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(to quote from Sir Richard Cox, the historian,) "many brave and worthy men, that have proved eminently serviceable to their king and country, whereby the name and estate are preserved in great honour and reputation to this day." The race thus referred to has been for centuries spread over the counties of Galway, Mayo, Limerick, Cork, and Tipperary; has possessed extensive landed property, and been ennobled at various epochs, under the titles of Clanricarde, Ulster, Clanmoris, St. Alban's, Leitrim, Brittas, Mayo, Tyaquin, Galway, Castle Connell, and Downes. The derivative branches were numerous, and many still maintain their footing in the west of Ireland, despite of the ruthless confiscations of Cromwell and William's times, and the scarcely less sweeping spoliation of the Encumbered Estates Court of the present day. From which of these branches Edmund Burke traced his ancestry has never been clearly ascertained. That he was a descendant of an offshoot of Clanricarde, several circumstances tend to show. Tradition, so often, and more especially in Ireland, an unerring guide on the misty path of the genealogist, affirms that the branch from which the great 'statesman sprung was a scion of the main stem of Clanricarde, long settled in the counties of Galway and Limerick; and this popular belief is corroborated by the arms borne by Edmund Burke, and his proved progenitors, 'which were those precisely of the Clanricarde family; as well as by the recognition of John Smith Burke the eleventh Earl, who on more than one occasion addressed the rising statesman as " cousin."

It is, at any rate, pretty certain that Edmund Burke's immediate progenitors possessed estates in the county of Limerick, the greater portion of which were lost in the civil commotions of the seventeenth century: the great grandfather of the statesman retired, in consequence, to the property he possessed in the county of Cork, and settled there in the neighbourhood of Castletown . Roche, a village about five miles from Doneraile. The grandson, Richard Bourke or Burke, the father of Edmund Burke, was

HIS PARENTS AND KINDRED.

brought up to the profession of the law, and resided for some time in Limerick, but eventually removed to Dublin, where he took a house on Arran Quay, and there practised as an attorney with eminent success. About the year 1725 he married Mary,

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daughter of Patrick Nagle, Esq., of Ballyduff and Moneaminy (descended from an ancient family in the county of Cork, of which was Sir Richard Nagle, Attorney-General for Ireland, temp. James II.). Through the Nagles, Edmund Burke was in a distant degree connected with the illustrious poet Edmund Spenser. Spenser's eldest son, Sylvanus of Kilcolman in the county of Cork, married Ellen, daughter of David Nagle, Esq. of Moneaminy.

Mr. Richard Burke had, by his wife, no less than fifteen children, all of whom died in youth except Garrett-EDMUND

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magnum nomen— —Richard, and Juliana. Garrett, the eldest son, followed his parent's profession, and resided in Dublin; he was never married, and died, not long after his father, in 1765, when the county of Cork property, which had been for several generations in his ancestors' possession, devolved on his brother Edmund, by whom it was sold for 4000l. Richard, the third son, acquired reputation in the political circles of London as a barrister, a wit, and a writer. More will be related of him in the course of this biography. Of the only daughter, Juliana, afterwards Mrs. French, further mention also will be made.

EDMUND BURKE, the second son, was born in his father's house, on Arran Quay, Dublin, the 1st January, 1730; or, as otherwise alleged, 1728. In his early years he was extremely delicate, even to the risk of consumption. This caused him to remain at home longer than youths usually do. His first instructor was his mother, and he was fortunate in being taught by her.

There are few men of transcendent ability who have not been the children of clever women, and Burke was no exception to this: his mother had a strong and cultivated understanding; to this she added the highest moral sense and the most fervent piety. No doubt her lessons kindled in the infant mind of her pupil the incipient sparks of that intellectual fire which was afterwards to burn so brightly; no doubt also the fond care of such a woman implanted in her child's breast those seeds of virtue and religion which grew with his growth, and secured the remarkable purity of his after-life. Another circumstance contributed not a little to give early vent to the ardent aspirations of the boy. Necessity for country air, for the invigoration of his frame, made the parents of Edmund Burke send him to sojourn at intervals in his grandfather's house at Castletown Roche, in the county of Cork, a town situate in a neighbourhood of romantic and surpassingly rural attractions and of glorious recollections. Here, at Kilcolman Castle, had Spenser written the Faerie Queene; here had lived Essex and Raleigh, and here were plenty of stories and legends about them.

HIS CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH.

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The locality was classic ground, and imagination may easily trace the youthful Edmund wandering amid such scenes, now absorbed in the quaint but glowing verse of that other Edmund whom he might in some measure associate with his ancestry, now all-attentive to some marvellous tale of the Elizabethan times which touched upon history, his favourite theme. It is but natural to suppose that upon the beautiful banks of the Blackwater, England's future orator imbibed in the poetry of the Faerie Queene the taste for ornate and eastern imagery which gave such splendour to his eloquence; that amid the memories hanging around the ruins of Kilcolman, he first thirsted for the historic knowledge which was to throw such power and prophetic force into his reasoning and his language.

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After a residence, on and off, of five years at Castledown Roche, where he picked up the rudiments of Latin and other juvenile scholastic information from a worthy pedagogue named O'Halloran, at the neighbouring village school of Glanworth,

Edmund Burke arrived at a more serious stage of his education. He became in the year 1741, in his twelfth year, as well as his brothers Garrett and Richard, an inmate of the famous classical academy at Ballitore, in the county of Kildare, a village some twenty-eight miles from Dublin. This academy, one of widespread and just repute, was then kept by Abraham Shackleton, a member of the Society of Friends, and a very accomplished and amiable man. He had come from Yorkshire, and had opened the school in Ballitore in 1726. Mr. Abraham Shackleton was a skilful and successful teacher, and at his school were educated many who became afterwards of considerable public note; Barry the painter, the protégé of Edmund Burke, being, as well as his patron, among the number.

The following quaint verses, from an old magazine, bear tribute to the acknowledged eminence of the academy:

"I've read in foreign climes of Ballitore,

He said, and of its celebrated school,
Where Irish youths imbibed that classic lore,
Which taught to win the field, or senates rule.
The days of Shackleton are days of yore,

To us who on life's stage now play the fool;
But they shall bloom in story ever green,

Nor ever fade, till fades the earthly scene."

Ballitore school continued to thrive long after the days of its most distinguished pupil. Abraham Shackleton's only son Richard succeeded his father in the management of the establishment about the year 1750, and from him the direction passed in 1775 to his sole surviving son Abraham Shackleton, who, in his turn, ceded it in 1809 to his son-in-law, James White, who remained at its head until its final close in 1840. Mr. White's daughter by his marriage with Miss Shackleton is wedded to a talented French gentleman, M. Théodore Eugène Suliot. Mr. White had a second wife, who, now his widow, lives with her children at Orange Hill, in the north of Ireland.

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