n of
intelligence first lights them up one after another with bewitching
visions and illusive magic. "All my studies," Burke wrote in 1746,
when he was in the midst of them, "have rather proceeded from sallies
of passion, than from the preference of sound reason; and, like all
other natural appetites, have been very violent for a season, and
very soon cooled, and quite absorbed in the succeeding. I have often
thought it a humorous consideration to observe and sum up all the
madness of this kind I have fallen into, this two years past. First, I
was greatly taken with natural philosophy; which, while I should have
given my mind to logic, employed me incessantly. This I call my _furor
mathematicus_. But this worked off as soon as I began to read it in
the college, as men by repletion cast off their stomachs all they have
eaten. Then I turned back to logic and metaphysics. Here I remained a
good while, and with much pleasure, and this was my _furor logicus_,
a disease very common in the days of ignorance, and very uncommon in
these enlightened times. Next succeeded the _furor historicus_, which
also had its day, but is now no more, being entirely absorbed in the
_furor poeticus_."

This is from one of Burke's letters to Richard Shackleton, the son
of his schoolmaster, with whom he had formed one of those close
friendships that fill the life of generous youth, as ambition fills an
energetic manhood. Many tears were shed when the two boys parted at
Ballitore, and they kept up their intimacy by a steady correspondence.
They discuss the everlasting dispute as to the ultimate fate of those
who never heard the saving name of Christ. They send one another
copies of verses, and Burke prays for Shackleton's judgment on an
invocation of his new poem, to beauteous nymphs who haunt the dusky
wood, which hangs recumbent o'er the crystal flood. Burke is warned by
Shackleton to endeavour to live according to the rules of the Gospel,
and he humbly accepts the good advice, with the deprecatory plea
that in a town it is difficult to sit down to think seriously. It is
easier, he says, to follow the rules of the Gospel in the country than
at Trinity College, Dublin. In the region of profaner things the
two friends canvass the comparative worth of Sallust and of Tully's
Epistles. Burke holds for the historian, who has, he thinks, a
fine, easy, diversified narrative, mixed with reflection, moral and
political, neither very trite nor obvious, no