From 1744 to 1749 he attended Trinity College, Dublin, ostensibly to study law and follow in his father's profession, but at the same time he cultivated an interest in literature, manifested in his editorship of a short-lived periodical,
The Reformer. In 1750 he journeyed to London to continue his legal education at the Middle Temple.
Eighteenth-century London was a major center of intellectual and literary exchange, and Burke's literary pursuits brought him into the society of such men as Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds, and fellow Irishman Oliver Goldsmith. During the course of the early 1750s Burke abandoned legal study in favor of a literary career. His desire for literary fame led to the production of his early essays on ideas of natural society and aesthetics: works both literary and philosophical.
A Vindication of Natural Society; or, a View of the Miseries and Evils arising to Mankind from every Species of Artificial Society. In a Letter to Lord ****. By a late Noble Writer (1756) offers a satiric response--a reductio ad absurdum--to the rationalist philosophy of Henry St. John, first Viscount Bolingbroke, and provides a vision of political society replicating the Hobbesian world of life in nature: nasty, brutish, and short.
This is a free page. This page contains 187 words. This
biography contains 4,622 words (approx. 15 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our Edmund Burke Access Pass.
