before and since, now
threw himself for a livelihood.

[Footnote 1: _American Taxation_.]

Of the details of the struggle we know very little. Burke was not fond
in after life of talking about his earlier days, not because he
had any false shame about the straits and hard shifts of youthful
neediness, but because he was endowed with a certain inborn
stateliness of nature, which made him unwilling to waste thoughts on
the less dignified parts of life. This is no unqualified virtue, and
Burke might have escaped some wearisome frets and embarrassments in
his existence, if he had been capable of letting the detail of the day
lie more heavily upon him. So far as it goes, however, it is a sign of
mental health that a man should be able to cast behind him the barren
memories of bygone squalor. We may be sure that whatever were the
external ordeals of his apprenticeship in the slippery craft of the
literary adventurer, Burke never failed in keeping for his constant
companions generous ambitions and high thoughts. He appears to have
frequented the debating clubs in Fleet Street and the Piazza of Covent
Garden, and he showed the common taste of his time for the theatre.
He was much of a wanderer, partly from the natural desire of restless
youth to see the world, and partly because his health was weak. In
after life he was a man of great strength, capable not only of bearing
the strain of prolonged application to books and papers in the
solitude of his library, but of bearing it at the same time with the
distracting combination of active business among men. At the date of
which we are speaking, he used to seek a milder air at Bristol, or in
Monmouthshire, or Wiltshire. He passed the summer in retired country
villages, reading and writing with desultory industry, in company
with William Burke, a namesake but perhaps no kinsman. It would
be interesting to know the plan and scope of his studies. We are
practically reduced to conjecture. In a letter of counsel to his son
in after years, he gave him a weighty piece of advice, which, is
pretty plainly the key to the reality and fruitfulness of his own
knowledge. "_Reading_," he said, "_and much reading, is good. But the
power of diversifying the matter infinitely in your own mind, and of
applying it to every occasion that arises, is far better; so don't
suppress the_ vivida vis." We have no more of Burke's doings than
obscure and tantalising glimpses, tantalising, because he was then