y_; _or_, _A View of the Miseries
and Evils arising to Mankind from Every Species of Civil Society_. Irony
is a dangerous weapon for a public man to have ever employed, and in
after-life Burke had frequently to explain that he was not serious. On
these two pamphlets' airy pinions Burke floated into the harbour of
literary fame. No less a man than the great David Hume referred to him,
in a letter to the hardly less great Adam Smith, as an Irish gentleman
who had written a 'very pretty treatise on the Sublime.' After these
efforts Burke, as became an established wit, went to Bath to recruit, and
there, fitly enough, fell in love. The lady was Miss Jane Mary Nugent,
the daughter of a celebrated Bath physician, and it is pleasant to be
able to say of the marriage that was shortly solemnized between the young
couple, that it was a happy one, and then to go on our way, leaving
them--where man and wife ought to be left--alone. Oddly enough, Burke's
wife was also the offspring of a 'mixed marriage'--only in her case it
was the father who was the Catholic; consequently both Mr. and Mrs.
Edmund Burke were of the same way of thinking, but each had a parent of
the other way. Although getting married is no part of the curriculum of
a law student, Burke's father seems to have come to the conclusion that
after all it was a greater distinction for an attorney in Dublin to have
a son living amongst the wits in London, and discoursing familiarly on
the 'Sublime and Beautiful,' than one prosecuting some poor countryman,
with a brogue as rich as his own, for stealing a pair of breeches; for we
find him generously allowing the young couple 200 pounds a year, which no
doubt went some way towards maintaining them. Burke, who was now in his
twenty-eighth year, seems to have given up all notion of the law. In
1758 he wrote for Dodsley the first volume of the _Annual Register_, a
melancholy series which continues to this day. For doing this he got 100
pounds. Burke was by this time a well-known figure in London literary
society, and was busy making for himself a huge private reputation. The
Christmas Day of 1758 witnessed a singular scene at the dinner table of
David Garrick. Dr. Johnson, then in full vigour of his mind, and with
the all-dreaded weapons of his dialectics kept burnished by daily use,
was flatly contradicted by a fellow-guest some twenty years his junior,
and, what is more, submitted to it without a murmur. One of the d