When Edmund Burke was in his fortieth year and fame was fast enveloping him, he looked back upon a pattern of personal history marked by such unforeseen twists and turns that his naturally vivid sense of providential direction was sharpened. He had started life as the second son of a Dublin solicitor of middling fortune who conformed to the established Church of Ireland but was married to a Catholic wife-a worldly disadvantage under the proscriptive penal laws of the early Georgian era. By 1768, however, Burke was a shining figure in the British House of Commons to which he had been twice elected; had planted himself in the landed gentry of Buckinghamshire and become the valued friend and counselor of the chiefs of the Whig aristocracy.
The threads that link the Dublin boy to the talented parliamentarian are disclosed in copious detail in the first volume of The Correspondence of Edmund Burke (Chicago, $8.00), edited by Professor Thomas W. Copeland of the University of Massachusetts. It covers the period from 1744, when Burke entered Trinity College, to the spring of 1768, and will be followed by nine more volumes on which other editors are working under Copeland’s general supervision.
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