sity, in defiance of the police. This they did; and putting him into the trough under the college pump, gave him the discipline of what they called a-ducking. The young agents in this business were soon discovered. Some of them fled, but of those that remained was Mr Brown, now a member in the Irish parliament, who was tried and convicted as one of the most active persons on the occasion; and received judgment accordingly.

"Soon after Mr Hutchinson obtained the situation of provost, he quarrelled with the then attorney-general, Mr Tisdal, a gentleman about seventy years of age, and sent him a challenge. Mr Tisdal replied by moving for an information against Mr Hutchinson, in the court of King's bench, and a rule nisi was granted. Some of the ablest men at the bar offered their services to the attorney-general on this occasion, and the pleadings began. The provost undertook his own defence, and speaking for three days successively, when the term ended, the further consideration was adjourned to the following term, which was that after the long vacation. This business, however, never came on again, the attorney-general dying within the time, and the proceedings of course finally stopping.

"He was extremely severe on his enemies in the university; and having a particular dislike to a Mr Shewbridge, one of the then junior fellows, he absolutely refused him leave of absence to go into the country for the benefit of his health. The consequence of this (at least the scholars of the university reported it so) was, that in a short time after Mr Shewbridge died, and the college was in an uproar on the occasion. The provost gave orders that the great bell should not toll, and that the corpse should be privately interred at 6 o'clock in the morning, in the Fellows' burial-ground. The students immediately posted up placards, insisting that the great bell should toll, and that the funeral should be by torch-light, at night; and they carried their point. Almost every student in the university attended the corpse to the grave, in scarfs and hat-bands, at their own expense: and when the funeral oration was pronounced, one spirit of revenge, in the manner of electricity, ran through them all; and they flew like lightning to the provost's dwelling-house, bursting open his doors, and smashing to pieces all that obstructed their fury. Fortunately the provost had intelligence of this intended outrage, and he and his family had removed, in consequence, to his country-seat, about four miles from the metropolis, some hours antecedent to this business. It was several weeks before the tumult entirely subsided and the young gentlemen returned to their studies; but the fate of Shewbridge rankled in their bosoms for many years afterwards, although the faculty declared that this gentleman could not have survived, whether he went to the country or not, his disorder being of that nature which set all possibility of prolonging life at defiance.

"Mr Hutchinson was at one and the same time a privy-councillor ; reversionary secretary of state; major of the 4th regiment of horse; provost of Trinity college, Dublin; and searcher, packer, and gauger of the port of Strangford !"

Edmund Burke.

BORN A. D. 1730.—died a. d. 1797.

EDMUND BURKE was a native of Ireland. His father was an attorney first in Limerick and afterwards in Dublin. Edmund, his second son, was born in the Irish capital on the 1st of January, 1730. After receiving some preliminary education in his own vicinage, he was sent to Ballytore, and placed under the tuition of Abraham Shackleton, a Quaker of considerable celebrity. At this respectable school several years of his life were spent; and the attachment of the master, and the gratitude of the pupil, reflect honour on both. The former lived to see his scholar attain a considerable degree of reputation; and the latter regularly spent a portion of his annual visit to Ireland at Ballytore. From this provincial seminary, Edmund was sent to the university of Dublin. Here, however, he does not appear to have been very highly distinguished either for application or talents. He is said, however, to have been fond of logic and metaphysics; and to have early planned a refutation of the systems of Berkeley and Hume. He indeed is said to have been a candidate in early life for the professorship of logic at the university of Glasgow. The immediate reason of his failure is not known; his youth, and the obscurity of his name and attainments, were such as to afford him no rational prospect of success.1

After this, he repaired to the English metropolis, and enrolled his name as a student in the Inner Temple. It appears from his speeches, his writings, and his conversation, that he must have studied the grand outline of our municipal jurisprudence with particular attention; but it may be doubted whether he ever entered into the minuter and technical branches of the profession. The state of his finances called for immediate supplies, and instead of perusing the pages of Bracton, Fleta, Littleton, and Coke, he was obliged to write essays, letters, and paragraphs, for the periodical publications of the day. But if these pursuits turned his attention from graver studies, they also conferred a facility of composition, and a command of style and of language, which proved eminently serviceable to him in his future life. Though Mr Burke, by the death of his elder brother, was to have succeeded to a very comfortable patrimony, yet, as his father was living, and had other children, it could not be supposed that his allowance was very ample. His first production we cannot exactly state; we have been informed that it was a poem, and that it was unsuccessful. This may seem paradoxical to some, considering the extent and variety of his talents, and above all the copious imagery with which his subsequent works and speeches abound; but history, and a closer observation of mankind, will furnish us with many cases in point. His first known publication was a work of much greater consequence, not only when we consider it as a work of fancy, but as an imitation of a first-rate original,—we allude to the

'It has been said that he quitted college without a degree: this, however, is contradicted by his biographer, Prior, who states that he commenced A. B. in February, 1747-8, and proceeded A. M. in 1751.

well-known pamphlet, entitled, A Vindication of Natural Society,' for some time supposed to be a posthumous work of Henry Lord Bolingbroke. To assume the style and character of such a writer, who had passed through all the high gradations of official knowledge for near half-a-century, a fine scholar,-a most ready and eloquent speaker, and the most nervous writer of his time,—was perhaps one of the boldest attempts ever undertaken, particularly when it is considered by whom. By a young man, a stranger to the manners, habits, and college connexions of the literati of this country; who could have no near view of the great character he imitated, and whose time of life would not permit of those long and gradual experiments by which excellence of any kind is to be obtained; but great and extraordinary minds have a consciousness of their own strength, which is their best and truest adviser; and Burke felt himself equal to the task. When this publication first appeared, almost every body received it as a posthumous work of Lord Bolingbroke; and so far from being looked upon as one of those hasty sketches of his youth, or the gleanings of old age, it was praised up to the standard of his best writing. The critics knew the turn of his periods, his style, his phrases, and above all, the matchless dexterity of his metaphysical pen. Charles Macklin, with the pamphlet in his hand, used frequently to exclaim at the Grecian Coffee-house, (where he gave a kind of literary law to the young templars at that time,) "Sir, this must be Harry Bolingbroke; I know him by his cloven foot!" Even the earl of Chesterfield, who so intimately knew the noble lord, and has drawn such a masterly portrait of him in his letters, confessed that he was for some time deceived on this point; and a still better judge, Bishop Warburton, was at first so much deceived as to exclaim to a friend, "You see, Sir, the fellow's principles; they now come out in a full blaze." His Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful' attracted much notice, and acquired him considerable celebrity as a man of letters. It excited a desire in Sir Joshua Reynolds-already at the head of his profession-to become acquainted with the author, and a friendship ensued which continued uninterrupted during the life of the great painter, and was unequivocally testified by a handsome bequest in his will. Dr Johnson also sought and obtained acquaintance with him, and he now became the constant frequenter of two clubs composed of some of the most celebrated men of that day. He must at this early period have managed to acquire a prodigious amount of multifarious knowledge, for Johnson himself used to say: "Take up whatever topic you will, Burke is ready to meet you. If he were to go into a stable, and talk to the ostlers for a short time, they would venerate him as the wisest of human beings. No person of sense ever met him under a gateway to avoid a shower, who did not go away convinced that he was the first man in England."

A literary work on a new plan, first suggested in 1750, and by some attributed to the Dodsleys, and by others to Mr Burke, was for some time a considerable source of emolument to him. This was the 'Annual Register,' a publication which soon obtained considerable celebrity, and of which Burke had the superintendence for several years. He was at length called off from his literary labours by avocations of a far different kind. In 1761 a gentleman-afterwards well-known by the cognomen of Single-speech Hamilton'-having been appointed se

cretary to the lord-lieutenant of Ireland, invited his friend Burke to accompany him thither. This offer he readily complied with, and although he appeared in no public station, yet he was rewarded with a pension of £300 per annum, which he soon after threw up on quarrelling with Hamilton. On his return to England he again betook himself to literary composition. A series of Essays written by him in a newspaper, which at one time obtained great celebrity, attracted the notice of the marquess of Rockingham, who, on coming into office, appointed Burke his private secretary. As it was now necessary he should have a seat in parliament, Lord Verney got him returned for Wendover in 1765. He was already provided with all the necessary talents for a speaker in the house, and was only deficient in the forms of business. He had acquired celebrity as a debater at The Robinhood' before he attempted to speak in the British senate; and vanquished an eloquent baker ere he began to cope with the great orators of the nation.

Holding a confidential place under the Rockingham administration, he of course supported all its measures. A former ministry, anxious to increase its influence by means of increased imposts, had conceived the idea of taxing America through the medium of a parliament in which she was not represented. Having attempted to carry this into effect by means of the famous Stamp act,' the Americans, alarmed at what they conceived to be a flagrant violation of every principle of the English constitution, made such a spirited resistance to the measure that it was abandoned, and the Rockingham party readily consented to the repeal. After a remarkably brief existence, the Rockingham party retired from office: on which occasion Burke drew up a sort of manifesto, entitled, A Short Account of a late Short Administration.' About this time he purchased a villa near Beaconsfield, for which he gave a sum exceeding, it is supposed, £20,000. How he acquired so large a sum does not appear. While one set of his biographers assert that the money in question was nominally a loan, but in reality a gift, from his munificent friend, Lord Rockingham, it is contended by others that a part only of the amount was advanced by his patron, a considerable portion of it having been received under the wills of his father and elder brother. His old friend Johnson frequently visited him at Beaconsfield; and one day, after wandering over the grounds for some time, exclaimed in an animated manner, "Non equidem invideo, miror magis!" Burke was hostile to the expulsion of Wilkes,—an act which the house of commons afterwards rescinded from its records. On the application of the Dissenters for relief, he took up their cause, and expressed his resentment in very animated terms against that misguided policy which permits all those not within the pale of the establishment to enjoy liberty less by right than by connivance. But perhaps the noblest part of his political conduct consisted in his steady and uniform advocacy of the rights of the colonists, and opposition to the American war, and his marked and declared hostility to the abettors of it. His speech against the Boston Port-bill was one of the noblest specimens of eloquence ever listened to in the British senate; and on the 19th of April, 1774, on a motion for the repeal of the tea duty, he discovered

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such talents, that an old and respectable member exclaimed, “Good God! what a man is this!-How could he acquire such transcendent powers?" One of Burke's chief opponents in this memorable debate was Wedderburne, who had left the opposition, and accepted the place of solicitor-general; but this desertion was amply compensated by the accession of a youthful orator, who, spurning the trammels with which he had hitherto been surrounded and beset, started indignant from the treasury-bench, and ranged himself on the side of his country. Although Fox and Burke had often broken a lance with each other in the "wordy war," from opposite sides of the house, they now united in the most cordial bonds of friendship, and it had been happy, perhaps, for their country, and for themselves, if names which so long shared the joint applause of their fellow-citizens, had glided down the stream of time together.

On the dissolution of a parliament which had inflicted so many miseries on its country, Burke, who had hitherto represented Wendover, as the nominee of Lord Verney, was elected for Malton, by the appointment of the marquess of Rockingham. The city of Bristol soon afterwards did itself the honour to return him. The earl of Chatham had failed, notwithstanding his reputation for wisdom, in an attempt to adjust the troubles of the colonies by means of a conciliatory bill: but this circumstance, which would have appalled an inferior man, did not discourage the member for Bristol from a similar attempt in another place. On the 22d of March, 1775, he brought forward his thirteen celebrated propositions, which were intended to close the breach, and heal all the differences between the mother-country and her colonies. He began by asserting, that the plan about to be submitted to the consideration of the house, was founded on the sure and solid basis of experience; for neither the chimeras of imagination, abstract ideas of right, nor general theories of government, ought to be attended to on such an occasion as this. Governments, he observed, to be practicable and beneficial, should be adapted to the feelings, habits, and opinions of the governed, for without this every scheme of rule would prove ineffectual, and even dangerous, as despotism itself must bend to circumstances and situations. Disclaiming, therefore, every consideration of right, he wished to contemplate the whole merely as an object of policy. Without inquiring whether they had a right to render their people miserable, he would ask whether it was not their interest to make them happy? And instead of arguing with the lawyers what they could do, he deemed it more consonant to the principles of reason, humanity, and justice, to consult rather what they ought to do in an emergency like the present. After observing that the colonies, as they had hitherto been governed, were living monuments of the wisdom of our ancestors, he took a view of their origin and progress, their ardent love of liberty, the astonishing growth of their population, the rapid increase of their commerce, fisheries, and agriculture. He then pointed out the manner in which Wales, and the counties palatine of Chester and Durham had been admitted into "an interest in the constitution;" and endeavoured to deduce from these facts, that it had always been the grand principle of British policy to secure the attachment of all parts of the empire by similar means. To this good old principle he therefore wished to recur; he took the doctrine, language,

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