Morning still cloudy and dark. I have not progressed much since my review took me away from it, in the Catalogue of my father’s Library. But now that I have my time this ought to become a very serious consideration. For the last two mornings, Conversation with my Wife has taken up the time I generally devote to it, but my time is precious, and I am reminded of the necessity of labour.

At the Office where I devoted myself to the study of Gottsched’s Grammar and liked the arrangement of it much better than Meidinger’s. For he begins with a most necessary thing to understand, the Article, while the other hardly seems to treat it by itself at all. Mr. Stone, the Treasurer of the City Guards, called upon me to pay the balance of the demand of my late brother’s Estate upon that Company. I was delighted to close the whole of that business and allow all his troubles and his pleasures to rest in peace. This demand I was particularly glad to collect, as it shows that his confidence was not always misplaced.1

I took my usual walk. After dinner, resumed and finished the first book of Cicero de Oratore in review. The argument is upon the necessity of all other Science to constitute the Orator. A question which involves no question when rightly considered, for it is solved by what 360may be made the definition of an Orator. The wider sense in which Crassus is made to understand it, is perhaps the pleasantest to minds generally, though that of Antony is likely to be the most accurate. Evening, Corinne and a little poetry in a desultory way, after which I read the first half of the third Book of Paradise Lost and two dry numbers of the Tatler.