llowed that of their father. In 1741 the three brothers were sent to
school at Ballitore in the county of Kildare, kept by Abraham Shackleton,
an Englishman, and a member of the Society of Friends. He appears to have
been an excellent teacher and a good and pious man. Burke always looked
back on his own connexion with the school at Ballitore as among the most
fortunate circumstances of his life. Between himself and a son of his
instructor there sprang up a close and affectionate friendship, and, unlike
so many of the exquisite attachments of youth, this was not choked by the
dust of life, nor parted by divergence of pursuit. Richard Shackleton was
endowed with a grave, pure and tranquil nature, constant and austere, yet
not without those gentle elements that often redeem the drier qualities of
his religious persuasion. When Burke had become one of the most famous men
in Europe, no visitor to his house was more welcome than the friend with
whom long years before he had tried poetic flights, and exchanged all the
sanguine confidences of boyhood. And we are touched to think of the
simple-minded guest secretly praying, in the solitude of his room in the
fine house at Beaconsfield, that the way of his anxious and overburdened
host might be guided by a divine hand.

In 1743 Burke became a student at Trinity College, Dublin, where Oliver
Goldsmith was also a student at the same time. But the serious pupil of
Abraham Shackleton would not be likely to see much of the wild and squalid
sizar. Henry Flood, who was two years younger than Burke, had gone to
complete his education at Oxford. Burke, like Goldsmith, achieved no
academic distinction. His character was never at any time of the academic
cast. The minor accuracies, the limitation of range, the treading and
re-treading of the same small patch of ground, the concentration of
interest in success before a board of examiners, were all uncongenial to a
nature of exuberant intellectual curiosity and of strenuous and
self-reliant originality. His knowledge of Greek and Latin was never
thorough, nor had he any turn for critical niceties. He could quote Homer
and Pindar, and he had read Aristotle. Like others who have gone through
the conventional course of instruction, he kept a place in his memory for
the various charms of Virgil and Horace, of Tacitus and Ovid; but the
master whose page by night and by day he turned with devout hand, was the
copious, energetic, flexible, diversified