at Cumberland Place, and
he and his brother amused themselves about town with other roisterers,
chiefly in gambling. Returned to Oxford he applied sedulously to the
acquisition of foreign languages. He says, "I got a simple grammar and
vocabulary, marked out the forms and words which I knew were absolutely
necessary, and learnt them by heart.... I never worked more than
a quarter of an hour at a time, for after that the brain lost its
freshness. After learning some three hundred words, easily done in a
week, I stumbled through some easy book-work and underlined every
word that I wished to recollect.... Having finished my volume, I then
carefully worked up the grammar minutiae, and I then chose some other
book whose subject most interested me. The neck of the language was now
broken, and progress was rapid. If I came across a new sound, like the
Arabic Ghayn, I trained my tongue to it by repeating it so many thousand
times a day. When I read, I invariably read out loud, so that the ear
might aid memory. I was delighted with the most difficult characters,
Chinese and Cuneiform, because I felt that they impressed themselves
more strongly upon the eye than the eternal Roman letters." [52] Such
remarks from the man who became the first linguist of his day are well
worth remembering. For pronouncing Latin words the "Roman way" he was
ridiculed, but he lived long enough to see this pronunciation adopted in
all our schools. The long vacation of 1841 was spent at Wiesbaden with
his father and mother. Here again the chief delights of Richard and
his brother were gambling and fencing; and when tired of Wiesbaden they
wandered about the country, visiting among other places Heidelberg
and Mannheim. Once more Richard importuned his father to let him leave
Oxford and enter the army, but Colonel Burton, who still considered
his son peculiarly fitted for the church, was not to be moved. Upon his
return to England, however, Burton resolved to take the matter into
his own hands. He laid his plans, and presently--in April 1842--an
opportunity offered.

The Oxford races of that year were being looked forward to with
exceptional interest because of the anticipated presence of a noted
steeplechaser named Oliver, but at the last moment the college
authorities forbade the undergraduates to attend them.

Burton, however, and some other lawless spirits resolved to go all the
same, and a tandem conveyed them from the rear of Worcester College
to