life from his pen.

On this melancholy event, the papers came into the possession of the
late Earl Fitzwilliam, from whom they devolved to the present Earl,
who, with Sir Richard Bourke, a distant relative of the family, and
personally intimate with Burke during the last eight years of his
life, has undertaken the present collection of his letters. Those
letters which required explanation have been supplied with intelligent
and necessary notes, and the whole forms a singularly important
publication.

* * * * *

Many of Burke's earliest letters were written to a Richard Shackleton,
the son of a Quaker at whose school Burke with his two brothers had
been placed in 1741. In 1743, he was placed in the college of Dublin,
and then commenced his correspondence with Shackleton. Even those
letters exhibit, at the age of little more than fifteen, the
sentiments which his mature life was spent in establishing and
enlarging. He says of sectaries, and this was to a sectary himself, "I
assure you, I don't think near so favourably of those sectaries you
mentioned, (he had just spoken of the comparative safety of virtuous
heathens, who, not having known the name of Christianity, were not to
be judged by its law,) many of those sectaries breaking, as they
themselves confessed, for matters of indifference, and no way
concerned in the only affair that is necessary, viz. salvation; and
what a great crime schism is, you can't be ignorant. This, and the
reasons in my last, and if you consider what will occur to yourself,
together with several texts, will bring you to my way of thinking on
that point. Let us endeavour to live according to the rules of the
Gospel; and he that prescribed them, I hope, will consider our
endeavours to please him, and assist us in our designs.

"I don't like that part of your letter, wherein you say you had the
testimony of well-doing in your breast. Whenever such notions rise
again, endeavour to suppress them. We should always be in no other
than the state of a penitent, because the most righteous of us is no
better than a sinner. Read the parable of the Pharisee and the
Publican who prayed in the temple."

We next have a letter exhibiting the effect of external things on the
writer's mind, and expressed with almost the picturesque power of his
higher days. He tells his friend, that he will endeavour to answer his
letter in good-humour, "though every thing around," he says,