Morning Cloudy and warm. I went to the Office as usual and passed my time in translating a part of the Preface of Pufendorf, but was less interested in the work and did not do it so well. There is much sense in this Preface, rather clumsily given and it is my desire to make my translation express the ideas even more clearly than the original. Whether I shall succeed I do not know, nor care, but I hope the attempt will do something to facilitate my powers of writing. They say practice makes perfect. Why not so with me? And are there many men who use themselves to it equally. I again attempted the first Chapter of Pufendorf but did not succeed in mastering it even this morning which makes me almost despair. I should not have taken so long to have read the larger work. It is to be allowed that the 72arrangement of it is clumsy for it forms divisions and subdivisions according to the ancient mode, which only serve to perplex and entangle.

I returned home without having been much interrupted, Mr. Champney, my father’s Tenant in Common Street being the only person, who came to tell me he could not yet pay me. I told him I was sorry, but could wait a little longer. Afternoon, passed in continuing my Catalogue which has nearly come to it’s end, and a further portion of Aeschines. I completed all my task and felt better satisfied than I did yesterday. My translation of this Oration goes on with perseverance and upon it’s success will depend the continuation of it to that of Demosthenes, which is the most important, and would certainly be much the most beneficial one. My time however is so limited that much must be done in a very little while, and I must hurry even what I now do. In the evening I read to Abby some of Clarissa Harlowe, interesting but interminable. She is a little too apt to prose, as all very good people are.1 I continued La Harpe in his Chapter upon Seneca. He is warped by his ideas of the French Revolution and tries one.