hat
lasting impression of Burke, of whom he said, "Sir, if you met Edmund
Burke under a gateway, where you had taken shelter for five minutes to
escape a shower, you would be so impressed by his conversation that you
would say, 'This is a most extraordinary man.'"

If one knows how, or has to, he can live in a large city at a small
expense. For nine years Burke's London life is a tale of a garret, with
the details almost lost in the fog. Of this time, in after-years, he
seldom spoke, not because he was ashamed of all the straits and shifts
he had to endure, but because he was endowed with that fine dignity of
mind which does not dwell on hardships gone and troubles past, but
rather fixes itself on blessings now at hand and other blessings yet to
come. Then, better still, there came a time when work and important
business filled every moment of the fast-flying hours. And so he himself
once said, "The sure cure for all private griefs is a hearty interest in
public affairs."

The best searchlight through the mist of those early days comes to us
through Burke's letters to his friend Richard, the son of his old Quaker
teacher. Shackleton had the insight to perceive his friend was no common
man, and so preserved every scrap of Burke's writing that came his way.

About that time there seems to have been a sort of meteoric shower of
chipmunk magazines, following in the luminous pathway of the "Spectator"
and the "Tatler." Burke was passing through his poetic period, and
supplied various stanzas of alleged poetry to these magazines for a
modest consideration. For one poem he received eighteen pence, as
tearfully told by Shackleton, but we have Hawkins for it that this was a
trifle more than the poem was worth.

Of this poetry we know little, happily, but glimpses of it are seen in
the Shackleton letters; for instance, when he asks his friend's
criticism of such lines as these:

"The nymphs that haunt the dusky wood,
Which hangs recumbent o'er the crystal flood."

He speaks of his delight in ambient sunsets, when gilded oceans, ghostly
ships, and the dull, dark city vanish for the night. Of course, such
things never happen except in books, but the practise of writing about
them is a fine drill, in that it enables the writer to get a grasp on
his vocabulary. Poetry is for the poet.

And if Burke wrote poetry in bed, having to remain there in the daytime,
while his landlady was doing up his single ruffled shirt for an e