“Harry has not brought ma petite cousine.  I want us to go to the play together;—­she has been but once.  Another short note from Jersey, inviting Rogers and me on the 23d.  I must see my agent to-night.  I wonder when that Newstead business will be finished.  It cost me more than words to part with it—­and to have parted with it!  What matters it what I do? or what becomes of me?—­but let me remember Job’s saying, and console myself with being ‘a living man.’

“I wish I could settle to reading again,—­my life is monotonous, and yet desultory.  I take up books, and fling them down again.  I began a comedy, and burnt it because the scene ran into reality;—­a novel, for the same reason.  In rhyme, I can keep more away from facts; but the thought always runs through, through ... yes, yes, through.  I have had a letter from Lady Melbourne—­the best friend I ever had in my life, and the cleverest of women.

“Not a word from * *.  Have they set out from * *? or has my last precious epistle fallen into the lion’s jaws?  If so—­and this silence looks suspicious, I must clap on my ‘musty morion’ and ’hold out my iron.’  I am out of practice—­but I won’t begin again at Manton’s now.  Besides, I would not return his shot.  I was once a famous wafer-splitter; but then the bullies of society made it necessary.  Ever since I began to feel that I had a bad cause to support, I have left off the exercise.

“What strange tidings from that Anakim of anarchy—­Buonaparte!  Ever since I defended my bust of him at Harrow against the rascally time-servers, when the war broke out in 1803, he has been a ’Heros de Roman’ of mine—­on the Continent; I don’t want him here.  But I don’t like those same flights—­leaving of armies, &c. &c.  I am sure when I fought for his bust at school, I did not think he would run away from himself.  But I should not wonder if he banged them yet.  To be beat by men would be something; but by three stupid, legitimate-old-dynasty boobies of regular-bred sovereigns—­O-hone-a-rie!—­O-hone-a-rie!  It must be, as Cobbett says, his marriage with the thick-lipped and thick-headed Autrichienne brood.  He had better have kept to her who was kept by Barras.  I never knew any good come of your young wife, and legal espousals, to any but your ‘sober-blooded boy’ who ‘eats fish’ and drinketh ‘no sack.’  Had he not the whole opera? all Paris? all France?  But a mistress is just as perplexing—­that is, one—­two or more are manageable by division.

“I have begun, or had begun, a song, and flung it into the fire.  It was in remembrance of Mary Duff, my first of flames, before most people begin to burn.  I wonder what the devil is the matter with me!  I can do nothing, and—­fortunately there is nothing to do.  It has lately been in my power to make two persons (and their connections) comfortable, pro tempore, and one happy, ex tempore,—­I rejoice in the last particularly,