The memory of what has been,
  And never more may be.

THE DIARY OF A LOVER OF LITERATURE

EXTRACTS FROM THE DIARY OF A LOVER OF LITERATURE. Ipswich:  Printed and sold by John Raw; sold also by Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, Paternoster Row, London. 1810.

It may be that, save by a few elderly people and certain lovers of old Gentleman’s Magazines, the broad anonymous quarto known as The Diary of a Lover of Literature is no longer much admired or even recollected.  But it deserves to be recalled to memory, if only in that it was, in some respects, the first, and in others, the last of a long series of publications.  It was the first of those diaries of personal record of the intellectual life, which have become more and more the fashion and have culminated at length in the ultra-refinement of Amiel and the conscious self-analysis of Marie Bashkirtseff.  It was less definitely, perhaps, the last, or one of the last, expressions of the eighteenth century sentiment, undiluted by any tincture of romance, any suspicion that fine literature existed before Dryden, or could take any form unknown to Burke.

It was under a strict incognito that The Diary of a Lover of Literature appeared, and it was attributed by conjecture to various famous people.  The real author, however, was not a celebrated man.  His name was Thomas Green, and he was the grandson of a wealthy Suffolk soap-boiler, who had made a fortune during the reign of Queen Anne.  The Diarist’s father had been an agreeable amateur in letters, a pamphleteer, and a champion of the Church of England against Dissent.  Thomas Green, who was born in 1769, found himself at twenty-five in possession of the ample family estates, a library of good books, a vast amount of leisure, and a hereditary faculty for reading.  His health was not very solid, and he was debarred by it from sharing the pleasures of his neighbour squires.  He determined to make books and music the occupation of his life, and in 1796, on his twenty-seventh birthday, he began to record in a diary his impressions of what he read.  He went on very quietly and luxuriantly, living among his books in his house at Ipswich, and occasionally rolling in his post-chaise to valetudinarian baths and “Spaws.”

When he had kept his diary for fourteen years, it seemed to a pardonable vanity so amusing, that he persuaded himself to give part of it to the world.  The experiment, no doubt, was a very dubious one.  After much hesitation, and in an evil hour, perhaps, he wrote:  “I am induced to submit to the indulgence of the public the idlest work, probably, that ever was composed; but, I could wish to hope, not absolutely the most unentertaining or unprofitable.”  The welcome his volume received must speedily have reassured him, but he had pledged himself to print no more, and he kept his promise, though he went on