Among our own countrymen, in times more favourable for a concentrated mind than in this age of scattered thoughts and of the fragments of genius, the custom long prevailed:  and we their posterity are still reaping the benefit of their lonely hours and diurnal records.  It is always pleasing to recollect the name of Alfred, and we have deeply to regret the loss of a manual which this monarch, so strict a manager of his time, yet found leisure to pursue:  it would have interested us much more even than his translations, which have come down to us.  Alfred carried in his bosom memorandum leaves, in which he made collections from his studies, and took so much pleasure in the frequent examination of this journal, that he called it his hand-book, because, says Spelman, day and night he ever had it in hand with him.  This manual, as my learned friend Mr. Turner, in his elaborate and philosophical Life of Alfred, has shown by some curious extracts from Malmsbury, was the repository of his own occasional literary reflections.  An association of ideas connects two other of our illustrious princes with Alfred.

Prince Henry, the son of James I., our English Marcellus, who was wept by all the Muses, and mourned by all the brave in Britain, devoted a great portion of his time to literary intercourse; and the finest geniuses of the age addressed their works to him, and wrote several at the prince’s suggestion.  Dallington, in the preface to his curious “Aphorisms, Civil and Militarie,” has described Prince Henry’s domestic life:  “Myself,” says he, “the unablest of many in that academy, for so was his family, had this especial employment for his proper use, which he pleased favourably to entertain, and often to read over.”

The diary of Edward VI., written with his own hand, conveys a notion of that precocity of intellect, in that early educated prince, which would not suffer his infirm health to relax in his royal duties.  This prince was solemnly struck with the feeling that he was not seated on a throne to be a trifler or a sensualist:  and this simplicity of mind is very remarkable in the entries of his diary; where, on one occasion, to remind himself of the causes of his secret proffer of friendship to aid the Emperor of Germany with men against the Turk, and to keep it at present secret from the French court, the young monarch inserts, “This was done on intent to get some friends.  The reasonings be in my desk.”  So zealous was he to have before him a state of public affairs, that often in the middle of the month he recalls to mind passages which he had omitted in the beginning:  what was done every day of moment, he retired into his study to set down.—­Even James the Second wrote with his own hand the daily occurrences of his times, his reflections and conjectures.  Adversity had schooled him into reflection, and softened into humanity a spirit of bigotry; and it is something in his favour, that after his abdication he collected his thoughts, and mortified himself by the penance of a diary.—­Could a Clive or a Cromwell have composed one?  Neither of these men could suffer solitude and darkness; they started at their casual recollections:—­what would they have done, had memory marshalled their crimes, and arranged them in the terrors of chronology?