[Footnote 1:  American Taxation.]

Of the details of the struggle we know very little.  Burke was not fond in after life of talking about his earlier days, not because he had any false shame about the straits and hard shifts of youthful neediness, but because he was endowed with a certain inborn stateliness of nature, which made him unwilling to waste thoughts on the less dignified parts of life.  This is no unqualified virtue, and Burke might have escaped some wearisome frets and embarrassments in his existence, if he had been capable of letting the detail of the day lie more heavily upon him.  So far as it goes, however, it is a sign of mental health that a man should be able to cast behind him the barren memories of bygone squalor.  We may be sure that whatever were the external ordeals of his apprenticeship in the slippery craft of the literary adventurer, Burke never failed in keeping for his constant companions generous ambitions and high thoughts.  He appears to have frequented the debating clubs in Fleet Street and the Piazza of Covent Garden, and he showed the common taste of his time for the theatre.  He was much of a wanderer, partly from the natural desire of restless youth to see the world, and partly because his health was weak.  In after life he was a man of great strength, capable not only of bearing the strain of prolonged application to books and papers in the solitude of his library, but of bearing it at the same time with the distracting combination of active business among men.  At the date of which we are speaking, he used to seek a milder air at Bristol, or in Monmouthshire, or Wiltshire.  He passed the summer in retired country villages, reading and writing with desultory industry, in company with William Burke, a namesake but perhaps no kinsman.  It would be interesting to know the plan and scope of his studies.  We are practically reduced to conjecture.  In a letter of counsel to his son in after years, he gave him a weighty piece of advice, which, is pretty plainly the key to the reality and fruitfulness of his own knowledge. “Reading,” he said, “and much reading, is good.  But the power of diversifying the matter infinitely in your own mind, and of applying it to every occasion that arises, is far better; so don’t suppress the vivida vis.”  We have no more of Burke’s doings than obscure and tantalising glimpses, tantalising, because he was then at the age when character usually either fritters itself away, or grows strong on the inward sustenance of solid and resolute aspirations.  Writing from Battersea to his old comrade, Shackleton, in 1757, he begins with an apology for a long silence which seems to have continued from months to years.  “I have broken all rules; I have neglected all decorums; everything except that I have never forgot a friend, whose good head and heart have made me esteem and love him.  What appearance there may have been of neglect, arises from my manner of life; chequered with various designs; sometimes in London, sometimes in remote parts of the country; sometimes in France, and shortly, please God, to be in America.”