had any
false shame about the straits and hard shifts of youthful neediness, but
because he was endowed with a certain inborn stateliness of nature,
which made him unwilling to waste thoughts on the less dignified parts
of life. This is no unqualified virtue, and Burke might have escaped
some wearisome frets and embarrassments in his existence, if he had
been capable of letting the detail of the day lie more heavily upon him.
So far as it goes, however, it is a sign of mental health that a man
should be able to cast behind him the barren memories of bygone
squalor. We may be sure that whatever were the external ordeals of his
apprenticeship in the slippery craft of the literary adventurer, Burke
never failed in keeping for his constant companions generous ambitions
and high thoughts. He appears to have frequented the debating clubs in
Fleet Street and the Piazza of Covent Garden, and he showed the
common taste of his time for the theatre. He was much of a wanderer,
partly from the natural desire of restless youth to see the world,