Burke who gave a permanent form to the debate in which he was the
liberal protagonist. His career is illustrative at once of the merits
and defects of English politics in the eighteenth century. The son of an
Irish Protestant lawyer and a Catholic mother, he served, after learning
what Trinity College, Dublin, could offer him, a long apprenticeship to
politics in the upper part of Grub Street. The story that he applied,
along with Hume, for Adam Smith's chair at Glasgow seems apocryphal;
though the _Dissertation on the Sublime and the Beautiful_ (1756) shows
his singular fitness for the studies that Hutcheson had made the special
possession of the Scottish school. It was in Grub Street that he appears
to have attained that amazing amount of varied yet profound knowledge
which made him without equal in the House of Commons. His earliest
production was a _Vindication of Natural Society_ (1756), written in the
manner of Lord Bolingbroke, and successful enough in its imitative
satire not only to deceive its immediate public, but also to become the
basis of Godwin's _Political Justice_. After a vain attempt to serve in
Ireland with "Single-Speech" Hamilton, he became the private secretary
to Lord Rockingham, the leader of the one section of the Whig party to
which an honorable record still remained. That connection secured for
him a seat in Parliament at the comparatively late age of thirty-six;
and henceforward, until his death in 1797, he was among its leading
members. His intellectual pre-eminence, indeed, seems from the very
outset to have been recognized on all hands; though he was still, in the
eyes of the system, enough of an outsider to be given, in the short
months during which he held office, the minor office of
Paymaster-General, without a seat in the Cabinet. The man of whom all
England was the political pupil was denied without discussion a place at
the council board. Yet when Fox is little more than a memory of great
lovableness and Pitt a marvellous youth of apt quotations, Burke has
endured as the permanent manual of political wisdom without which