Burke entered political life, or entered active political life, when he was returned to Parliament in the December of 1765. Up to that time his life had been largely uneventful; much of it must be called as far as we are concerned eventless, for of a great gap of his life, a gap of no less than nine years, we know, if not absolutely nothing, certainly next to nothing. It is not even quite certain where or when he was born. The most approved account is that he was born in Dublin on January 12, 1729, reckoning according to the new style. The place of his birth is still pointed out to the curious in Dublin: one of the many modest houses that line the left bank of the Liffey. His family was supposed to stem from Limerick, from {97} namesakes who spelled their name differently as Bourke. His mother's family were Catholic; Burke's mother always remained stanch to her native faith, and, though Burke and his brothers were brought up as the Protestant sons of a Protestant father, the influence of his mother must have counted for much in creating that tender and generous sympathy towards a proscribed creed which is one of the noblest characteristics of Burke's career. Burke's earliest and in a sense his best education was received between his twelfth and fourteenth years, in the school of a Yorkshire Quaker named Abraham Shackleton, who kept a school at Ballitore. Burke used often to declare in later years that he owed everything he had gained in life to the teaching and the example of those two years with Abraham Shackleton. The affectionate regard which Burke felt for his schoolmaster, an affectionate regard which endured until Shackleton's death, thirty years later, in 1771, he felt also for his schoolmaster's son, Richard Shackleton. Most of what we know of Burke's life in Trinity College from 1743 to 1748 we gather from his letters to Richard Shackleton, letters of absorbing interest to any student of the growth of a great mind. Less vivacious, less brilliant than the boyish letters of Goethe, they resemble them in the eager thirst they display for knowledge of all kinds, in their passionate enthusiasm for all the rich varieties of human knowledge, in their restless experiments in all directions. In those younger days Burke thought himself, as every generous and ambitious youth must needs think himself, a poet, and many verses were forwarded to the faithful friend, to lighten the effect of serious theological discussions and elaborate comparisons of classical authors.