Burke Edmund

Burke

 (bûrk), Edmund 1729-1797.

Irish-born British politician and writer who supported the cause of the American colonists in Parliament but took a more conservative position in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). He is also noted for his aesthetic treatise A Philosophical Inquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757).

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.