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- [4 Aug. 1821] (Creation)
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4 pp.
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WW is thinking of visiting Cumberland and Westmorland - 'I have long intended to make the regular cockney tour of the lakes'. WW has never seen them: 'I shall climb to the top and measure its height by the barometer, knock off a piece of rock with a geological hammer to see what it is made of, and then evolve some quotation from Wordsworth into the still air above it'. WW recently went to Brighton and returned by Oxford: 'they are more violently geological there than we are here'. He is pleased that 'at least one science, and that a most important and interesting one and (whatever you may think) with indisputable claims to be called a science, has not only been rigorously cultivated in the universities[,] upon it had been prosecuted out of them for 100 years, which is in itself a new fact, but has owed and is likely to owe its substance and value in a great measure to academical professors'. This makes it a novelty since 'they are so slow in abandoning what is obsolete every where else and adopting what is established every where else but the fact is so or mainly so. Like very obstinate artillerymen they stand by their guns even after they are spiked. - However we hope to alter a good deal of this in time'.