This was in 1778, when he was called to Madrid, as one of the principal magistrates of the capital and court; a place that brought him again into the administration of criminal justice, from which, during his stay at Seville, he had been relieved. His duties were distasteful to his nature, but he fulfilled them faithfully, and consoled himself by intercourse with such men as Campomanes and Cabarrus, who devoted themselves, as he did, to the great task of raising the condition of their country. Of course, he had now little leisure for poetry. But, being accidentally employed on affairs of consequence at the Paular convent, he was so struck by the solemn scenery in which it stood, and the tranquil lives of its recluse inhabitants, that his poetical spirit broke out afresh in an address to Mariano Colon, one of the family of the great discoverer of America, and afterwards its head;--a beautiful epistle, full of the severe genius of the place that inspired it, and of its author’s longing for a repose his spirit was so well fitted to enjoy. In 1780, he was raised to a place in the Council of Orders, where he had more leisure, and was able to give his time to higher objects;--some of the results of which are to be seen in his report to the government on the military and religious Orders of Knighthood; in his system of instruction for the Imperial College of Calatrava; in his Discourse on the Study of History, as a necessary part of the wise study of jurisprudence; and in other similar labors, which proved him to be incontestably an excellent prose-writer, and the first philosophical statesman in the kingdom. At the same time, however, he amused himself with elegant literature, and took great solace in collecting around him the poets and men of letters whom he loved. In 1785, he wrote several burlesque ballads on the quarrels of Huerta, Yriarte, and Forner about the theatre; and the next year published two satires in blank verse and in the style of Juvenal, rebuking the corrupted manners of his times. All of them were received with favor; and the ballads, though not printed till long afterwards, were perhaps only the more effective because they were circulated in manuscript, and so became matters of great interest.