Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 07
General
Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 07
Literature -- Collections
This was in 1755, but in 1756 he married, and made his first appearance
in the literary world by the publication of a book. About these years
from 1750 to 1759 little is known. He published two works, one a
treatise on the 'Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful,' and
the other a 'Vindication of Natural Society,' a satire on Bolingbroke.
Stray allusions and anecdotes about other men in the diaries and
correspondence of the time show that he frequented the literary
coffee-houses, and was gradually making an impression on the authors and
wits whom he met there. Besides the two books we have mentioned, he
produced some smaller things, such as an 'Essay on the Drama,' and part
of an 'Abridgment of the History of England.' But although these helped
to secure him admission to the literary set, they did not raise him out
of the rank of obscure literary adventurers, who from the Revolution of
1688, and especially after the union with Scotland, began to swarm to
London from all parts of the three kingdoms. The first recognition of
him as a serious writer was his employment by Dodsley the bookseller, at
a salary of $100 a year, to edit the Annual Register, which Dodsley
founded in 1769. Considered as a biographical episode, this may fairly
be treated as a business man's certificate that Burke was industrious
and accurate. As his income from his father was withdrawn or reduced in
1755, there remain four years during which his way of supporting himself
is unknown. His published works were certainly not "pot-boilers." He
was probably to some extent dependent on his wife's father, Dr. Nugent,
an Irish physician who when Burke made his acquaintance lived in Bath,
but after his daughter's marriage settled in London, and seems to have
frequented and have been acceptable in the same coffee-houses as Burke,
and for the same reasons. But Burke was not a man to remain long
dependent on any one. These nine years were evidently not spent
fruitlessly. They had made him known and brought him to the threshold of
public life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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