Edmund Burke was born, 1730, of respectable parents in Ireland.  He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, where he made a fair proficiency, but did not give promise of those rare powers which he afterwards exhibited.  He was no prodigy, like Cicero, Pitt, and Macaulay.  He early saw that his native country presented no adequate field for him, and turned his steps to London at the age of twenty, where he entered as a student of law in the Inner Temple,—­since the Bar was then, what it was at Rome, what it still is in modern capitals, the usual resort of ambitious young men.  But Burke did not like the law as a profession, and early dropped the study of it; not because he failed in industry, for he was the most plodding of students; not because he was deficient in the gift of speech, for he was a born orator; not because his mind repelled severe logical deductions, for he was the most philosophical of the great orators of his day,—­not because the law was not a noble field for the exercise of the highest faculties of the mind, but probably because he was won by the superior fascinations of literature and philosophy.  Bacon could unite the study of divine philosophy with professional labors as a lawyer, also with the duties of a legislator; but the instances are rare where men have united three distinct spheres, and gained equal distinction in all.  Cicero did, and Bacon, and Lord Brougham; but not Erskine, nor Pitt, nor Canning.  Even two spheres are as much as most distinguished men have filled,—­the law with politics, like Thurlow and Webster; or politics with literature, like Gladstone and Disraeli.  Dr. Johnson, Garrick, and Reynolds, the early friends of Burke, filled only one sphere.

The early literary life of Burke was signalized by his essay on “The Sublime and Beautiful,” original in its design and execution, a model of philosophical criticism, extorting the highest praises from Dugald Stewart and the Abbe Raynal, and attracting so much attention that it speedily became a text-book in the universities.  Fortunately he was able to pursue literature, with the aid of a small patrimony (about L300 a year), without being doomed to the hard privations of Johnson, or the humiliating shifts of Goldsmith.  He lived independently of patronage from the great,—­the bitterest trial of the literati of the eighteenth century, which drove Cowper mad, and sent Rousseau to attics and solitudes,—­so that, in his humble but pleasant home, with his young wife, with whom he lived amicably, he could see his friends, the great men of the age, and bestow an unostentatious charity, and maintain his literary rank and social respectability.