ishes,
that at the opening of his life Burke had the same scornful antipathy to
political rationalism which flamed out in such overwhelming passion at its
close.

In the same year (1756) appeared the _Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin
of our Ideas on the Sublime and Beautiful_, a crude and narrow performance
in many respects, yet marked by an independent use of the writer's mind,
and not without fertile suggestion. It attracted the attention of the
rising aesthetic school in Germany. Lessing set about the translation and
annotation of it, and Moses Mendelssohn borrowed from Burke's speculation
at least one of the most fruitful and important ideas of his own
influential theories on the sentiments. In England the _Inquiry_ had
considerable vogue, but it has left no permanent trace in the development
of aesthetic thought.

Burke's literary industry in town was relieved by frequent excursions to
the western parts of England, in company with William Burke. There was a
lasting intimacy between the two namesakes, and they seem to have been
involved together in some important passages of their lives; but we have
Edmund Burke's authority for believing that they were probably not kinsmen.
The seclusion of these rural sojourns, originally dictated by delicate
health, was as wholesome to the mind as to [v.04 p.0826] the body. Few men,
if any, have ever acquired a settled mental habit of surveying human
affairs broadly, of watching the play of passion, interest, circumstance,
in all its comprehensiveness, and of applying the instruments of general
conceptions and wide principles to its interpretation with respectable
constancy, unless they have at some early period of their manhood resolved
the greater problems of society in independence and isolation. By 1756 the
cast of Burke's opinions was decisively fixed, and they underwent no
radical change.

He began a series of _Hints on the Drama_. He wrote a portion of an
_Abridgment of the History of England_, and brought it down as far as the
reign of John. It included, as was natural enough in a warm admirer of
Montesquieu, a fragment on law, of which he justly said that it ought to be
the leading science in every well-ordered commonwealth. Burke's early
interest in America was shown by an _Account of the European Settlements_
on that continent. Such works were evidently a sign that his mind was
turning away from abstract speculation to the great political and economic
fields, an