BURKE AND HIS FRIENDS Though Burke had, at a critical period of his life, definitely abandoned the career of letters, he never withdrew from close intimacy with the groups who still live for us in the pages of Boswell, as no other literary group in our history lives.

Goldsmith's famous lines in _Retaliation_ show how they all deplored that he should to party give up what was meant for mankind.

They often told one another that Edmund Burke was the man whose genius pointed him out as the triumphant champion of faith and sound philosophy against deism, atheism, and David Hume.

They loved to see him, as Goldsmith said, wind into his subject like a serpent.

Everybody felt at the Literary Club that he had no superior in knowledge, and in colloquial dialectics only one equal.