ody, though sorely puzzled to surmise what thing or when, so
pleasantly does he take life), from all sorts of out-of-the-way country
places, where he lodges with quaint old landladies who wonder maternally
why he never gets drunk, and generally mistake him for an author until he
pays his bill. When in town he frequented debating societies in Fleet
Street and Covent Garden, and made his first speeches; for which purpose
he would, unlike some debaters, devote studious hours to getting up the
subjects to be discussed. There is good reason to believe that it was in
this manner his attention was first directed to India. He was at all
times a great talker, and, Dr. Johnson's dictum notwithstanding, a good
listener. He was endlessly interested in everything--in the state of the
crops, in the last play, in the details of all trades, the rhythm of all
poems, the plots of all novels, and indeed in the course of every
manufacture. And so for six years he went up and down, to and fro,
gathering information, imparting knowledge, and preparing himself, though
he knew not for what.

The attorney in Dublin grew anxious, and searched for precedents of a son
behaving like his, and rising to eminence. Had his son got the legal
mind?--which, according to a keen observer, chiefly displays itself by
illustrating the obvious, explaining the evident, and expatiating on the
commonplace. Edmund's powers of illustration, explanation, and
expatiation could not indeed be questioned; but then the subjects
selected for the exhibition of those powers were very far indeed from
being obvious, evident, or commonplace, and the attorney's heart grew
heavy within him. The paternal displeasure was signified in the usual
manner--the supplies were cut off. Edmund Burke, however, was no
ordinary prodigal, and his reply to his father's expostulations took the
unexpected and unprecedented shape of a copy of a second and enlarged
edition of his treatise on the _Sublime and Beautiful_, which he had
published in 1756 at the price of three shillings. Burke's father
promptly sent the author a bank-bill for 100 pounds--conduct on his part
which, considering he had sent his son to London and maintained him there
for six years to study law, was, in my judgment, both sublime and
beautiful. In the same year Burke published another pamphlet--a one-and-
sixpenny affair--written ironically in the style of Lord Bolingbroke, and
called _A Vindication of Natural Societ