James the Second is an illustrious instance of the admirable industry of our ancestors.  With his own hand this prince wrote down the chief occurrences of his times, and often his instant reflections and conjectures.  Perhaps no sovereign prince, said Macpherson, has been known to have left behind him better materials for history.  We at length possess a considerable portion of his diary, which is that of a man of business and of honest intentions, containing many remarkable facts which had otherwise escaped from our historians.

The literary man has formed diaries purely of his studies, and the practice may he called journalising the mind, in a summary of studies, and a register of loose hints and sbozzos, that sometimes happily occur; and like Ringelbergius, that enthusiast for study, whose animated exhortations to young students have been aptly compared to the sound of a trumpet in the field of battle, marked down every night, before going to sleep, what had been done during the studious day.  Of this class of diaries, Gibbon has given us an illustrious model:  and there is an unpublished quarto of the late Barre Roberts, a young student of genius, devoted to curious researches, which deserves to meet the public eye.[106] I should like to see a little book published with this title, “Otium delitiosum in quo objecta vel in actione, vel in lectione, vel in visione ad singulos dies Anni 1629 observata representantur.”  This writer was a German, who boldly published for the course of one year, whatever he read or had seen every day in that year.  As an experiment, if honestly performed, this might be curious to the philosophical observer; but to write down everything, may end in something like nothing.

A great poetical contemporary of our own country does not think that even Dreams should pass away unnoticed; and he calls this register his Nocturnals.  His dreams are assuredly poetical; as Laud’s, who journalised his, seem to have been made up of the affairs of state and religion;—­the personages are his patrons, his enemies, and others; his dreams are scenical and dramatic.  Works of this nature are not designed for the public eye; they are domestic annals, to be guarded in the little archives of a family; they are offerings cast before our Lares.

    Pleasing, when youth is long expired, to trace
      The forms our pencil or our pen design’d;
    Such was our youthful air, and shape, and face,
      Such the soft image of our youthful mind. 
          
                                      SHENSTONE.

LICENSERS OF THE PRESS.

In the history of literature, and perhaps in that of the human mind, the institution of the LICENSERS OF THE PRESS, and CENSORS OF BOOKS, was a bold invention, designed to counteract that of the Press itself; and even to convert this newly-discovered instrument of human freedom into one which might serve to perpetuate that system of passive obedience which had so long enabled modern Rome to dictate her laws to the universe.  It was thought possible in the subtlety of Italian astuzia and Spanish monachism, to place a sentinel on the very thoughts as well as on the persons of authors; and in extreme cases, that books might be condemned to the flames as well as heretics.