at
the age when character usually either fritters itself away, or grows
strong on the inward sustenance of solid and resolute aspirations.
Writing from Battersea to his old comrade, Shackleton, in 1757,
he begins with an apology for a long silence which seems to have
continued from months to years. "I have broken all rules; I have
neglected all decorums; everything except that I have never forgot a
friend, whose good head and heart have made me esteem and love him.
What appearance there may have been of neglect, arises from my
manner of life; chequered with various designs; sometimes in London,
sometimes in remote parts of the country; sometimes in France, and
shortly, please God, to be in America."

One of the hundred inscrutable rumours that hovered about Burke's name
was, that he at one time actually did visit America. This was just as
untrue as that he became a convert to the Catholic faith; or that he
was the lover of Peg Woffington; or that he contested Adam Smith's
chair of moral philosophy at Glasgow along with Hume, and that both
Burke and Hume were rejected in favour of some fortunate Mr. James
Clow. They are all alike unfounded. But the same letter informs
Shackleton of a circumstance more real and more important than any
of these, though its details are only doubtfully known. Burke had
married--when and where, we cannot tell. Probably the marriage took
place in the winter of 1756. His wife was the daughter of Dr. Nugent,
an Irish physician once settled at Bath. One story is that Burke
consulted him in one of his visits to the west of England, and fell in
love with his daughter. Another version makes Burke consult him after
Dr. Nugent had removed to London; and tells how the kindly physician,
considering that the noise and bustle of chambers over a shop must
hinder his patient's recovery, offered him rooms in his own house.
However these things may have been, all the evidence shows Burke to
have been fortunate in the choice or accident that bestowed upon him
his wife. Mrs. Burke, like her father, was, up to the time of her
marriage, a Catholic. Good judges belonging to her own sex describe
her as gentle, quiet, soft in her manners, and well-bred. She had the
qualities which best fitted and disposed her to soothe the vehemence
and irritability of her companion. Though she afterwards conformed to
the religion of her husband, it was no insignificant coincidence
that in two of the dearest relations of his life t