If I could grudge you any pleasure, I should think with some degree of envy on your fortnight spent at Oxford, as exclusive of your particular business there, I know of no place where much time can be spent with more satisfaction. Ten times at least have I visited that venerable seat of the Muses, and could with delight revisit it ten times more; perfectly agreeing with a travelled friend of mine whom I have heard declare that, after having seen the whole world, Oxford was most worthy of a traveller’s attention.
You have, it must be confessed, much work upon your hands, and are undoubtedly right in allowing yourself to be idle for a few weeks; but surely your idleness is of a whimsical kind; and if poring over old manuscripts with eyes already well nigh worn out in the service be a relaxation, I can scarcely guess what you would call labour.
Burke is, indeed, a young man of his years. But the reason I take to be, that if age should deprive him of one half of his ideas he would still have more left him than any man of five-and-twenty. If he has really given up politics—a cession which I wish heartily he had made twelve months ago—literature will be his only resource, and he will yet be able to delight and to inform mankind. I cannot, with you, however, recommend a revisal of the Sublime and Beautiful, since, notwithstanding the miraculous texture of his brain, thirty years I fear may have taken from him more in fire and fancy than they have given in experience.[1]
When I mentioned Fabricius to you, I was, as you may recollect, desirous of possessing a copy of all his works. They are all of them curious, and in my present course of study necessary for consultation. A Dublin bookseller, now on the Continent has promised if possible to procure them for me.
Boydell’s second number I have, thanks to your brother, safely received. I do not see why people should be disappointed, as the large prints appear to me excellent, and the small ones- ↑ Here we see the party politician at war in opinion with the great majority of persons at home and abroad. The power of his friend over the politics of Europe became nearly universal; while “fire and fancy” threw all other writers into the shade.
