There is no evidence that at this time he and Goldsmith were acquainted with one another.  Flood had gone to Oxford some time before.  The one or two companions whom Burke mentions in his letters are only shadows of names.  The mighty Swift died in 1745, but there is nothing of Burke’s upon the event.  In the same year came the Pretender’s invasion, and Burke spoke of those who had taken part in it in the same generous spirit that he always showed to the partisans of lost historic causes.

Of his own family Burke says little, save that in 1746 his mother had a dangerous illness.  In all my life, he writes to his friend, I never found so heavy a grief, nor really did I well know what it was before.  Burke’s father is said to have been a man of angry and irritable temper, and their disagreements were frequent.  This unhappy circumstance made the time for parting not unwelcome.  In 1747 Burke’s name had been entered at the Middle Temple, and after taking his degree, he prepared to go to England to pursue the ordinary course of a lawyer’s studies.  He arrived in London in the early part of 1750.

A period of nine years followed, in which the circumstances of Burke’s life are enveloped in nearly complete obscurity.  He seems to have kept his terms in the regular way at the Temple, and from the mastery of legal principles and methods which he afterwards showed in some important transactions, we might infer that he did more to qualify himself for practice than merely dine in the hall of his inn.  For law, alike as a profession and an instrument of mental discipline, he had always the profound respect that it so amply deserves, though he saw that it was not without drawbacks of its own.  The law, he said, in his fine description of George Grenville, in words that all who think about schemes of education ought to ponder, “is, in my opinion, one of the first and noblest of human sciences; a science which does more to quicken and invigorate the understanding than all the other kinds of learning put together; but it is not apt, except in persons very happily born, to open and to liberalise the mind exactly in the same proportion."[1] Burke was never called to the bar, and the circumstance that, about the time when he ought to have been looking for his first guinea, he published a couple of books which had as little as possible to do with either law or equity, is a tolerably sure sign that he had followed the same desultory courses at the Temple as he had followed at Trinity College.  We have only to tell over again a very old story.  The vague attractions of literature prevailed over the duty of taking up a serious profession.  His father, who had set his heart on having a son in the rank of a barrister, was first suspicious, then extremely indignant, and at last he withdrew his son’s allowance, or else reduced it so low that the recipient could not possibly live upon it.  This catastrophe took place some time in 1755,—­a year of note in the history of literature, as the date of the publication of Johnson’s Dictionary.  It was upon literature, the most seductive, the most deceiving, the most dangerous of professions, that Burke, like so many hundreds of smaller men before and since, now threw himself for a livelihood.