a complete Tartuffe; a strong, sanguine, square-shouldered son of the Church, whom a Protestant would be apt to warrant against any sufferings he was like to sustain by privation.  My purpose, however, just now was to talk of the “strict retreat,” which did not prevent the nuns from walking in their little garden, breviary in hand, peeping at us, and allowing us to peep at them.  Well, now, we are in strict retreat; and if we had been so last year, instead of gallivanting to Ireland, this affair might not have befallen—­if literary labour could have prevented it.  But who could have suspected Constable’s timbers to have been rotten from the beginning?

Visited the Exhibition on my way home from the Court.  The new rooms are most splendid, and several good pictures.  The Institution has subsisted but five years, and it is astonishing how much superior the worst of the present collection are to the teaboard-looking things which first appeared.  John Thomson, of Duddingston, has far the finest picture in the Exhibition, of a large size—­subject Dunluce, a ruinous castle of the Antrim family, near the Giant’s Causeway, with one of those terrible seas and skies which only Thomson can paint.  Found Scrope there improving a picture of his own, an Italian scene in Calabria.  He is, I think, greatly improved, and one of the very best amateur painters I ever saw—­Sir George Beaumont scarcely excepted.  Yet, hang it, I do except Sir George.

I would not write to-day after I came home.  I will not say could not, for it is not true; but I was lazy; felt the desire far niente, which is the sign of one’s mind being at ease.  I read The English in Italy,[161] which is a clever book.

Byron used to kick and frisk more contemptuously against the literary gravity and slang than any one I ever knew who had climbed so high.  Then, it is true, I never knew any one climb so high; and before you despise the eminence, carrying people along with you, as convinced that you are not playing the fox and the grapes, you must be at the top.  Moore told me some delightful stories of him.  One was that while they stood at the window of Byron’s Palazzo in Venice, looking at a beautiful sunset, Moore was naturally led to say something of its beauty, when Byron answered in a tone that I can easily conceive, “Oh! come, d—­n me, Tom, don’t be poetical.”  Another time, standing with Moore on the balcony of the same Palazzo, a gondola passed with two English gentlemen, who were easily distinguished by their appearance.  They cast a careless look at the balcony and went on.  Byron crossed his arms, and half stooping over the balcony said, “Ah! d—­n ye, if ye had known what two fellows you were staring at, you would have taken a longer look at us.”  This was the man, quaint, capricious, and playful, with all his immense genius.  He wrote from impulse, never from effort; and therefore I have always reckoned Burns and Byron the most genuine poetical geniuses of my time, and half a century before me.  We have, however, many men of high poetical talent, but none, I think, of that ever-gushing and perennial fountain of natural water.