Day cloudy with heavy showers. I went to the Office and from thence to the Athenaeum where I daudled away time reading little Essays in the English Periodicals of no sort of value to any body or thing. The running Literature of Great Britain is now all froth. Walk and home. Quiet afternoon. Continued and finished Helen—The interest of which story is exceedingly well sustained to the end. Miss Edgeworth is on the whole the best of novel writers because she connects a moral with her story and yet not disgusting or even fatiguing you. She goes also into the folds of the heart, exposes it’s workings in the human family in their dearest domestic relations. A little too much display of reading perhaps but on the whole more diverting by its mass of happy allusion. I admire her works more than I do those of Scott. The latter had perhaps the most brilliant imagination, but he has not the pathos. Evening reading Belinda. Afterwards Göthe in the German reader.