BURKE, EDMUND

Born January 12, 1729, new style, at Dublin, Ireland, and died July 8, 1797, in England. Famous statesman, writer and orator who championed the cause of the American Colonists on the floor of the English Parliament, April 19, 1774.

His father, a Protestant attorney, his mother a Roman Catholic Published in 1756 the satire A Vindication of Natural Society, then his Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas on the Sublime and Beautiful, translated into German and annotated by another Freemason, Lessing; a series of Hints on the Drama and an Abridgment of the History of England; and became interested in America and wrote an Account of the European Settlements. Brother George W. Baird (Builder, October, 1923) says that Burke was a member of Jerusalem Lodge No. 44, Clerkenwell, London. In Builder (July, 1923), Brother Arthur Heiron mentions Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Sir William Forbes, Richard Savage, Alexander Pope, Richard Garriek, Jonathan Swift, close friends or contemporaries of Burke, as active and proven Freemasons. There is an impressive statue of Edmund Burke at Washington, District of Columbia (see also New Age, January, 1924).