"The muse nor can, nor will declare,
What is my work, and what my studies there."

What serious nourishment Burke was laying in for his understanding we
cannot learn from any other source. He describes himself as spending
three hours almost every day in the public library; "the best way in
the world," he adds oddly enough, "of killing thought." I have read
some history, he says, and among other pieces of history, "I am
endeavouring to get a little into the accounts of this, our own poor
country,"--a pathetic expression, which represents Burke's perpetual
mood, as long as he lived, of affectionate pity for his native land.
Of the eminent Irishmen whose names adorn the annals of Trinity
College in the eighteenth century, Burke was only contemporary at the
University with one, the luckless sizar who in the fulness of time
wrote the _Vicar of Wakefield_. There is no evidence that at this time
he and Goldsmith were acquainted with one another. Flood had gone to
Oxford some time before. The one or two companions whom Burke mentions
in his letters are only shadows of names. The mighty Swift died in
1745, but there is nothing of Burke's upon the event. In the same year
came the Pretender's invasion, and Burke spoke of those who had taken
part in it in the same generous spirit that he always showed to the
partisans of lost historic causes.

Of his own family Burke says little, save that in 1746 his mother had
a dangerous illness. In all my life, he writes to his friend, I never
found so heavy a grief, nor really did I well know what it was before.
Burke's father is said to have been a man of angry and irritable
temper, and their disagreements were frequent. This unhappy
circumstance made the time for parting not unwelcome. In 1747 Burke's