Never was there a proprietor less in danger of sinking into the easy apathetical indolence of the mere country gentleman; for, impressed with a belief that he was born to enlarge the limits of all science, he applied himself to the study of every branch of human learning, and, having _mastered what was already known_, and finding the _amount but little_, he seriously set himself to add to it. And first, as learning can be communicated only by the aid of language, “words being the signs of things,” he deemed it evident that, if language be imperfect, learning must of necessity be so likewise; quite on the principle that a defect in the carved figure of a signet cannot fail of being transmitted to the image formed by it on the wax. The result of his inquiries on this subject differed only a very little from the conclusion which, when pursuing a similar course of study, the celebrated Lord Monboddo arrived at more than a hundred years after. His Lordship believed that all languages, except Greek, are a sort of vulgar dialects which have grown up rather through accident than design, and exhibit, in consequence, little else than a tissue of defects both in sound and sense. Greek, however, he deemed a perfect language; and he accounted for its superiority by supposing that, in some early age of the world, it had been constructed on philosophical principles, out of one of the old jargons, by a society of ingenious grammarians, who afterwards taught it to the common people. Sir Thomas went a little further; for, not excepting even the Greek, he condemned every language, ancient and modern, and set himself to achieve what, according to Monboddo, had been already achieved by the grammarians of Greece. And hence his ingenious but unfortunate work, “The Universal Language.”