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Then came William Burke, a distant cousin, and together they tramped off through rural England, loitering along flowering hedgerows, and stopping at quaint inns, where the villagers made guesses as to whether the two were gentlemen out for a lark, smugglers or Jesuits in disguise.

One of these trips took our friends to Bath, and there we hear they were lodged at the house of a Doctor Nugent, an excellent and scholarly man. William Burke went back to London and left Edmund at Bath deep in the pursuit of the Sublime. Doctor Nugent had a daughter, aged twenty, beautiful, gentle and gracious. The reader can guess the rest.

That Burke’s wife was a most amiable and excellent woman there is no doubt. She loved her lord, believed in him and had no other gods before him. But that she influenced his career directly or through antithesis, there is no trace. Her health was too frail to follow him–his stride was terrific–so she remained at home, and after every success he came back and told her of it, and rested his great, shaggy head in her lap.

Only one child was born to them, and this boy closely resembled his mother in intellect and physique. This son passed out early in life, and so with Edmund died the name.

* * * * *

The next book Burke launched was the one we know best, “On the Sublime.” The original bore the terrifying title, “A Philosophical Inquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas Concerning the Sublime and Beautiful.” This book consists of one hundred seventeen chapters, each chapter dealing with some special phase of the subject.

It is the most searching and complete analysis of an abstract theme of which I know. It sums the subject up like an essay by Herbert Spencer, and disposes of the case once and forever. It is so learned that only a sophomore could have written it, and we quite forgive the author when we are told that it was composed when he was nineteen.

The book proved Burke’s power to follow an idea to its lair, and its launching also launched the author upon the full tide of polite society. Goldsmith said, “We will lose him now,” but Burke still stuck by his coffeehouse companions and used them as a pontoon to bridge the gulf ‘twixt Bohemia and Piccadilly.

In the meantime he had written a book for Dodsley on “English Settlements in North America,” and this did Burke more good than any one else, as it caused him to focus his inquiring mind on the New World. After this man began to write on a subject, his intellect became luminous on the theme, and it was his forevermore.

At routs and fetes and four-o’-clocks, Burke was sought as an authority on America. He had never been there–he had but promised himself that he would go–for a sick wife held him back. In the meantime he had seen every man of worth who had been to America, and had sucked the orange dry. Macaulay gives the idea when he describes Burke’s speech at the Warren Hastings trial. Burke had never been to India; Macaulay had, but that is nothing.

Says Macaulay:

When Burke spoke, the burning sun, the strange vegetation of the palm and cocoa-tree, the rice-field, the tank, the huge trees, older than the Mogul Empire, under which the village crowds assemble, the thatched roof of the peasant’s hut, the rich tracery of the mosque where the Imam prays with his face to Mecca, the drums, the banners and gaudy idols, the devotee swinging in the air, the graceful maiden with the pitcher on her head, descending the steps to the riverside, the black faces, the long beards, the yellow streaks of sect, the turbans and the flowing robes, the spears and silver maces, the elephants with their canopies of state, the gorgeous palanquin of the prince, and the close litter of the noble lady–all these things were to him as familiar as the subjects which lay on the road between Beaconsfield and Saint James Street. All India was present to the eye of his mind, from the halls where suitors laid gold and perfumes at the feet of the sovereign, to the wild moor where the gipsy camp was pitched; from the bazar, humming like a beehive with the crowd of buyers and sellers, to the jungle where the lonely courier shakes his bunch of iron rings to scare away the hyenas. He had just as lively an idea of the insurrection at Benares as of Lord George Gordon’s riots, and of the execution of Numcomar as of Doctor Dodd. Oppression in Bengal was to him the same thing as oppression in the streets of London.