se and witty;
And if ever marriage should happen to me,
A Weinsberg dame my wife shall be.

Translated by C. T. Brooks: Reprinted from 'Representative German Poems'
by the courtesy of Mrs. Charles T. Brooks.

EDMUND BURKE

(1729-1797)

BY E. L. GODKIN

Edmund Burke, born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1729, was the son of a
successful attorney, who gave him as good an education as the times and
the country afforded. He went to school to an excellent Quaker, and
graduated at Trinity College in 1748. He appears to have then gone to
London in 1750 to "keep terms," as it was called, at the Middle Temple,
with the view of being admitted to the bar, in obedience to his father's
desire and ambition. But the desultory habit of mind, the preference for
literature and philosophical speculation to connected study, which had
marked his career in college, followed him and prevented any serious
application to the law. His father's patience was after a while
exhausted, and he withdrew Burke's allowance and left him to his own
resources.

This was in 1755, but in 1756 he married, and made his first appearance
in the literary world by the publication of a book. About these years
from 1750 to 1759 little is known. He published two works, one a
treatise on the 'Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful,' and
the other a 'Vindication of Natural Society,' a satire on Bolingbroke.
Stray allusions and anecdotes about other men in the diaries and
correspondence of the time show that he frequented the literary
coffee-houses, and was gradually making an impression on the authors and
wits whom he met there. Besides the two books we have mentioned, he
produced some smaller things, such as an 'Essay on the Drama,' and part
of an 'Abridgment of the History of England.' But although these helped
to secure him admission to the literary set, they did not raise him out
of the rank of obscure literary adventurers, who from the Revolution of
1688, and especially after the union with Scotland, began to swarm to
London from all parts of the three kingdoms. The first recognition of
him as a serious writer was his employment by Dodsley the bookseller, at
a salary of $100 a year, to edit the Annual Register, which Dodsley
founded in 1769. Considered as a biographical episode, this may fairly
be treated as a business man's certificate that Burke was industrious
and accurate. As his income from his father was withdrawn or reduced in
1755,