Fine morning but quite cold. I went to the Office. Time taken up in Accounts as usual and in writing Diary. Instead of employing my time as I ought to have done, I amused myself with Taylor’s trashy miscellany. He is one of those numerous writers of the present day who do little or nothing for the literary world and yet who deal in chat that is quite amusing for literary loungers.

Went to the Athenaeum, thence to walk. Afternoon occupied in copying a letter to Mr. Otis for my father, then Bacon’s Novum Organum, and I tried to write in the evening but without success. I am reading aloud to my Wife in the evening Scott’s Fair Maid of Perth. He has great powers of description, and a charming flow of style.