In 1741 he was sent to school at Ballitore, a village some thirty miles away from Dublin, where Abraham Shackleton, a Quaker from Yorkshire, had established himself fifteen years before, and had earned a wide reputation as a successful teacher and a good man.  According to Burke, he richly deserved this high character.  It was to Abraham Shackleton that he always professed to owe whatever gain had come to him from education.  If I am anything, he said many years afterwards, it is the education I had there that has made me so.  His master’s skill as a teacher did not impress him more than the example which was every day set before him, of uprightness and simplicity of heart.  Thirty years later, when Burke had the news of Shackleton’s death (1771), “I had a true honour and affection,” he wrote, “for that excellent man.  I feel something like a satisfaction in the midst of my concern, that I was fortunate enough to have him once under my roof before his departure.”  No man has ever had a deeper or more tender reverence than Burke for homely goodness, simple purity, and all the pieties of life; it may well be that this natural predisposition of all characters, at once so genial and so serious as his, was finally stamped in him by his first schoolmaster.  It is true that he was only two years at Ballitore, but two years at that plastic time often build up habits in the mind that all the rest of a life is unable to pull down.

In 1743 Burke became a student of Trinity College, Dublin, and he remained there until 1748, when he took his Bachelor’s degree.  These five years do not appear to have been spent in strenuous industry in the beaten paths of academic routine.  Like so many other men of great gifts, Burke in his youth was desultory and excursive.  He roamed at large over the varied heights that tempt our curiosity, as the dawn of intelligence first lights them up one after another with bewitching visions and illusive magic.  “All my studies,” Burke wrote in 1746, when he was in the midst of them, “have rather proceeded from sallies of passion, than from the preference of sound reason; and, like all other natural appetites, have been very violent for a season, and very soon cooled, and quite absorbed in the succeeding.  I have often thought it a humorous consideration to observe and sum up all the madness of this kind I have fallen into, this two years past.  First, I was greatly taken with natural philosophy; which, while I should have given my mind to logic, employed me incessantly.  This I call my furor mathematicus.  But this worked off as soon as I began to read it in the college, as men by repletion cast off their stomachs all they have eaten.  Then I turned back to logic and metaphysics.  Here I remained a good while, and with much pleasure, and this was my furor logicus, a disease very common in the days of ignorance, and very uncommon in these enlightened times.  Next succeeded the furor historicus, which also had its day, but is now no more, being entirely absorbed in the furor poeticus.”