You have revived it with great advantage. Besides doing everything which the vindication of the first genius, perhaps in the world, required from the hand of him who studied him the most, and illustrated him the best; you have in the most natural, happy, and pleasing manner, and as if you were drawn into it by your subject, given us a very interesting history of our language during that important period in which, after being refined by Chaucer, it fell into the rudeness of civil confusion, and then continued in a pretty even progress to the state of correctness, strength, and elegance, in which we see it in your writings.
Your note, in which for the first time you leave the character of the antiquary, to be, I am afraid, but too right in that of a prophet, has not escaped me. Johnson used to say he loved a good hater. Your admiration of Shakspeare would be ill sorted, indeed, if your taste (to talk of nothing else) did not lead you to a perfect abhorrence of the French revolution and all its works. Once more thank you most heartily for the great entertainment you have given me as a critick, as an antiquary, a philologist, and as a politician. I shall finish the book I think to-day.
This will be delivered to you by a young kinsman of mine, of Exeter College, in Oxford. I think him a promising young man, very well qualified to be an admirer of yours, and I hope, to merit your notice, of which he is very ambitious. I have the honour to be, my dear sir, with true respect and affection, your most faithful and very much obliged and humble servant,
Edmund Burke.
Beaconsfield, April 8, 1796.
Lord Charlemont writes a long letter in August; regrets having ordered “Ireland’s magnificent and ostentatious deceit;” thanks him for literary purchases; asks whether a Liverpool trader be a sufficiently safe conveyance for his treasures to Dublin; and refers to his correspondent’s literary employments and those of some of their mutual friends.
