Burke | Page 5

and
partly because his health was weak. In after life he was a man of great
strength, capable not only of bearing the strain of prolonged application

to books and papers in the solitude of his library, but of bearing it at the
same time with the distracting combination of active business among
men. At the date of which we are speaking, he used to seek a milder air
at Bristol, or in Monmouthshire, or Wiltshire. He passed the summer in
retired country villages, reading and writing with desultory industry, in
company with William Burke, a namesake but perhaps no kinsman. It
would be interesting to know the plan and scope of his studies. We are
practically reduced to conjecture. In a letter of counsel to his son in
after years, he gave him a weighty piece of advice, which, is pretty
plainly the key to the reality and fruitfulness of his own knowledge.
"Reading," he said, "and much reading, is good. But the power of
diversifying the matter infinitely in your own mind, and of applying it to
every occasion that arises, is far better; so don't suppress the vivida
vis." We have no more of Burke's doings than obscure and tantalising
glimpses, tantalising, because he was then at the age when character
usually either fritters itself away, or grows strong on the inward
sustenance of solid and resolute aspirations. Writing from Battersea to
his old comrade, Shackleton, in 1757, he begins with an apology for a
long silence which seems to have continued from months to years. "I
have broken all rules; I have neglected all decorums; everything except
that I have never forgot a friend, whose good head and heart have made
me esteem and love him. What appearance there may have been of
neglect, arises from my manner of life; chequered with various designs;
sometimes in London, sometimes in remote parts of the country;
sometimes in France, and shortly, please God, to be in America."
One of the hundred inscrutable rumours that hovered about Burke's
name was, that he at one time actually did visit America. This was just
as untrue as that he became a convert to the Catholic faith; or that he
was the lover of Peg Woffington; or that he contested Adam Smith's
chair of moral philosophy at Glasgow along with Hume, and that both
Burke and Hume were rejected in favour of some fortunate Mr. James
Clow. They are all alike unfounded. But the same letter informs
Shackleton of a circumstance more real and more important than any of
these, though its details are only doubtfully known. Burke had
married--when and where, we cannot tell. Probably the marriage took
place in the winter of 1756. His wife was the daughter of Dr. Nugent,

an Irish physician once settled at Bath. One story is that Burke
consulted him in one of his visits to the west of England, and fell in
love with his daughter. Another version makes Burke consult him after
Dr. Nugent had removed to London; and tells how the kindly physician,
considering that the noise and bustle of chambers over a shop must
hinder his patient's recovery, offered him rooms in his own house.
However these things may have been, all the evidence shows Burke to
have been fortunate in the choice or accident that bestowed upon him
his wife. Mrs. Burke, like her father, was, up to the time of her
marriage, a Catholic. Good judges belonging to her own sex describe
her as gentle, quiet, soft in her manners, and well-bred. She had the
qualities which best fitted and disposed her to soothe the vehemence
and irritability of her companion. Though she afterwards conformed to
the religion of her husband, it was no insignificant coincidence that in
two of the dearest relations of his life the atmosphere of Catholicism
was thus poured round the great preacher of the crusade against the
Revolution.
About the time of his marriage, Burke made his first appearance as an
author. It was in 1756 that he published A Vindication of Natural
Society, and the more important essay, A Philosophical Inquiry into the
Origin of our Ideas on the Sublime and Beautiful. The latter of them
had certainly been written a long time before, and there is even a
traditional story that Burke wrote it when he was only nineteen years
old. Both of these performances have in different degrees a historic
meaning, but neither of them would have survived to our own day
unless they had been associated with a name of power. A few words
will suffice to do justice to them here. And first as to the Vindication of
Natural Society. Its alternative title was, A View of the Miseries and
Evils arising to Mankind from every Species of Civil Society, in