"Yet after all, do you know that I would rather sleep in the southern corner of a country church-yard than in the tomb of the Capulets? I should like, however, that my dust should mingle with kindred dust; the good old expression, 'family burying-grounds,' has something pleasant in it, at least to me."
This was his last, as it seems to have been his first desire; and it has found an echo in many a richly dowered heart.
"Lay me," said Allan Cunningham, "where the daisies can grow on my grave;" and it is well known that Moore—
"The poet of all circles,"—
and, as a poor Irishman once rendered it—
"The darlint of his own,"
has frequently expressed a desire to be buried at Sloperton beside his children.
The future orator found the law, as a profession, alien to his habits and feelings, for at the expiration of the usual term he was not even called to the bar. Some say he desired the professorship of logic at the University of Glasgow, and even stood the contest; but this has been disputed, and if he was rejected, it is matter of congratulation, that his talents and time were not confined to so narrow a sphere. At that period his mind was occupied by his theories on the Sublime and Beautiful, which were finally condensed and published in the shape of that essay which roused the world to admiration.
Mr. Prior says, and with every show of reason, "that Mr. Burke's ambition of being distinguished in literature, seems to have been one of his earliest, as it was one of his latest, passions." His first avowed work was "The Vindication of Natural Society;" but he wrote a great deal anonymously; and the essay on "The Sublime and Beautiful," triumphant as it was, must have caused him great anxiety; he began it before he was nineteen, and kept it by him for seven years before it was published—a valuable lesson to those who rush into print and mistake the desire for celebrity, for the power which bestows immortality.
The literature which is pursued chiefly in solitude, is always the best sort: society, which cheers and animates men in most employments, is an impediment to an author if really warmed by true genius, and impelled by a sacred love of truth not to fritter away his thoughts or be tempted to insincerity.