and buildings, instead of first arranging the sentiments and faculties in man to which art makes its appeal.  Addison’s treatment was slight and merely literary; Burke dealt boldly with his subject on the base of the most scientific psychology that was then within his reach.  To approach it on the psychological side at all was to make a distinct and remarkable advance in the method of the inquiry which he had taken in hand.

CHAPTER II

IN IRELAND—­PARLIAMENT—­BEACONSFIELD

Burke was thirty years old before he approached even the threshold of the arena in which he was destined to be so great a figure.  He had made a mark in literature, and it was to literature rather than to public affairs that his ambition turned.  He had naturally become acquainted with the brother-authors who haunted the coffee-houses in Fleet Street; and Burke, along with his father-in-law, Dr. Nugent, was one of the first members of the immortal club where Johnson did conversational battle with all comers.  We shall, in a later chapter, have something to say on Burke’s friendships with the followers of his first profession, and on the active sympathy with which he helped those who were struggling into authorship.  Meanwhile, the fragments that remain of his own attempts in this direction are no considerable contributions.  His Hints for an Essay on the Drama are jejune and infertile, when compared with the vigorous and original thought of Diderot and Lessing at about the same period.  He wrote an Account of the European Settlements in America.  His Abridgment of the History of England comes down no further than to the reign of John.  A much more important undertaking than his history of the past was his design for a yearly chronicle of the present.  The Annual Register began to appear in 1759.  Dodsley, the bookseller of Pall Mall, provided the sinews of war, and he gave Burke a hundred pounds a year for his survey of the great events which were then passing in the world.  The scheme was probably born of the circumstances of the hour, for this was the climax of the Seven Years’ War.  The clang of arms was heard in every quarter of the globe, and in East and West new lands were being brought under the dominion of Great Britain.

In this exciting crisis of national affairs, Burke began to be acquainted with public men.  In 1759 he was introduced, probably by Lord Charlemont, to William Gerard Hamilton, who only survives in our memories by his nickname of Single-speech.  As a matter of fact, he made many speeches in Parliament, and some good ones, but none so good as the first, delivered in a debate in 1755, in which Pitt, Fox, Grenville, and Murray all took part, and were all outshone by the new luminary.  But the new luminary never shone again with its first brilliance.  He sought Burke out on the strength of the success of the Vindication of Natural Society, and he seems to have had a