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The person, with whom this similarity of taste connected him, was Charles Reviczki, afterwards imperial minister at Warsaw, and ambassador at the English court with the title of Count. Their correspondence, which turns principally on the object of their common pursuits, and is written in the French and Latin languages, commenced in 1768. At this time he took his degree of Bachelor of Arts.
At Paris he succeeded by the help of some previous knowledge of the Chinese character, and by means of Couplet's Version of the Works of Confucius, in construing a poem by that writer, from a selection in the king's library, and sent a literal version of it to his friend Reviczki. From the French capital the party returned through Spa to England.
In a letter to Reviczki, of February, 1775, we find him declaring that he no longer intended to solicit the embassy to Constantinople. This year he attended the spring circuit, and sessions at Oxford; and the next was appointed one of the commissioners of bankrupts, and was to be found regularly as a legal practitioner in Westminster Hall.
Sir William Jones was the only Englishman of distinction who was earnestly devoted to Eastern studies; but his Persian Grammar, which was in some degree the foundation-stone of Persian scholarship in England, had not yet appeared, and Sir William Jones was still writing to Reviczki those delightful letters in which he raves about the poetry of the Arabs and the Persians.
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