“Tom is very much improved in his appearance during the last two or three years.  His figure is not so bad for a man of thirty as for a man of twenty-two.  He dresses better, and his manners, from seeing a great deal of society, are very much improved.  When silent and occupied in thought, walking up and down the room as he always does, his hands clenched and muscles working with the intense exertion of his mind, strangers would think his countenance stern; but I remember a writing-master of ours, when Tom had come into the room and left it again, saying, ’Ladies, your brother looks like a lump of good-humour!’

“March 30, 1831—­Tom has just left me, after a very interesting conversation.  He spoke of his extreme idleness.  He said:  ’I never knew such an idle man as I am.  When I go in to Empson or Ellis their tables are always covered with books and papers.  I cannot stick at anything for above a day or two.  I mustered industry enough to teach myself Italian.  I wish to speak Spanish.  I know I could master the difficulties in a week, and read any book in the language at the end of a month, but I have not the courage to attempt it.  If there had not been really something in me, idleness would have ruined me.’

“I said that I was surprised at the great accuracy of his information, considering how desultory his reading had been.  ’My accuracy as to facts,’ he said, ’I owe to a cause which many men would not confess.  It is due to my love of castle-building.  The past is in my mind soon constructed into a romance.’  He then went on to describe the way in which from his childhood his imagination had been filled by the study of history.  ’With a person of my turn,’ he said, ’the minute touches are of as great interest, and perhaps greater, than the most important events.  Spending so much time as I do in solitude, my mind would have rusted by gazing vacantly at the shop windows.  As it is, I am no sooner in the streets than I am in Greece, in Rome, in the midst of the French Revolution.  Precision in dates, the day or hour in which a man was born or died, becomes absolutely necessary.  A slight fact, a sentence, a word, are of importance in my romance.  Pepys’s Diary formed almost inexhaustible food for my fancy.  I seem to know every inch of Whitehall.  I go in at Hans Holbein’s gate, and come out through the matted gallery.  The conversations which I compose between great people of the time are long, and sufficiently animated; in the style, if not with the merits, of Sir Walter Scott’s.  The old parts of London, which you are sometimes surprised at my knowing so well, those old gates and houses down by the river, have all played their part in my stories.’  He spoke, too, of the manner in which he used to wander about Paris, weaving tales of the Revolution, and he thought that he owed his command of language greatly to this habit.

“I am very sorry that the want both of ability and memory should prevent my preserving with greater truth a conversation which interested me very much.