Just where Burke got his generous constitution and predisposition to enlightened ways of thinking it is not easy to see. Certainly Richard Burke, his brother, the only other member of the family whose character we discern distinctly, had a quite opposite bent. The father was a steady Dublin attorney, a Protestant, and a man, so far as we know, of solid but not brilliant parts. The mother had been a Miss Nagle, of a Roman Catholic family, which had multiplied exceedingly in County Cork. Of the home and its life we know singularly little. We are told that many children were born to the good attorney, but we hear of only four of them that grew to maturity, Garret, Edmund, Richard, and a sister best known to Edmund’s biographers as Mrs. French. Edmund, the second son, was born on the twelfth of January, 1729, in the second year of the reign of George II., Robert Walpole being chief minister of the Crown. How he fared or what sort of lad he was for the first twelve years of his life we have no idea. We only know that in the year 1741, being then twelve years old, he was sent with his brothers Garret and Richard to the school of one Abraham Shackleton, a most capable and exemplary Quaker, at Ballytore, County Kildare, to get, in some two years’ time, what he himself always accounted the best part of his education. The character of the good master at Ballytore told upon the sensitive boy, who all his life through had an eye for such elevation and calm force of quiet rectitude as are to be seen in the best Quakers; and with Richard Shackleton, the master’s son, he formed a friendship from which no vicissitude of his subsequent career ever loosened his heart a whit. All his life long the ardent, imaginative statesman, deeply stirred as he was by the momentous agitation of affairs,--swept away as he was from other friends,--retained his love for the grave, retired, almost austere, but generous and constant man who had been his favorite schoolfellow. It is but another evidence of his unfailing regard for whatever was steady, genuine, and open to the day in character and conduct.