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He was born in Dublin, [[Ireland]], the son of a [[Protestant]] lawyer and a [[Catholic]] mother. He was educated in classics at a [[Quaker]] boarding school and at [[Trinity College Dublin]], he remained a committed [[Anglican]] the rest of his life. He considered a national established church a requirement for sound government. In 1750 he went to London to study law but soon left his course. In 1756 he published his first book anonymously ''A Vindication of Natural Society'', a satirical account of the rise of civilization and how it produces unhappiness and distress; it attacked the political rationalism and religious skepticism of Henry St. John, Viscount [[Bolingbroke]]. In 1757 he anonymously published the ''Origin of Our Ideas on the Sublime and Beautiful'', his most philosophical work; it is a founding manifesto of Romanticism, which came to dominate European thought and sensibility after 1800.<ref>Byrne, William F. Byrne, "Burke's higher romanticism: politics and the sublime," ''Humanitas'' (2006) [http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-6661343/Burke-s-higher-romanticism-politics.html online]</ref> He founded the ''The Annual Register'', a record of contemporary political events. He was a member of the intellectual circle around [[Samuel Johnson]].