This is from one of Burke’s letters to Richard Shackleton, the son of his schoolmaster, with whom he had formed one of those close friendships that fill the life of generous youth, as ambition fills an energetic manhood.  Many tears were shed when the two boys parted at Ballitore, and they kept up their intimacy by a steady correspondence.  They discuss the everlasting dispute as to the ultimate fate of those who never heard the saving name of Christ.  They send one another copies of verses, and Burke prays for Shackleton’s judgment on an invocation of his new poem, to beauteous nymphs who haunt the dusky wood, which hangs recumbent o’er the crystal flood.  Burke is warned by Shackleton to endeavour to live according to the rules of the Gospel, and he humbly accepts the good advice, with the deprecatory plea that in a town it is difficult to sit down to think seriously.  It is easier, he says, to follow the rules of the Gospel in the country than at Trinity College, Dublin.  In the region of profaner things the two friends canvass the comparative worth of Sallust and of Tully’s Epistles.  Burke holds for the historian, who has, he thinks, a fine, easy, diversified narrative, mixed with reflection, moral and political, neither very trite nor obvious, nor out of the way and abstract; and this is the true beauty of historical observation.

Some pages of verse describe to Shackleton how his friend passes the day, but the reader will perhaps be content to learn in humbler prose that Burke rose with the dawn, and strode forth into the country through fragrant gardens and the pride of May, until want of breakfast drove him back unwillingly to the town, where amid lectures and books his heart incessantly turned to the river and the fir-woods of Ballitore.  In the evening he again turned his back on the city, taking his way “where Liffey rolls her dead dogs to the sea,” along to the wall on the shore, whence be delighted to see the sun sink into the waters, gilding ocean, ships, and city as it vanished.  Alas, it was beneath the dignity of verse to tell us what we should most gladly have known.  For,

  “The muse nor can, nor will declare,
  What is my work, and what my studies there.”

What serious nourishment Burke was laying in for his understanding we cannot learn from any other source.  He describes himself as spending three hours almost every day in the public library; “the best way in the world,” he adds oddly enough, “of killing thought.”  I have read some history, he says, and among other pieces of history, “I am endeavouring to get a little into the accounts of this, our own poor country,”—­a pathetic expression, which represents Burke’s perpetual mood, as long as he lived, of affectionate pity for his native land.  Of the eminent Irishmen whose names adorn the annals of Trinity College in the eighteenth century, Burke was only contemporary at the University with one, the luckless sizar who in the fulness of time wrote the Vicar of Wakefield.