A Life of Edmund Burke Author:James Prior Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PBEFACE. Few things interest the curiosity of mankind more, or prove so instructive in themselves, as to trace the progress of a powerful mind, by the honoura... more »ble exertion of native energies, rising amid serious obstructions and difficulties from a private condition to stations of public eminence and trust, and in its progress acquiring the power to rule, or to influence the destiny of nations. Such a person, as sprung not from the privileged few, but from among the mass of the people, we feel to be one of ourselves. Our sympathies go along with him in his career. The young imagine that it may possibly be their own case. The old, with a glance of retrospective regret, may fancy that, with a little more of the favour of fortune, it might have been theirs. And, at any rate, we are anxious to ascertain the causes of his superiority, to treasure up his experience, to profit by what he experienced to be useful, to avoid what he found to be disadvantageous. The lesson becomes doubly instructive to that large class of society who are born to be the architects of their own fortune when it impresses the preat truth, that natural endowments however great, receive their highest polish and power, their only secure reward, from diligent study—from continued, unwearied application— a homely faculty within the reach of all men; one whose fruits, as they bear testimony to the industry of the possessor and intrinsic value of the possession, are above all others likely to wear well. Of the great results of such endowments, fostered and directed by such cultivation, we have not a more distinguished example than Edmund Burke. To an attentive reader ot our political and literary history during the sixty years that are past, no name will more frequently attract attention, whether we consider th...« less