Fine day. I went to the Office as usual and was occupied in making up Accounts after which I finished the sixth volume of Gibbon which closes the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in the West. A work in itself of immense labour and erudition. I admire it upon the whole. The disposition of the historian seems to have been warped by a sense of real injury done to virtue through the Agency of hypocrisy and fanaticism. He goes to one extreme from a dislike of the other. Attended a meeting of the Bar at one o’clock, and from thence went to the Athenaeum, so that I did not walk today.

Afternoon. Finished the Georgics and the story of Aristaeus which 253is considered as the greatest ornament. They are models for that species of composition, a sign of which is that all subsequent times have only imitated them.1 Quiet Evening at home. Read part of Goëthe’s Memoirs to my Wife.2