EDMUND BURKE.

DESCENT OF BURKE.

ALTHOUGH the name of Edmund Burke may be more than once read in the genealogical records of the proud Norman family of De Burgh, Bourke, or Burke, his biographers have failed to trace satisfactorily his pedigree from their high aristocratic stock. Mr. Sergeant Burke, in his Public and Domestic Life of the statesman, however, tells us that the popular belief of his being sprung from a branch of the De Burgh, or Clanricarde, is corroborated heraldically; the arms borne by Edmund Burke, and his proved progenitors, being precisely those of the Clanricarde family; while John Smith, the 10th Earl, on more than one occasion addressed the rising statesman as his "cousin ;" yet this same Earl resumed by sign-manual, in 1752, the original surname of De Burgh, which had been corrupted into Burke.-(Sir Bernard Burke's Peerage and Baronetage, 22nd edit. 1860.)

These statements are entitled to consideration; although it is urged by a writer who has evidently taken much pains with the subject, that had Burke been in any way connected with the family of Lord Clanricarde, the world would have been reminded of it at the time when he was vilified as a Jesuit, and "O'Bourke, the Irish Papist." The same writer adds that the name of Burke, or Bourke, is as common in the counties of Limerick and Cork as those of Smith and Brown are in Surrey and Middlesex.*

Burke himself never laid claim to such derivative honours:

* Athenæum, No. 1363.

indeed, in a letter to the Duke of Bedford, he shows some contempt for the emblazonry of Heralds' College. There is better evidence to show that Edmund Burke sprang from John Bourke, Mayor of Limerick, in 1645, who, in a riot instigated by the intrigues of the Papal Nuncio, lost much of his property, was deposed from his office, and imprisoned for his devotion to the royal cause. So many stones were thrown on this day, that it was long afterwards called Stony Monday. The father of Edmund was Richard Burke, a Protestant, and educated for an attorney. Removing from Limerick to Dublin, he took a house in Bachelor's Walk, then on Arran Quay, afterwards on Ormond Quay, and soon obtained extensive practice. About 1725 or 1726, he married a Miss Nagle, of the family of that name still existing near Castletown Roche, and descended from the Attorney-General to James II. By this lady Richard Burke became the father of fourteen or fifteen children, all of whom died young, except Garret, Edmund, Richard, and a daughter named Juliana. She married a Mr. French, a gentleman of the county of Galway; and a gentleman of the Irish Bar, who knew her long and intimately, told Mr. Prior, “Mrs. French, had nature destined her for the other sex, would have been as great an orator as her brother Edmund."

Edmund Burke was born in the house on Arran Quay, Jan. 1, according to the register in Trinity College, 1728; and according to the tablet to Burke's memory, in Beaconsfield church, 1729. Burke himself, in a letter to Lord Rockingham, states the day, Jan. 12. Now, making allowance for the difference in style, and the difference in the civil and historical year, which existed at the time of Burke's birth, they seem reconcileable the one with the other. Burke, it is admitted, was born on the 1st of January, O. S., and, therefore, according to one computation, in 1728, and to the other, in 1729; the difference in the day being explained by the change in the style.

John Galt, the biographer of West, the painter, relates that when he was travelling in Italy, he was so struck with

the resemblance of the chief of the Benedictine monk at Ravenna, to Edmund Burke, that he could scarcely persuade himself he was not the same person. Galt then confidently asserts the resemblance was not accidental, "for the Protestant orator was indeed the brother of the monk." Galt does not give any proof, and is supposed to be in error, while none of the family, or its earliest connexions, knew any other than the three brothers. Nevertheless, the story of the relationship, connexion, or personal likeness, between the statesman and the chief of the Benedictines may have led to the oftrepeated assertion of Edmund being a Jesuit: monastic cast of features may have fostered this belief.

BURKE'S FIRST SCHOOLMASTER.

even his

At Castletown Roche the young Edmund was first put out to school, and the ruins of the schoolroom are traditionally pointed out to this day. The village schoolmaster, O'Halloran, lived to a great age, and his uniform boast was that he was the first who had put a Latin Grammar into the hands of Edmund Burke. Mr. Prior relates that when Edmund went there to look after his property, in 1766, O'Halloran hearing that his boy, as he called him, had got into Parliament, went to the house where he was staying, and recognised him dressing in a room over the door, when the boy as quickly remembered his old master's face. Running quickly downstairs, his shirt-collar open, his beard half shaven, he seized him eagerly by both hands, and, said O'Halloran, " asked all about me, and about the little boys his schoolfellows, and said you must stay all day with me, O'Halloran, and gossip about old times; and sure enough I did;-but was this all, do you suppose? No, to be sure it was not;-didn't he put five golden guineas into my hand as I was coming away ?" Mr. Haviland Burke, to whom this anecdote was related, asked a cottager in the neighbourhood whether he knew anything of a noted man named Burke, who once lived in that quarter? "To be sure I do," was the reply; "hasn't everybody heard of Edmund Burke ?"

.M