“To dine to-day with Rogers and Sharpe, for which I have some appetite, not having tasted food for the preceding forty-eight hours.  I wish I could leave off eating altogether.

“Saturday, December 11. 
“Sunday, December 12.

“By G——­t’s answer, I find it is some story in real life, and not any work with which my late composition coincides.  It is still more singular, for mine is drawn from existence also.

“I have sent an excuse to M. de Stael.  I do not feel sociable enough for dinner to-day;—­and I will not go to Sheridan’s on Wednesday.  Not that I do not admire and prefer his unequalled conversation; but—­that ‘but’ must only be intelligible to thoughts I cannot write.  Sheridan was in good talk at Rogers’s the other night, but I only stayed till nine.  All the world are to be at the Stael’s to-night, and I am not sorry to escape any part of it.  I only go out to get me a fresh appetite for being alone.  Went out—­did not go to the Stael’s but to Ld.  Holland’s.  Party numerous—­conversation general.  Stayed late—­made a blunder—­got over it—­came home and went to bed, not having eaten.  Rather empty, but fresco, which is the great point with me.

“Monday, December 13. 1813.

“Called at three places—­read, and got ready to leave town to-morrow.  Murray has had a letter from his brother bibliopole of Edinburgh, who says, ’he is lucky in having such a poet’—­something as if one was a pack-horse, or ‘ass, or any thing that is his:’  or, like Mrs. Packwood, who replied to some enquiry after the Odes on Razors,—­’Laws, sir, we keeps a poet.’  The same illustrious Edinburgh bookseller once sent an order for books, poesy, and cookery, with this agreeable postscript—­’The Harold and Cookery are much wanted.’  Such is fame, and, after all, quite as good as any other ‘life in other’s breath.’  ’Tis much the same to divide purchasers with Hannah Glasse or Hannah More.

“Some editor of some magazine has announced to Murray his intention of abusing the thing ‘without reading it.’  So much the better; if he redde it first, he would abuse it more.

“Allen (Lord Holland’s Allen—­the best informed and one of the ablest men I know—­a perfect Magliabecchi—­a devourer, a Helluo of books, and an observer of men,) has lent me a quantity of Burns’s unpublished, and never-to-be published, Letters.  They are full of oaths and obscene songs.  What an antithetical mind!—­tenderness, roughness—­delicacy, coarseness—­sentiment, sensuality—­soaring and grovelling, dirt and deity—­all mixed up in that one compound of inspired clay!

“It seems strange; a true voluptuary will never abandon his mind to the grossness of reality.  It is by exalting the earthly, the material, the physique of our pleasures, by veiling these ideas, by forgetting them altogether, or, at least, never naming them hardly to one’s self, that we alone can prevent them from disgusting.