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great art of good breeding which rendered men pleased with him and with themselves. He had an inexhaustible fund of discourse, either serious or jocose, seasoned with wit and humour, poignant, strong, delicate, sportive, as answered the purpose or occasion. He had a vast variety of anecdotes and stories, which were always well adapted and well told; he had also constant cheerfulness and high spirits. His looks and voice were in unison with the agreeable insinuation and impressiveness of his conversation and manners. Owning these attractions,-his lasting possessions,—it was no wonder that at all times Burke found it easy to have whatever associates he liked; and he always chose the best.

While at college, Burke was a member of that excellent institution of juvenile debate for the use of the students of Trinity, called the Historical Society, which was the arena not only of his incipient oratory, but of that of many others among the greatest men Ireland has produced.

Burke's varied studies had made him an adept in rhetoric and composition, as well as in logic, physics, history, and moral philosophy; and before he left college an opportunity occurred for a display of his proficiency. The occasion also afforded an early and remarkable instance of that aristocratic inclination of his mind, which, whatever might be afterwards thought or said of him, never at any time forsook him. The circumstance was this: In the year 1749 one Dr. Charles Lucas, a demagogue apothecary, wrote a number of daring papers against government, and acquired as great popularity in Dublin as Wilkes afterwards did in London. Burke, versed in scholastic logic, and full of other knowledge suited to his purpose, perceived the noxious and insidious tendency of the doctor's extreme levelling doctrines, and adopted a novel and clever mode of counteracting them. He wrote several essays in the style of Lucas, imitating it so completely as to deceive the public, pursuing Lucas's principles to consequences obviously resulting from them, and at the same time showing their absurdity and danger. Thus the first literary effort of his mind was an ex

HIS ENTRY AT THE TEMPLE.

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posure of the absurdity of violent harangues about wild democratic innovations.

In Burke's correspondence, at and about this time, with his friend Shackleton and others, one cannot but be struck with his early acquisition of that deeply religious and moral style of thought and tone which characterised him through life. His letters to Shackleton, published among those edited by Earl Fitzwilliam and Sir Richard Bourke, may be always read in their entirety with pleasure and advantage. Many of these were written while. Burke was in, or little past his teens; and there frequently occur such expressions as the following:

"I assure you, my friend, that without the superior grace of God, I shall find it very difficult to be commonly virtuous.”

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It is one of the subtlest stratagems the enemy of mankind uses to delude us, that by lulling us into a false security his conquest may be the easier. We should always be in no other than the state of a penitent, because the most righteous of us is no better than a sinner."

"Providence never intended to much the greater part an entire life of ease and quiet. A peaceable, honourable, and affluent decline of life must be purchased by a laborious or hazardous youth; and every day I think more and more that it is well worth the purchase. Poverty and age sort very ill together; and a course of struggling is miserable indeed when strength is decayed and hope gone. Turpe senex miles."

"Advice should proceed from a desire to improve; never from a desire to reproach."

"Parting from a relative or friend, if I may make such a comparison, is like the sensation a good man is said to feel at the hour of death."

Edmund Burke was intended by his father for the bar; he was consequently entered at the Middle Temple on the 23d April, 1747. In 1750 he came to keep his terms in London.

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BURKE'S STUDENT-LIFE.

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BURKE'S STUDENT-LIFE-ARTHUR MURPHY-BURKE'S ASSOCIATION WITH LITERATURE-HIS EARLY SUCCESS AS A WRITER-MISS WOFFINGTON— "THE VINDICATION OF NATURAL SOCIETY" - THE " ESSAY ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL" SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS, DR. JOHNSON, MACKLIN GLASGOW-AMERICA.

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ACCORDING to the earnest desire of his father, and pursuant also to his own purpose at the time, Burke forthwith made preparations to become a barrister, and commenced the study of the law. But the narrow and tedious path which leads to legal display and forensic triumph soon became far too confined and lengthy for a mind already at the goal of so much knowledge, and conscious of powers that would brook no delay, and must be at once in action. The ripe fruit of the man's genius was ready to be plucked, and might possibly have withered under prolonged cultivation. Law he read, it is true, and as with all other information within his reach, he quickly grasped its theory and principles, mastering the science so as to effectively serve his purpose upon some important occasions in his subsequent career. Burke, in one of his letters, makes the following apt remark as to forensic study: "The law," he writes,

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causes no difficulty to those who readily understand it, and to those who never will understand it; and for all between these extremes, God knows, they have a hard task of it." From the exclusive drudgery customarily imposed on the law-student, Burke fled to the common and dangerous, but in his case very fortunate refuge, literature. Yet even here, though his talents speedily placed him high among authors, it would seem that he took to writing merely as the readiest means to the great end foreshadowed, though still scarcely distinct, to his aspiring vision.

Another motive for Burke's early truancy towards the law may be ascribed to his acquaintance with a fellow-student and fellow-countryman, some few years his senior, who, like himself, was paying court to the Muses within the atmosphere of the forum. This was Arthur Murphy, a name eminent in dramatic and other

branches of English literature. Arthur Murphy was the author of an able standard translation of Tacitus, which, by the way, he

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dedicated to Edmund Burke: he also wrote many charming dramas; some of them remain in vogue even to this day. His Way to keep Him is a chef-d'œuvre. Murphy's life was indeed varied. Educated for a merchant, he relinquished the toils of traffic for

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