the strictures of his friends and relations on this subject.  He said that after he had finished his college course, he was in great doubt as to what his future employment should be.  He did not feel himself good enough for the Church, he felt that his mind was not properly disciplined for that holy office, and that the struggle between his conscience and his impulses would have made life a torture.  He also shrank from the law, although Southey often told him that he was well fitted for the higher parts of the profession.  He had studied military history with great interest, and the strategy of war; and he always fancied that he had talents for command; and he at one time thought of a military life, but then he was without connections, and he felt if he were ordered to the West Indies his talents would not save him from the yellow fever, and he gave that up.  At this time he had only a hundred a year.  Upon this he lived, and travelled, and married, for it was not until the late Lord Lonsdale came into possession that the money which was due to them was restored.  He mentioned this to show how difficult it often was to judge of what was passing in a young man’s mind, but he thought that for the generality of men, it was much better that they should be early led to the exercise of a profession of their own choice.

December 1846.—­Henry Fletcher and I dined at the Mount on the 21st of this month.  The party consisted of Mr. Crabb Robinson (their Christmas guest), Mrs. Arnold, Miss Martineau, and ourselves.  My mother’s cold was too bad to allow her to go, which I regretted, as it was, like all their little meetings, most sociable and agreeable.  Wordsworth was much pleased with a little notice of his new edition in the Examiner; he thought it very well done.  He expressed himself very sweetly at dinner on the pleasant terms of neighbourly kindness we enjoyed in the valleys.  It will be pleasant in after times to remember his words, and still more his manner when he said this, it was done with such perfect simplicity and equality of feeling, without the slightest reference to self, and I am sure without thinking of himself at the time as more than one of the little circle whose friendly feeling he was commending.

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October 1846.—­Wordsworth dined with us one day last week, and was in much greater vigour than I have seen him all this summer.

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He mentioned incidentally that the spelling of our language was very much fixed in the time of Charles the Second, and that the attempts which had been made since, and are being made in the present day, were not likely to succeed.  He entered his protest as usual against [Carlyle’s] style, and said that since Johnson no writer had done so much to vitiate the English language.  He considers Lord Chesterfield the last good English writer before Johnson.  Then came the Scotch historians, who did infinite mischief to style, with the exception of Smollett, who wrote good pure English.  He quite agreed to the saying that all great poets wrote good prose; he said there was not one exception.  He does not think Burns’s prose equal to his verse, but this he attributes to his writing his letters in English words, while in his verse he was not trammelled in this way, but let his numbers have their own way.