The day was cloudy with rain. I went to the Office and busied myself all the morning in learning my share of the German Grammar. I found upon a review of the substantives a very considerable difficulty in ascertaining the distinctions drawn between the declensions. This is not over clearly explained in my Grammar. I therefore took up another, that of Gottsched,1 to see if this would answer better. But I could not accomplish enough to judge, as I was forced to attend to advertising Mr. New’s Estate in Cambridge Street which is again to be sold. This accomplished, I started upon my usual walk for health, 359tedious but necessary. “There is no enjoying life without thee” so says Ben Jonson I believe, and whether he does or not, so says the truth.

After dinner occupied with Cicero de Oratore, and reviewed about twenty five sections with much pleasure. Eloquence is a fascinating study, if Lord Bacon’s Maxim be true that Knowledge is Power, the only way to understand it is by the implication of the proper means to convey it. Knowledge lying locked up in a man’s head is as inert and useless a mass as so much gold in its primitive bed. It is circulation that gives both power. They differ in one thing alone, that the first has influence increasing in proportion to the attention bestowed to the shape in which it is circulated, the other seldom rises above a certain fixed value, attached to the native metal in its roughest state. But a truce with speculation. Evening passed in reading Corinne with my Wife, and a visit from Mr. Degrand who has again much against my will, showed his face at my House.2 I finished the second book of Milton’s Paradise Lost, reading with attention the famous Allegory of Sin and Death, and closed with two numbers of the Tatler.