ABSTRACT
Neither dazzled by the splendour, nor enervated by the enjoyments of which he participated in the house of Lord Belfield, the pleasurable days of Vaurien were not inactive; he snatched at those intervals of time which many consume in listless regrets of a wearied existence, and from midnight orgies, often escaped to studious vigils. His present object was the acquisition of the English language; he knew that every process of industry can be calculated with precision, and that the learning of languages, of which the knowledge inflates the vanity of so many idlers in erudition, / was after all only the gross amount of so many days patient labour. ‘As for the dead languages (he said) they are not of indispensible utility in the present state of the literature of modern Europe; we have models of every species of composition; I feel no ambition to re-write in Greek or in Latin, what is inimitable in my maternal language; I would not wrestle with a poet of my own country, to suffocate him with Olympic dust, or barbarously macerate him with the blows of a Roman cestus, loaded with lead. 232 The idiom of our residence is a current coin, but the languages of which men are even ignorant of the pronunciation, are only curious medals, to place in the ostentatious cabinet of the petty virtuoso.’
