BURKE, these pages are less anxious to render the due tribute to his talents, than to his principles. His genius has long gained for itself the highest prize of fame. In an age eminent for intellectual distinction, Burke vindicated to himself the admiration of Europe. Owing nothing of his celebrity to birth, opulence, or official rank, he required none of those adventitious supports, to rise and move at ease in the highest regions of public effect, dignity, and renown. There was no fear that his plumage would give way in either the storm or the sunshine; those are the casualties of inferior powers. He had his share of both, the tempest, and that still more perilous trial, which has melted down the virtue of so many aspiring spirits in the favour of cabinets. But Burke grew purer, and more powerful for good, to his latest moment; he constantly rose more and more above the influence of party, until at last the politician was elevated into the philosopher; and in that loftier atmosphere, from which he looked down on the cloudy and turbulent contests of the time, he soared upward calmly in the light of truth, and became more splendid at every wave of his wing.

This is no exaggeration of his singular ability, or of its course. Of all the memorable men of his day, Burke is the only orator, whose eloquence has been incorporated into the wisdom of his country. His great contemporaries grappled triumphantly with the emergencies of the hour, and having achieved the exploit of the hour, were content with what they had done.

But it is palpable, that Burke in every instance

contemplated a larger victory; that his struggle was not more to meet a contingency, than to establish a principle; that he was not content with overwhelming the adversary of the moment, but must bequeath with that triumph some new knowledge of the means by which the adversary might be overwhelmed in every age to come-some noble contribution to that grand tactic by which men and nations are armed and marshalled against all difficulty. The labours of his contemporaries were admirable; the mere muscular force of the human mind never exhibited more prodigious feats, than in the political contests of the days of Chatham, Holland, Pitt and Fox. The whole period from the fall of the Walpole Ministry to the death of Pitt, was an unrelaxing struggle of the most practised, expert, and vivid ability. But it was the struggle of the arena—a great rivalry for the prize of the peoplethe fierce and temporary effort of great intellectual gladiators. When they were exhausted, or perished, others followed, if with inferior powers, with close imitation. But no man has followed Burke. No defender of the truth has ever exhibited that fine combination of practical vigour with essential wisdom; that mastery of human topics with that diviner energy which overthrew not merely the revolutionary spirit of his day, but enables us to maintain the conflict against all its efforts to come ;-like the conqueror of the Python, leaving his own image to all time, an emblem of matchless grace and grandeur, to ages when the enemy and the era alike are no more.

Edmund Burke, like most of those men who have made themselves memorable by their public services, was of humble extraction; the son of an Irish attorney. Yet, as Ireland is the land of genealogies, and every man who cares for the honours of ancestry, may indulge himself at large among the wide obscurity of the Irish lineages, Burke's biographers have gratified their zeal by searching for his origin among the De Burghs or Burgos, whose names are found in the list of Strongbow's knights in the invasion under Henry the Second. Edmund Burke justly seems to have thought little upon the subject, and contenting himself with being a son of Adam, prepared to lay the foundations of a fame independent of the Norman. He was born in Dublin, January 1, 1730, old style; of a delicate constitution, which in his boyhood he rendered still more delicate by a love of reading. Being threatened with consumption, he was removed at an early age from the air of the capital to the house of his grandfather at Castletown Roche, a village in the county of Cork, in the neighbourhood of the old castle of Kilcolman, once the residence of the poet Spenser, and seated in the centre of a district alike remarkable for traditional interest, and landscape beauty. Early associations often have a powerful effect on the mind; and it is not improbable that the rich and lovely scenery of this spot had some share in storing up those treasures of brightness and beauty, that love for solemn and lofty thoughts, which characterised in subsequent life the spirit of this extraordinary man.

From wandering among the hills and streams of this romantic country, of which the acknowledged picture still lives in the "Fairy Queen,” Burke was transferred in his twelfth year to a school, kept by an intelligent Quaker at Ballytore, between twenty and thirty miles from Dublin. The opinion then formed of him was not unlike that which we might conceive from his later career. He was said to be fond of acquiring great diversity of knowledge, to have evinced a remarkable quickness of apprehension, and delighted in the display of memory. He read many of the old romances of chivalry, and much history and poetry. His habits were almost solitary, but he was gentle, goodnatured, and willing to assist and oblige. In a debate, in 1780, after the riots, Burke adverted to his education under the roof of the quaker, Abraham Shackleton. "I have been educated," said he, "as a Protestant of the Church of England, by a dissenter, who was an honour to his sect, though that sect was considered one of the purest. Under his eye I have read the Bible, morning, noon, and night, and have ever since been the happier and better man for such reading. I afterwards turned my attention to the reading of all the theological publications on all sides, which were written with such wonderful ability in the last and present centuries. But, finding at length that such studies tended to confound and bewilder rather than enlighten, I dropped them, embracing and holding fast a firm faith in the Church of England.”

Burke was sent to the Dublin University in 1743.

There he acquired no particular distinction. In his third year he became "a scholar of the house," an honour then obtained without much difficulty, after an examination in the classical course of the College; and probably also one of the premiums at the general examinations of the students. On the whole, he appears to have been either indolent, or adverse to the course of reading pursued in the Irish University. Goldsmith speaks of him as an idler; which may have been true, in the sense of a taste for desultory reading. Leland, then one of the tutors, always admitted that he displayed cleverness, but," from his retired habits, was unlikely to solicit public distinction!" The evident fact, on all authorities, is; that while in College, he was a literary lounger, satisfied with going through the routine of the required exercises, but enjoying himself only over novels and newspapers, plays and travels, and the general miscellaneous publications of the day; a style of reading which nothing but the painful exertions of many an after year, even with the most powerful faculties, can retrieve; but which utterly confuses and dilapidates inferior talents, generates all the trifling and much of the vice of society, and fills the professions with loungers for life. Let no man sanction his disregard of the efforts enjoined on him by his University, under the example of Burke; unless he can atone for his folly by the mind of Burke. And let no man look with negligence on the prospects opened out to manly and well-directed exertion in those noble Institutions, unless he is prepared to begin