,
art every thing! When thou _wert_, thou wert not antiquity--then thou
wert nothing, but hadst a remoter _antiquity_, as thou called'st it,
to look back to with blind veneration; thou thyself being to thyself
flat, _jejune, modern_! What mystery lurks in this retroversion? or
what half Januses[1] are we, that cannot look forward with the same
idolatry with which we for ever revert! The mighty future is as
nothing, being every thing! the past is every thing, being nothing!

What were thy _dark ages_? Surely the sun rose as brightly then as
now, and man got him to his work in the morning. Why is it that we can
never hear mention of them without an accompanying feeling, as though
a palpable obscure had dimmed the face of things, and that our
ancestors wandered to and fro groping!

Above all thy rarities, old Oxenford, what do most arride and solace
me, are thy repositories of mouldering learning, thy shelves--

What a place to be in is an old library! It seems as though all the
souls of all the writers, that have bequeathed their labours to these
Bodleians, were reposing here, as in some dormitory, or middle state.
I do not want to handle, to profane the leaves, their winding-sheets.
I could as soon dislodge a shade. I seem to inhale learning, walking
amid their foliage; and the odour of their old moth-scented coverings
is fragrant as the first bloom of those sciential apples which grew
amid the happy orchard.

Still less have I curiosity to disturb the elder repose of MSS.
Those _variae lectiones_, so tempting to the more erudite palates, do
but disturb and unsettle my faith. I am no Herculanean raker. The
credit of the three witnesses might have slept unimpeached for me. I
leave these curiosities to Porson, and to G.D.--whom, by the way, I
found busy as a moth over some rotten archive, rummaged out of some
seldom-explored press, in a nook at Oriel. With long poring, he is
grown almost into a book. He stood as passive as one by the side of
the old shelves. I longed to new-coat him in Russia, and assign him
his place. He might have mustered for a tall Scapula.

D. is assiduous in his visits to these seats of learning. No
inconsiderable portion of his moderate fortune, I apprehend, is
consumed in journeys between them and Clifford's-inn--where, like a
dove on the asp's nest, he has long taken up his unconscious abode,
amid an incongruous assembly of attorneys, attorneys' clerks,
apparitors, promoters, vermin of the l