t have counted for
much in creating that tender and generous sympathy towards a proscribed
creed which is one of the noblest characteristics of Burke's career.

Burke's earliest and in a sense his best education was received between
his twelfth and fourteenth years, in the school of a Yorkshire Quaker
named Abraham Shackleton, who kept a school at Ballitore. Burke used
often to declare in later years that he owed everything he had gained
in life to the teaching and the example of those two years with Abraham
Shackleton. The affectionate regard which Burke felt for his
schoolmaster, an affectionate regard which endured until Shackleton's
death, thirty years later, in 1771, he felt also for his schoolmaster's
son, Richard Shackleton. Most of what we know of Burke's life in
Trinity College from 1743 to 1748 we gather from his letters to Richard
Shackleton, letters of absorbing interest to any student of the growth
of a great mind. Less vivacious, less brilliant than the boyish
letters of Goethe, they resemble them in the eager thirst they display
for knowledge of all kinds, in their passionate enthusiasm for all the
rich varieties of human knowledge, in their restless experiments in all
directions. In those younger days Burke thought himself, as every
generous and ambitious youth must needs think himself, a poet, and many
verses were forwarded to the faithful friend, to lighten the effect of
serious theological discussions and elaborate comparisons of classical
authors.

Dissensions with his father and a determination to study for the bar
sent Burke to England in the early part of 1750, and there for nine
long years he practically disappears from our knowledge. All we know
is that he studied law, but that, like many another law student, he
gave more time and thought to literature than to his legal studies;
that this action deepened the hostility of his father, who {98} reduced
Burke's allowance to a pittance, and that his daily need as well as his
desire drove Burke to seek his livelihood in letters.

[Sidenote: 1759--The work of Edmund Burke]

He seems to have had a hard fight for it. The glimpses we get of him
during that period of youthful struggle show him as an ardent student
of books, but a no less ardent student of life, not merely in the
streets and clubs and theatres of the great city, but in the seclusion
of quiet country villages and the highways and byways of rural England.
Romance has not failed to