“I have declined presenting the Debtors’ Petition, being sick of parliamentary mummeries.  I have spoken thrice; but I doubt my ever becoming an orator.  My first was liked; the second and third—­I don’t know whether they succeeded or not.  I have never yet set to it con amore;—­one must have some excuse to one’s self for laziness, or inability, or both, and this is mine.  ’Company, villanous company, hath been the spoil of me;’—­and then, I have ‘drunk medicines,’ not to make me love others, but certainly enough to hate myself.

“Two nights ago I saw the tigers sup at Exeter ’Change.  Except Veli Pacha’s lion in the Morea,—­who followed the Arab keeper like a dog,—­the fondness of the hyaena for her keeper amused me most.  Such a conversazione!—­There was a ‘hippopotamus,’ like Lord L——­l in the face; and the ‘Ursine Sloth’ hath the very voice and manner of my valet—­but the tiger talked too much.  The elephant took and gave me my money again—­took off my hat—­opened a door—­trunked a whip—­and behaved so well, that I wish he was my butler.  The handsomest animal on earth is one of the panthers; but the poor antelopes were dead.  I should hate to see one here:—­the sight of the camel made me pine again for Asia Minor.  ‘Oh quando te aspiciam?’

“November 16.

“Went last night with Lewis to see the first of Antony and Cleopatra.  It was admirably got up, and well acted—­a salad of Shakspeare and Dryden, Cleopatra strikes me as the epitome of her sex—­fond, lively, sad, tender, teasing, humble, haughty, beautiful, the devil!—­coquettish to the last, as well with the ‘asp’ as with Antony.  After doing all she can to persuade him that—­but why do they abuse him for cutting off that poltroon Cicero’s head?  Did not Tully tell Brutus it was a pity to have spared Antony? and did he not speak the Philippics? and are not ’words things?’ and such ‘words’ very pestilent ‘things’ too?  If he had had a hundred heads, they deserved (from Antony) a rostrum (his was stuck up there) apiece—­though, after all, he might as well have pardoned him, for the credit of the thing.  But to resume—­Cleopatra, after securing him, says, ‘yet go—­it is your interest,’ &c.—­how like the sex! and the questions about Octavia—­it is woman all over.

“To-day received Lord Jersey’s invitation to Middleton—­to travel sixty miles to meet Madame * *!  I once travelled three thousand to get among silent people; and this same lady writes octavos, and talks folios.  I have read her books—­like most of them, and delight in the last; so I won’t hear it, as well as read.

“Read Burns to-day.  What would he have been, if a patrician?  We should have had more polish—­less force—­just as much verse, but no immortality—­a divorce and a duel or two, the which had he survived, as his potations must have been less spirituous, he might have lived as long as Sheridan, and outlived as much as poor Brinsley.  What a wreck is that man! and all from bad pilotage; for no one had ever better gales, though now and then a little too squally.  Poor dear Sherry!  I shall never forget the day he and Rogers and Moore and I passed together; when he talked, and we listened, without one yawn, from six till one in the morning.