them, Burke conceived a strong distaste for the profession of the law. His
father, who was an attorney of substance, had a distaste still stronger for
so vagrant a profession as letters were in that day. He withdrew the annual
allowance, and Burke set to work to win for himself by indefatigable
industry and capability in the public interest that position of power or
pre-eminence which his detractors acquired either by accident of birth and
connexions or else by the vile arts of political intrigue. He began at the
bottom of the ladder, mixing with the Bohemian society that haunted the
Temple, practising oratory in the free and easy debating societies of
Covent Garden and the Strand, and writing for the booksellers.

In 1756 he made his first mark by a satire upon Bolingbroke entitled _A
Vindication of Natural Society_. It purported to be a posthumous work from
the pen of Bolingbroke, and to present a view of the miseries and evils
arising to mankind from every species of artificial society. The imitation
of the fine style of that magnificent writer but bad patriot is admirable.
As a satire the piece is a failure, for the simple reason that the
substance of it might well pass for a perfectly true, no less than a very
eloquent statement of social blunders and calamities. Such acute critics as
Chesterfield and Warburton thought the performance serious. Rousseau, whose
famous discourse on the evils of civilization had appeared six years
before, would have read Burke's ironical vindication of natural society
without a suspicion of its irony. There have indeed been found persons who
insist that the _Vindication_ was a really serious expression of the
writer's own opinions. This is absolutely incredible, for various reasons.
Burke felt now, as he did thirty years later, that civil institutions
cannot wisely or safely be measured by the tests of pure reason. His
sagacity discerned that the rationalism by which Bolingbroke and the
deistic school believed themselves to have overthrown revealed religion,
was equally calculated to undermine the structure of political government.
This was precisely the actual course on which speculation was entering in
France at that moment. His _Vindication_ is meant to be a reduction to an
absurdity. The rising revolutionary school in France, if they had read it,
would have taken it for a demonstration of the theorem to be proved. The
only interest of the piece for us lies in the proof which it furn