civilization.

Edmund Burke was born, 1730, of respectable parents in Ireland. He was
educated at Trinity College, Dublin, where he made a fair proficiency,
but did not give promise of those rare powers which he afterwards
exhibited. He was no prodigy, like Cicero, Pitt, and Macaulay. He early
saw that his native country presented no adequate field for him, and
turned his steps to London at the age of twenty, where he entered as a
student of law in the Inner Temple,--since the Bar was then, what it was
at Rome, what it still is in modern capitals, the usual resort of
ambitious young men. But Burke did not like the law as a profession, and
early dropped the study of it; not because he failed in industry, for he
was the most plodding of students; not because he was deficient in the
gift of speech, for he was a born orator; not because his mind repelled
severe logical deductions, for he was the most philosophical of the
great orators of his day,--not because the law was not a noble field
for the exercise of the highest faculties of the mind, but probably
because he was won by the superior fascinations of literature and
philosophy. Bacon could unite the study of divine philosophy with
professional labors as a lawyer, also with the duties of a legislator;
but the instances are rare where men have united three distinct spheres,
and gained equal distinction in all. Cicero did, and Bacon, and Lord
Brougham; but not Erskine, nor Pitt, nor Canning. Even two spheres are
as much as most distinguished men have filled,--the law with politics,
like Thurlow and Webster; or politics with literature, like Gladstone
and Disraeli. Dr. Johnson, Garrick, and Reynolds, the early friends of
Burke, filled only one sphere.

The early literary life of Burke was signalized by his essay on "The
Sublime and Beautiful," original in its design and execution, a model of