One might say, no doubt, that this is an intelligible enough account of a young fellow’s life between twenty and thirty: and that we can fill in the particulars for ourselves. We have known other young Irishmen of restless and volatile natures, and need make no mystery of this one. Goldsmith, too, disappeared, we remember, in that same decade, making show of studying medicine in Edinburgh, but not really studying it, and then wandering off to the Continent, and going it afoot in light-hearted, happy-go-lucky fashion through the haunts both of the gay Latin races and the sad Teutonic, greatly to the delectation, no doubt, of the natives,--for all the world loves an innocent Irishman, with his heart upon his sleeve. ’Twould all be very plain indeed if we found in Burke that light-hearted vein. But we do not. The fellow is sober and strenuous from the first, studying the things he was not sent to study with even too intent application, to the damage of his health, and looking through the pleasures of the town to the heart of the nation’s affairs. He was a grave youth, evidently, gratifying his mind rather than his senses in the pleasures he sought; and when he emerges from obscurity it is first to give us a touch of his quality in the matter of intellectual amusement, and then to turn at once to the serious business of the discussion of affairs to which the rest of his life was to be devoted. The two books which he gave the world in 1756 were “A Vindication of Natural Society,” a satirical piece in the manner of Bolingbroke, and “A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful,” which he had begun when he was nineteen and had since reconsidered and revised. Bolingbroke, not finding revealed religion to his taste, had written a “Vindication of Natural Religion” which his vigorous and elevated style and skillful dialectic had done much to make plausible. Burke put forth his “Vindication of Natural Society” as a posthumous work of the late noble lord, and so skillfully veiled the satirical character of the imitation as wholly to deceive some very grave critics, who thought they could discern Bolingbroke’s flavor upon the tasting. For the style, too, they took to be unmistakably Bolingbroke’s own. It had all his grandeur and air of distinction: it had his vocabulary and formal outline of phrase. The imitation was perfect. And yet if you will scrutinize it, the style is not Bolingbroke’s, except in a trick or two, but Burke’s. It seems Bolingbroke’s rather because it is cold and without Burke’s usual moral fervor than because it is rich and majestic and various. There is no great formal difference between Burke’s style and Bolingbroke’s: but there is a great moral and intellectual difference. When Burke is not in earnest there is perhaps no important difference at all. And in the “Vindication of Natural Society” Burke is not in earnest. The book is not, indeed, a parody, and its satirical quality is much too covert