unty Limerick, who held a respectable
local position in the time of the civil wars. Burke's mother belonged
to the Nagle family, which had a strong connection in the county of
Cork; they had been among the last adherents of James II., and they
remained firm Catholics. Mrs. Burke remained true to the Church of her
ancestors, and her only daughter was brought up in the same faith.
Edmund Burke and his two brothers, Garret and Richard, were bred in
the religion of their father; but Burke never, in after times, lost a
large and generous way of thinking about the more ancient creed of his
mother and his uncles.

In 1741 he was sent to school at Ballitore, a village some thirty
miles away from Dublin, where Abraham Shackleton, a Quaker from
Yorkshire, had established himself fifteen years before, and had
earned a wide reputation as a successful teacher and a good man.
According to Burke, he richly deserved this high character. It was to
Abraham Shackleton that he always professed to owe whatever gain had
come to him from education. If I am anything, he said many years
afterwards, it is the education I had there that has made me so. His
master's skill as a teacher did not impress him more than the example
which was every day set before him, of uprightness and simplicity of
heart. Thirty years later, when Burke had the news of Shackleton's
death (1771), "I had a true honour and affection," he wrote, "for that
excellent man. I feel something like a satisfaction in the midst of my
concern, that I was fortunate enough to have him once under my roof
before his departure." No man has ever had a deeper or more tender
reverence than Burke for homely goodness, simple purity, and all the
pieties of life; it may well be that this natural predisposition of
all characters, at once so genial and so serious as his, was finally
stamped in him by his first schoolmaster. It is true that he was only
two years at Ballitore, but two years at that plastic time often build
up habits in the mind that all the rest of a life is unable to pull
down.

In 1743 Burke became a student of Trinity College, Dublin, and he
remained there until 1748, when he took his Bachelor's degree. These
five years do not appear to have been spent in strenuous industry in
the beaten paths of academic routine. Like so many other men of great
gifts, Burke in his youth was desultory and excursive. He roamed at
large over the varied heights that tempt our curiosity, as the daw