Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: BURKE. 1730-1797. Edmund Burke was born in Dublin in 1730 and died in 1797. Unlike hia great contemporary, Pitt, be was not a youthful prodigy, but was a warm-hearted boy of apparently average intellectual eapacity. Having graduated at Trinity College, Dublin, he went to London and entered upon the study of law. But the profession did not suit him, and he soon abandoned it, and devoted himself to literary labors. His first considerable work was an essay entitled A Vindication of Natural Socicty. It was a parody on the works of Lord Bolingbroke, who had maintained that natural religion is sufficient for man, and that he does not need a revelation. His second book was one which gave him permanent and honorable fame, — An Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas on the Sublime and Beautiful. In 1759 Burke returned to Ireland as private secretary to William Gerard Hamilton (known in history as " Single-Speech Hamilton "), Chicf Secretary to the Lord Licutenant . He held his place but a short time, and left it to become Secretary to the Marquis of Rockingham. Soon obtaining a seat in Parliament he began the brilliant political career the particulars of which are familiar to all. He was especially promiuent in the debates upon the American War, and displayed a more thorough knowledge of the subject lhan any of his colleagues. In 1783 a political seheme, of which he was the organizer, having failed, he retired to private life. Burke was not a popular man ; he alienated his closest friends by the singularity and obstinacy of his opinions; but remembering that Goldsmith loved him, and that he had befriended George Crabbe in the hour of the latter's extremity, we cannot doubt that he had a kind heart. As a writer Burke stands in the very front rank. We give extracts from one of his speeches...