UNTIL the publication of Mr Macknight's 'Life of Burke,' the biographies of this eminent orator, writer, and statesman were full of minute errors. Contradictory statements prevailed concerning the date and place of his birth, the religion of his parents, his early education, his employments before he entered Parliament, and many other points wherein assurance is to be desired regarding a man of such eminence.

He was born in a house on Arran Quay, Dublin, most probably on January 12, 1728 or 1729.1 His supposed ancestors were wealthy citizens of Limerick, who adhered to the Catholic faith, and lost their possessions in the time of Cromwell. His father was a solicitor in good practice, and belonged to the Protestant communion. His mother's name was Nagle; she was a Roman Catholic. It is of some consequence to note that Burke's earliest years were spent under the care of his Catholic uncles, who farmed some land of their own in the south of Ireland, and that his schoolmaster (Abraham Shackleton, of Ballitore, in Kildare) was a Quaker. He had thus the best possible training in the toleration of different creeds. From 1743 to 1748 he was a student in Trinity College, Dublin. He was too desultory to excel in the studies of the place; he had occasional fits of application to mathematics and logic; and he was awarded a scholarship in classics : but he did not carry off the highest honours in any one department.

11728 according to the register of Trinity College; 1729 according to the tablet in Beaconsfield Church.

Not that, like his contemporary the gay Goldsmith, he wasted his time in frolic and dissipation; but he gave himself up to miscellaneous reading, especially of poetry, to verse-making, and to daydreaming. In 1747 he entered his name at the Middle Temple, and in 1750 went to London to keep law terms; but in this new study he showed equally little diligence, and for some years is to be conceived as a young Templar, in delicate health, fond of jaunting about England, fond of literature, and anything but fond of law." 1

His first literary productions appeared in 1756. A Vindication of Natural Society,' intended as a parody of Bolingbroke's reasonings on religion, is sometimes praised as a successful piece of mimicry; but it contains more of the real Burke than of the sham Bolingbroke. It may be viewed as an exercise in the style that the author ultimately adopted as his habitual manner of composition. The Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful' has much less glow and sweep of style; the writer's flow of words seems to be painfully embarrassed by the necessity of observing order and proportion of statement. In 1757 he married. The same year he wrote 'An Account of European Settlements in America,' and an unfinished Essay towards an Abridgment of English History.' Next year he suggested to Dodsley the Annual Register,' a yearly summary of notable facts. He is supposed to have written the whole of this annual for 1758 and for 1759, and to have contributed the political summary for a good many years after.

In 1759 he was introduced more intimately to political life. In that year he became connected with "Single-Speech" Hamilton as private secretary, or, as he was nicknamed, "jackal," his previous studies making him well qualified to act as political tutor. He accompanied Hamilton to Ireland in 1761, and is supposed to have been the original prompter of the efforts then instituted by Government to relax the inhuman penal laws against the Roman Catholics. In 1765, his connection with Hamilton having ended in an open rupture, he was fortunate enough to obtain the higher appointment of private secretary to the Prime Minister, Lord Rockingham, who continued his friend and patron to the last.

He entered Parliament in 1766 as member for Wendover. Our space will not allow us to trace his career minutely. During his first session he supported Rockingham's conciliatory policy towards the irritated colonies of North America in speeches that fairly rivalled the eloquence of the veteran Chatham. Thereafter he vigorously defended this policy both in Parliament and out of it, with speech and with pamphlet, through several stormy years until the final rupture and Declaration of Independence. 'Observations

1 The story that in 1751 he applied for the Professorship of Logic in Glasgow is discredited as absurd, and its origin sufficiently accounted for.

on a late Publication, intituled The Present State of the Nation,' a reply to a jeremiad supposed to be written by Grenville, appeared in 1769; Thoughts on Present Discontents' in the following year. His patronage of the colonies was widely acknowledged In 1771 he was appointed agent for the state of New York, with a salary of £500 a-year; and in 1774 he was returned to Parliament free of expense by the peace-loving merchants of Bristol. His famous speech "on conciliation with America" was made in support of certain resolutions that he introduced in 1775.

In 1778 he supported Lord Nugent's proposals for freeing the trade of Ireland from certain restrictions. The credit of this action which, indeed, "the impartial historian" would have expected from any Irishman of moderately patriotic feelings-is not a little diminished by his factious opposition to Pitt's endeavours in 1785 to procure the abolition of the remaining restrictions.

In 1780 he brought forward his great scheme of economical reform. The ministers of the Crown had at their disposal a large number of lucrative sinecures, nominal posts in the royal household, and suchlike. On this patronage. a gigantic system of corruption, used by the Government to bribe adherents-Burke proposed to make considerable curtailments. Only a small part of his scheme was carried.

About the same time his attention was powerfully drawn to Indian misgovernment by his kinsman William Burke. In 1781 he sat on a committee of inquiry. In 1783 he assisted in concocting Fox's India Bill, which proposed to abolish the East India Company and vest the government in seven commissioners appointed for life. Shortly afterwards he opposed the more constitutional and judicious Bill introduced by Pitt. One of the most memorable events of his life was the conduct of the impeachment of Warren Hastings for tyrannical abuse of his power as Governor of India. The trial lasted from 1788 to 1794, judgment not being pronounced till 1796.

Much has been said regarding his views of the French Revolution, and his consequent separation from his political associates. In a debate on the Army Estimates in 1790, Fox took occasion to praise the French Guards, because, during the late commotions, they had sided, not with the Court, but with the people; they "had shown that men, by becoming soldiers, did not cease to be citizens." In the course of the same debate Burke deprecated this praise, called them "not citizens, but base hireling mutineers, and mercenary sordid deserters," and warmly asserted that rather than give the least countenance in England to the distemper of France, he would "abandon his best friends, and join with his worst enemies." Afterwards, when the leading members of his party

avowed a decided sympathy with the Revolution, he openly and violently broke with them, and employed his eloquence in decrying that event with such effect that he has been called the leader of the reactionary movement throughout Europe. His most famous writings on the subject are 'Reflections on the French Revolution,' 1790; 'An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs,' 1791; and 'Letters on a Regicide Peace,' 1796.

In 1794 he retired from Parliament. Shortly after, he sustained a great blow in the death of his only son, who had just been elected for Malton in his stead. Towards the end of the same year he received a pension from Government; and the apparent inconsistency of an economical reformer accepting such a boon having been attacked by the Duke of Bedford in the House of Lords, he replied in his famous "Letter to a Noble Lord," February 1795. He died at Beaconsfield on July 8, 1797.

Burke's appearance is described by Mr Macknight in the following terms: "Tall, and apparently endowed with much vigour of body, his presence was noble and his appearance prepossessing. In later years, the first peculiarity which caught the eye as Burke walked forwards, as his custom was, to speak in the middle of the House, were his spectacles, which, from shortness of sight, seemed never absent from his face. His dress, though not slovenly, was by no means such as would have suited a leader of fashion. He had the air of a man who was full of thought and care, and to whom his outward appearance was not of the slightest consideration. But as a set-off to this disadvantage, there was in his whole deportment a sense of personal dignity and habitual self-respect... His brow was massive. They who knew how amiable Burke was in his private life, and how warm and tender was the heart within, might expect to see these softer qualities depicted on his countenance. But they would have been disappointed. It was not usual at any time to see his face mantling with smiles; he decidedly looked like a great man, but not like a meek or gentle one. All his troubles were impressed on his working features, and gave them a somewhat severe expression, which deepened as he advanced in years, until they became to some observers unpleasantly hard. The marks about the jaw, the firmness of the lines about the mouth, the stern glance of the eye, and the furrows on the expansive forehead, were all the sad ravages left by the difficulties and sorrows of genius, and by the iron which had entered the soul."

"During his boyhood, and even for some years after he had reached manhood, his health was very delicate." He had an athletic frame, but a tendency to consumption threatened him in his childhood, and again when first he went to reside in London.

De Quincey justly describes Burke as "the supreme writer of his century.' No writer of that century is to be compared with him as regards command of English expression. With equal justice, as it seems to us, he is described by Carlyle as "a man vehement rather than earnest; a resplendent, far-sighted Rhetorician, rather than a deep, sure Thinker." Others, who eagerly and somewhat perversely question this judgment of Carlyle's, maintain him to have been "a man of the highest genius, taking rank with Shakspeare and Bacon." There is no necessary discrepancy between these views, if only we recognise diversity of gifts, and cease to advance impossible claims for our favourite authors. Burke may have had as much intellectual force as either Shakspeare or Bacon, although it displayed itself in a different line. To be such a rhetorician as he was implies no common powersimmense resources of expression and illustration, a wide and ready command of facts, and fertile and far-sighted ingenuity in arranging facts and principles for the purposes of persuasion. To be among the foremost rhetoricians demands, probably, as great intellectual power of its kind as to be among the foremost poets or the foremost men of science. Be this as it may, one cannot read much of Burke's writings without seeing that they are essentially rhetorical. His 'Vindication of Natural Society' is obviously an exercise in the art of special pleading. Even his 'Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful' is the work of a rhetorician rather than a clear-sighted analyst. It is not a profound analysis of æsthetic emotions, but a wide assemblage of facts, and an ingenious pleading in favour of some very fanciful theories. His various pamphlets and speeches are, as Mr Arnold says, "saturated with ideas;" but the ideas are all brought out with polemical objects. Many of them appear to have occurred in the heat of pressing his point, and sometimes their application even carries an air of sophistry. The claim of high political sagacity, so often advanced in his favour, is not incompatible with this splendid ingenuity in accumulating substantial and insubstantial arguments in support of his views. Yet one may well doubt whether Burke's political sagacity was of the first rank. Certain of his predictions are sometimes quoted as evidence of this sagacity; but not to mention that many of his predictions were oracular failures, the very fact of making confident political predictions is in itself an evidence of want of sagacity. It is, of course, unprofitable to argue regarding a term so vague; yet we are safe to say that the highest honours of sagacity cannot be awarded to a man confessedly onesided. He was too vehement and passionate to be always master of his sagacity. "When his passions were asleep," says an able editor of his works, "and his judgment calm, no man could display more perspicacity; the range and comprehensiveness of his