her they tramped off
through rural England, loitering along flowering hedgerows, and stopping
at quaint inns, where the villagers made guesses as to whether the two
were gentlemen out for a lark, smugglers or Jesuits in disguise.

One of these trips took our friends to Bath, and there we hear they were
lodged at the house of a Doctor Nugent, an excellent and scholarly man.
William Burke went back to London and left Edmund at Bath deep in the
pursuit of the Sublime. Doctor Nugent had a daughter, aged twenty,
beautiful, gentle and gracious. The reader can guess the rest.

That Burke's wife was a most amiable and excellent woman there is no
doubt. She loved her lord, believed in him and had no other gods before
him. But that she influenced his career directly or through antithesis,
there is no trace. Her health was too frail to follow him--his stride
was terrific--so she remained at home, and after every success he came
back and told her of it, and rested his great, shaggy head in her lap.

Only one child was born to them, and this boy closely resembled his
mother in intellect and physique. This son passed out early in life, and
so with Edmund died the name.

* * * * *

The next book Burke launched was the one we know best, "On the Sublime."
The original bore the terrifying title, "A Philosophical Inquiry Into
the Origin of Our Ideas Concerning the Sublime and Beautiful." This book
consists of one hundred seventeen chapters, each chapter dealing with
some special phase of the subject.

It is the most searching and complete analysis of an abstract theme of
which I know. It sums the subject up like an essay by Herbert Spencer,
and disposes of the case once and forever. It is so learned that only a
sophomore could have written it, and we quite forgive the author when we
are told that it was composed when he was nineteen.

The book proved Burke's power to follow an idea to its lair, and its
launching also launched the author upon the full tide of polite society.
Goldsmith said, "We will lose him now," but Burke still stuck by his
coffeehouse companions and used them as a pontoon to bridge the gulf
'twixt Bohemia and Piccadilly.

In the meantime he had written a book for Dodsley on "English
Settlements in North America," and this did Burke more good than any one
else, as it caused him to focus his inquiring mind on the New World.
After this man began to write on a subject, his intellect be