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196 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.

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