SOURCE: "Thomas Burke," in The Glory That Was Grub Street: Impressions of Contemporary Authors, Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1928, pp. 13-22.

In the following essay, Adcock favorably surveys the early years of Burke's literary career.

It used to be a canon of criticism, not so long ago, that all great art is impersonal. We were told (when I was young one distinguished critic told me in most reverent and emphatic terms) that Shakespeare could not be found in his plays or poems; that these were the sublime creations of his intellect and imagination, and that he had kept himself out of them with the perfect reticence of the supreme artist. It was a generally accepted faith. When somebody said that with his sonnets Shakespeare had unlocked his heart, wasn't it Browning who exclaimed, "then so much the less Shakespeare he!"

But this notion that the artist writes in a...